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The Food of Belonging

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

If hope is a thing with feathers, then love is a thing with roots and leaves and edible delights.

 
In our old neighborhood on the east bench of Ogden, a city of about 87,000 nestled against the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains in northern Utah, nearly everyone we knew had a small garden. Pam, one street over from us, grew row after row of rhubarb. She’d call me each spring and tell me to come on over with some scissors and a big bag. Then I’d make rhubarb crumble and take her some. The crumble was my grandma’s recipe, and since Pam was an older woman, it made sense that she grew it. No one my age is aching to eat rhubarb. I always think of my great grandma growing it on her little farm outside of Logan, Utah in the early 1900s, against a backdrop of the Great Depression, clucking chickens, a grazing cow, and a clothesline full of wind-blown laundry. Rhubarb just feels older, a staple in a generation that ate things like liver and onions and went to the movies for a nickel.

I’ll admit with some shame, as a member of Generation X, that I can only eat rhubarb with a good dose of sugar. As a kid I looked on much of the food of my grandparents’ generation with distaste. But, ironically, in my adulthood I’ve become fascinated by old-school Depression cuisine, and rhubarb crumble makes a delicious dessert, with its slightly crunchy top you break through with a spoon to reach the warm ooze of soft rhubarb in the center. Pink and chewy, it’s unlike anything else I’ve eaten. Since I was one of the only people Pam knew who would eat it, I got all the rhubarb she could spare.

Pam loved a listening ear and a humorous story. She was a delight to spend a few minutes with, sharing some anecdote about a neighbor, and she talked with a kind of sing-songy voice I loved, one I could pick out anywhere in a room. She collected old postcards and antiques and sometimes when I stopped by for a rhubarb picking, she pulled me into her house to see her latest display of postcards and dolls. She also loved to tease. We were neighbors for years before we finally became official Facebook friends and learned each other’s’ full names. After that, for fun, we added a kind of formality to our greetings.

“Why hello there, Sunni Brown Wilkinson,” she would say with an air of mock cordiality.

“How are you, Pamela Carlene Nelson?” I’d respond.

We did this for years, seeing each other nearly every week, and laughed at ourselves every time. And we talked about our gardens, what we were growing, what was doing well that year. We shared treats. We loved each other. This was our way of saying so.

 

Gordon, two houses down from us on the corner, had a little thicket of raspberries in addition to a plot of bush beans and what looked to the naked eye like the largest tomato plants known to man. Not that he ate any of that. As a self-proclaimed “bachelor” in his 80s (a term that no doubt felt cool to him though it was inaccurate, since he was really a divorcee), Gordon ate like a college student in a frat house: frozen dinners, boxes of fruit snacks, popsicles, candy bars, soda. But he liked to grow stuff. He’d dote on his garden in the fatherliest of ways, then harvest time he’d can it and give it to neighbors, proud of all of his hard work, then turn around and cuddle up to his junk food all winter, happily eating Marie Callender’s frozen pot pies and Otter Pops while he watched Dancing with the Stars.

But every summer we’d get a few calls to Come on down and pick whatcha want. Hell, I’ve got more than I know what to do with. There was always a sense of pride in his voice. As if the fruits and veggies were his handsome and unruly children, growing so tall and bright, unabashedly flashing their beauty for every passerby, that you couldn’t help but admire them.

The night I made lasagna with our own homegrown tomatoes and invited Gordon to dinner was a turning point for his teenage palette. We crammed into the tiny dining space we’d carved out in our 1950s rambler—me, my husband Sean, and our three young sons, and now Gordon—and dug into one of the many dishes where I could use our garden tomatoes. To my surprise, Gordon confessed he’d never had lasagna. If I remember correctly, he’d never even heard of it. How this was possible is still beyond me, but it must have been owing to a lifetime of crappy food and I suppose a lack of interest in cuisines beyond American diner or the frozen food aisle. Turns out, he loved it. After that, he told me he started to buy Marie Callender’s frozen lasagna, and we either invited him over or walked him down a piece every time I cooked it, a giddiness every time he took it from our hands.

One time we stopped by with a treat and, while we stood on Gordon’s front porch chit-chatting, our four-year-old stepped forward and spontaneously blurted out, “Gordon, hey Gordon… I love you!” The awkward silence that followed suggested Gordon was a little embarrassed, but we all laughed. One of us tussled his hair.

Gordon took our food. He ate with us. We ate from his garden. We fed each other. It was already there. We loved Gordon and he loved us. This is how we said it.

I thought about her tulip bulbs slowly waking up a few inches underground, ready to push out of the dirt just when she was entering it.

The queen of the neighborhood was Jackie, our elderly, next-door neighbor who spent most of her life outdoors tending to the oldest, largest, and most productive garden within a ten-mile radius. A typical day, summer to fall, would entail a call from Jackie to Meet me out by the back fence where she would hand over an assortment of zucchini, tomatoes, squash, and possibly a small bag of cherry tomatoes or strawberries in a re-used grocery bag. That done, we’d lounge at the back fence a while, Jackie leaning against it and me, hands on hips, one ear cocked toward the house to be sure none of my boys was hollering for me. Generally, I’d listen while Jackie caught me up on the goings-on of each member of her family that included four daughters, a dozen grandkids, and a growing number of in-laws and great-grandkids whose names and numbers I was never able to keep a handle on. But I knew most of them by sight, having lived next to Jackie for 13 years, watching her family grow and multiply as she watched ours begin. With the birth of each of our three boys she brought over a tray filled with food, our dinner for a couple of nights: casseroles, homemade bread, steamed veggies from her garden, and a cake or pie for dessert. It was Never any trouble, and she’d include a gift for the new baby: a little rattle or a set of bibs.

Jackie was the kind of neighbor who would bake a giant tray of the most mouth-watering cinnamon rolls and then act like you were Mother Teresa for taking any off her hands; she just had more than enough for herself. She and Gordon, besides being neighbors (she was the literal connection between us, her house sandwiched between ours) were also distant cousins, and I sometimes wondered if there wasn’t a little healthy rivalry between their gardens, though anyone knew Jackie was never to be outdone there.  

I think gardening was literally what she lived for, especially once her husband died. Afte climbing down from pruning her peach tree, she missed a step on her ladder and broke her leg in her 80s. She was never convinced she was getting too old to take care of the house and yard she’d known for 60-plus years. Even when her back ached and it was 100 degrees outside, she’d throw on a broad-rimmed hat, sit on a bucket, and pull weeds from her drive strip or pick beans.

Once she reached 90 and the summers of northern Utah grew oppressively hot thanks to climate change, neighbors started walking over or calling her on the phone to say Not in the heat, Jackie or Don’t overdo it. If she protested at all, they’d text one of her daughters who then called her to tell her to get in the house. But I know she spent the day just waiting to go back outside, and before the sun set she’d have a bucket filled with weeds and her arms full of corn and potatoes, irises and black-eyed Susans.

Plants were her language. And she tended to them with as much motherly care as any woman has done for any child. Her peach and apple trees were pruned, sprayed, fertilized, and picked meticulously. And she gave us offerings from them every year: the peaches for snacking and the apples—an old, impossible to find anymore variety—for apple strudel.

Jackie died last March. She missed the joint birthday party for Cooper and our oldest son, Cael, that we throw every year. She was in the hospital with water in her lungs. Over the years she’d become family, and it was the first time in ten years she wouldn’t show up to one of our son’s birthday parties with a typed letter and a little stash of money. I love watching you grow up or You’re getting so big she’d type out carefully at the end of the letter every year. “We’re family,” she’d say each time we hugged her after a visit.

It was cold outside still in March, after the hardest winter we’d had in decades, and it didn’t seem right not to have more sunshine the day we buried Jackie. Her funeral was simple, mostly family and neighbors, and we gathered in the little chapel of our church and sang songs she loved and told funny stories. And cried. Cooper sobbed. One of his best friends was now gone. My older two sons, Cael and Beck, were pianists for the service, Cooper was an honorary pallbearer, and my husband spoke. At Jackie’s family’s insistence, we participated in the whole service as much as her blood relatives. “You’re family” was their response when I suggested maybe we participated too much. “This is exactly what she wanted.”

I’d miss her stories about picking wild asparagus from the local ditches as a girl. I’d miss her easy laugh, the way she knew the names of every single neighbor, her expert orchid-tending advice. And when we gathered around her coffin with her daughters, I thought about her tulip bulbs slowly waking up a few inches underground, ready to push out of the dirt just when she was entering it.

Once in a while we’d actually say love somewhere in our conversations, but honestly it felt unnecessary. She said it in every garden offering she ever gave us, in every chat at the back fence, every impromptu chat on her driveway when she hollered, Come look at how my roses are doing! We said it back every time we set down the gardening tools or stopped the mower at one of her waves and walked over for what we knew would be a long conversation. And our sons said it every time they snuck over to her house to drink root beer and eat Creamies (she knew the way to their hearts was not veggies), happily perched with Jackie on her porch swing until I came to drag them back home to chores and homework.  

We loved Jackie and she loved us. But it was the tomatoes and peaches and apples that said it most. If hope is a thing with feathers, then love is a thing with roots and leaves and edible delights.

Of all the foods I’ve canned over the years, peaches are my sons’ favorite. Not that they always appreciate fresh peaches right off the tree. A picky eater, Cooper once confessed to our pediatrician, much to my mortification, that he hates fruits and vegetables, no doubt the crumbs of Oreos still clinging to the sides of his mouth as he said it. But set an already sweet fruit swimming in a little sea of sugar water and you’ve got more of a dessert than a healthy snack.

A few months after our fourth and last son passed away as a stillborn, our neighbors collected money to buy us a peach tree to plant in his memory. It was a lovely little tree, tender and young, just like he had been in our arms. We planted it in our backyard about ten feet from the fire pit and nurtured it for its first two years, finally able to pick fruit from it after the second summer. The peaches were delicious, but more than that, they felt like a symbol of love, a blossoming and fulfilling even in the wake of deep heartache. I thought of our friends and of our son every time I looked at that beautiful tree. It was a token of hope in spite of everything.

Four years later, we are living in a different home, with a different yard, and though I’ve told myself that all we need is a little more fertilizer and some better planning, nothing is growing the way it did in the old yard. The tomato plants finally feather out but take ages to grow anything sizeable that ripens. The squash and zucchini plants wither in the heat, despite my efforts to water them multiple times a day.

And while we are slowly getting to know people better here, it takes time. People are kind but we aren’t part of their lives quite yet, inextricably linked in the soil of the place. And no one’s boisterous garden plot is flashing its colorful undersides for all the world to see. No one makes any calls in mock desperation, looking to get over-populating beans off their hands.

I post something on Facebook when it’s the anniversary of our son’s passing, and the woman who bought our old house sends me a private message: “Jackie told me once that the peach tree in our yard was planted in honor of your little guy.” Then she mentioned that her family also has a memorial peach tree for two baby twins who died at birth. “I just think that is an interesting connection we have and something I think about when I’m working in the yard sometimes. We will have lots of peaches this year so I will have to bring you some.”

I answer back, thanking her but doubt that, several months later when peaches finally ripen, she’ll even remember this suggestion. I know her name is Hannah and her husband is Gabe, and that they bought the house just before they married to move into as newlyweds and start a family, just like my husband and I did. I know their two-year-old boy is a towhead who toddles around the yard and pretends to mow with his dad, just like our sons years ago. We moved away before Jackie passed, and though she was sad to lose us as neighbors, I know she at least found comfort in the idea of a new family springing up next door.

Then one night in September, two weeks into fall semester, I assign my English students Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” about gift economies: small, tight-knit communities where people take from the earth’s offerings and respond with humility and reciprocity by in turn giving freely to each other. The heart of this, she says, is gratitude, the deep thanks we feel both to the land that gave us our food and the people we share with and who share with us:

It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods.

That last part tugs at me hardest: that belonging is “the most vital of foods.”

It’s both an exhilarating and a tiring night in class. Some students look bored to death in our discussion of this long, dense essay, the worries and troubles of their long day sitting heavy on them. A few light up and want to talk about gift economies all night. They love the prospect of living this way, the way Indigenous people like Kimmerer have lived for centuries, the way some few pockets of civilizations still do, often quietly and organically in communities all over the world. Simply sharing earth’s bounty over and over with each other. Gifting harvests but also bonding together in times of scarcity. Unlike the market economy we know too well, it isn’t about getting your own and hoarding it for a time of need. It’s about honestly sharing what you have and trusting your neighbor to do the same. The currency in these economies is not money but relationships. This, we all agree, is how civilizations survived for centuries. They had to rely on one another. And the contemporary idea of self-sufficiency feels, if not ridiculous, then at least prideful and sanctimonious.

When I ask how feasible this kind of economy is for us, one student suggests it would only work in a rural area. “The older generation gets this,” he says. “Farmers and ranchers and old-timers. But I don’t know how many of us could do this now, where we live.” Ogden is a small city compared to Salt Lake, but it’s still urban. The diverse neighborhoods scattered throughout have always suggested to me a kind of intimacy, places where you sense a handful of people are living a gift economy in their own, rudimentary way.

But when I ask if anyone has ever lived in a kind of gift economy, I just get blank stares. One student finally raises his hand and says, “I used to. When we first moved into our house, there were no fences in the neighborhood and the old neighbors lived just like that. But then,” he went on, “new people moved in and put up fences, and things just changed. So, no one really does that anymore.”

He admits he loved it and that he knew people better. Then he goes silent. I keep prodding the class to see if anyone has experienced a gift economy, even in a small way. No one else has. And I wonder if in the 18 years I’ve been teaching, this is the saddest thing I’ve ever witnessed.

I’ll wonder just how much she knows about this code we lived by in this neighborhood for so many years, a code that’s ancient and filled with gratitude…

On the drive home, I call my husband to vent a little about class. He listens for a few moments, tries to be encouraging, then says after a short pause, “Gabe and Hannah came over tonight.”

“What?” I ask, incredulous. And before I can ask more he hurries on excitedly.

“They brought peaches from our old yard and apples from Jackie’s tree.”

He pauses after each sentence because he knows I’m emotional and taking it all in. This fills me up and stings at the same time.

“We talked for a while. They’re really nice. I think we’d be really good friends with them.”   

I’m heartbroken I wasn’t there. This is just what we’ve been missing all these years. Then just before we hang up, he adds, “Oh, and I guess some of Gabe and Hannah’s friends bought Jackie’s house. They have little kids, too.”

I picture the neighborhood vibrant and colorful and alive, the way Jackie liked it, and two young couples laboring over gardens and fruit trees. That they drove 20 minutes to our new house to bring sacred fruit to a couple they’d never actually met makes me cry.

It isn’t until the next day that I can even think about what to say to Hannah. Our brief messenger conversations have been mostly about forwarding mail and a few details about Jackie’s funeral. They were out of town and were sad to miss it but watched the broadcast and commented on our family’s contributions.

But how to thank someone you don’t even know for such a gift? Memorial peaches for your son’s brief life. Memorial apples for your friend’s long life. And an unspoken understanding that you just gift these things, that they’ve meant everything to someone, that this is the language we speak when we ache and celebrate and cherish and honor and connect. That they signify a belonging, “the most vital of foods.”

Eventually I settle on a simple question: Is there a good day or time that I can come to your house next week? I have something to give her. She says she’s home full-time with her son and to come by anytime.

I’ll make bread and grab a jar of homemade apricot jam from the fruit room. I’m sure I’ll cry giving those to her, thinking of the peaches and apples in our bowl back home. And I’ll wonder just how much she knows about this code we lived by in this neighborhood for so many years, a code that’s ancient and filled with gratitude and that people, if they’re lucky, keep alive in little pockets all over the world. This code that says when we share food and the gifts of the earth, in the quietest and most communal of ways, we belong to each other.

  

   

Sunni Brown WilkinsonSunni Brown Wilkinson is a poet and essayist. Her forthcoming book, Rodeo, was selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and will be published in 2025 by Autumn House Press. Other books are The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of the Sundress Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has also been awarded New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize, and the Sherwin Howard Award. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.

Read and listen to poetry by Sunni Brown Wilkinson also appearing in Terrain.org: “Teapot Lake on the Head of a Pin” and “For the Skunk Who Lives in the Woodpile I Pass on My Morning Walk.”

Photo of rhubarb pie and fixins by from my point of view, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Sunni Brown Wilkinson by Lyndee Carlston.