I am a garagesaleaholic. Run that one through your spellchecker and see if anything comes up other than: “Excusez-moi; not a word, for sure.” Being able to apply a label to one’s self is invigorating, if not enlightening. I like the idea of ego wrapped in insight…
It’s the dead of winter where I live in the Rockies, and so my hankering for garage sales is as dormant as the aspen trees in my yard. But a brisk wind can blow, and the death rattle on the branches stirs the skeleton of leaves which withered but refused to go quietly. They are still hanging on for dear life. That’s quite a feat, considering how the wind has raged at near hurricane strength recently.
And so, during the winter months, I take simple pleasure in the fact that the Internet has provided a nice, warm, seasonal venue for my addiction. I’m not talking about eBay here, although I have been known for – and will probably revive – my interest in online bartering. What I’m talking about is a gem of a local website which gives me and others in my rural community an opportunity to quietly move goods and services and exchange some green along the way.
A few days ago, I stumbled upon a post on this website, and two items caught my eye: a garden cart and a Cuisinart ice cream churn. I took up gardening a number of years ago as a way to keep our local Road and Bridge Department from its continual carve on my property. As for ice cream: my earliest memories are of the savory delight, and I’m sure that as an toddler, my first words – much to my parents' chagrin – were probably not “mama” and “papa.” Undoubtedly, they were “eyes scream.”
The items have no real connection other than they were owned by one person and purchased at an incredible price by me. But it got me thinking: who was their former steward? I know, from a brief phone conversation, they belonged to a woman who had died; I think she was the seller’s mother-in-law. And I know that items in the household were being cleaned out because the couple was getting ready to rent the house out.
The garden cart was wonderful, and I loaded it up quickly with all my gardening apparati (again, do the spell check; nothing will come up!). As my tools went in, big and small, I said a silent word of thanks. Someone obviously loved gardening enough to give their own implements of the task a space in their universe. I’m something of a neat freak, and just the thought of having everything accessible and at the ready was exciting.
Gardening is one of the most powerful acts of creation. And I say this because I came from a state (Florida) where you could stick anything in the ground and – unless you had a black thumb -- it would grow. Here, in the wilds of Colorado, humans are pitted against Mother Nature in a constant battle to bring beauty and joy into their corner of the universe. The gardening season is extremely brief in the land of prolonged winter (don't get me wrong; I love winter), but the rewards are rich. A kindred soul passed something along to me that I will treasure.
But it was the ice cream churn that made me think long and hard. Tucked away with the churn in a ziplock bag was a Williams-Sonoma ice cream book. I love Williams-Sonoma, and the book was completely unexpected. The book itself cost more than the price I paid for the garden cart and the churn. It now graces the shelf by my kitchen, and tonight I will be deciding which of the recipes will inaugurate my ice cream making career.
When I picked up my items, I hadn’t noticed the book because the bag was filled with hand-clipped recipes for ice cream and sorbet. I started perusing the recipes, again wondering about the woman who had so meticulously collected them. Interestingly, there was no recipe for chocolate confection. That was a little surprising. It seems to me most people who start experimenting with ice cream will go for vanilla or chocolate. You know, get a handle on the basics and then let things crank...
What I found instead were recipes for more exotic flavors: “dreamy strawberry,” “best-ever peach” and the like. Raspberries, blackberries, apples, oranges, lemons, limes. As Rachael Ray would say, “yum-o.” One was a recipe for Asian pear ice cream. How exotic! One- and two-word appraisals accompanied some of the recipes: “OK,” “too sweet,” “pretty color.”
But also tucked inside was something perplexing, at least to me: not one, but several recipes for rhubarb ice cream. As much as I love fruit and veggies, I have to admit rhubarb would never be invited to my garden party. It is just too harsh and displeasing, with too much undertone for me. It lingers far too long when an exit would be more appropriate. There just isn’t a rhubarb anything I can think of that I’m willing to make or eat, let alone include it in ice cream. These were the only recipes I tossed.
And so I draw some conclusions about a nameless, faceless lady who graced our planet. That she was creative and nurturing. She had a flair for style and adventure. Her palette was sophisticated and her nature inquisitive. I expect she laughed a lot, and was a person of patience. She had a sweet tooth.
And all those snipets of recipes tell me something we all know: the sweetness of life is always tempered with a touch of the bitter.
