Why the Chinese Prize Sons

Though we have run dry of Easter egg hunters, we have no shortage of people who eat breakfast. And while the eggs we peeled for Easter morning were only white as snow and brown as earth, they tasted just like the colored variety.

Saturday breakfast was always a big deal in my mother’s house: pancakes. Sometimes (oh, please, please) waffles. My father helped in the making of these things, and it was a fine way to start out the weekend, let me tell you. My mom used to make her own syrup out of boiled, caramelized brown sugar and Mapeline. I still love pancakes, even though the simple sight of them invariably puts my present wardrobe out of reach.

But (aside from waffles), the speciallest breakfast of all was something my mom called “Eggs Vermacella.” Weird name. Funny that I—armchair etymologist that I am—never questioned it. You just have to figure, some great chef—Francois Vermacella—came up with the dish and named it after himself?

It was something my mother’s mother had made for breakfast, way back in the day (I think – I think I remember Mom telling me that), and when I was a kid, we only had it once in a blue moon.

A work-intensive dish. You take boiled eggs, peel them, save the great yellow globes from inside, cut up the whites into medium small bits. Then you make a white sauce (I have Mom’s recipe for white sauce, but I tend to get fancy and capricious with these things, so they never turn out the same way twice), and add the bits of egg white to the sauce. This is served over toast – toast, egg sauce, then the yellows, very finely grated over the top. Fabulous. In our own version here, we add other things – a little garlic, then bacon and shredded cheese on top. And we only make it on Easter morning.

Some years ago, as I was – for some inexplicable reason – thumbing through the Betty Crocker cookbook Mom gave me on the occasion of my wedding (the only cook book I really use; I’ve opened it at least twenty five times). In it, I stumbled across this very recipe. It was kind of a shock, like suddenly running into a celebrity or finally discovering a picture of an ancestor: a huge, full color, layout shot of this dish with the words “Eggs vers Marseilles” printed under it in some curly, fancy font.

Hmmmmm.

My grandmother was from Alabama. Evidently, they don’t speak French there.

It does make you wonder how many other good old family traditions are just slightly skewed truths?

So here is a picture of our Easter Feast. We still call it Eggs Vermacella, but now we are very fond of the name for its own sake. This is not a very good picture. I forgot about how I’m blogging the Significant Moments until Guy had already mixed up the toppings and I’d eaten half of mine.

So there you go.

I have now posted a recipe. Sort of.

But that was not what I meant to do when I sat down to write this – thus the title of the piece. Oh, and I have decided to name this column “Singing in the Barn” because I do that a lot, and can’t help but think of it as a metaphor for my life. “Kstreetjournal,” which was Murphy’s idea, is the publication masthead title. “Singin’” is the column. See?

Oh – and before I actually get started with the real subject, here’s something else, a thought I had this morning as I was shoveling up material with my apple-picker, which is what nice horse people call the manure rake: here is an interesting juxtaposition of words: wont and want. “Wont” means “way,” as in, “That’s just his way.” More than habit, really. Sort of – just the way you are, the way you go about things.

“Want” can mean a couple of things. One of them suggests need –“they were in want of.” Meaning they had a deficit and a need. I suppose, to accurately define the breadth of this word, you’d have to somehow communicate a whole class of feeling in all its gradient—everything from roaring lust through hankering and coveting into the cravings of starvation—with a whole center section that is characterized by selfishness and short term thinking. Which is what brought me to this interplay:

Being in want is pretty much always simply a product of wont, which is driven by wanting.

And I wonder if maybe these were the same word in the beginning. And who made up that word, anyway? Someone who walked by a window in the Shambles of York, saw some fruit buns in the window of that wonderful, marvelous little bakery just near where the purple paint man sets up his statue base (yes, I know you have no idea what I’m talking about) and, looking at those lovely fat buns, feeling the stirring in the soul that grips you at the first glimpse of them, suddenly had pop into his mind the following string of letters: W-A-N-T. It’s close in sound to WAAAAAA – which is sometimes the way we write the sounds a baby makes when he’s feeling that very same (if less refined and tuned) feeling.

I don’t know.

But here: on to the topic of the day—

Why the Chinese Prize Sons

Saturday, March whatever in the year of our Lord 2008.

G: in Kansas City with the oldest daughter and her brood (including one chick and a large dog. I am not including the husband as brood).

Chaz: in Japan, with her good friend who managed to leave her rail pass, passport and wallet on the trail they took from the airport to the hotel.

M: home with me. (YAY!)

C&L: running their Home Owner Association’s Easter egg hunt, and busily waiting for The Kid to spring forth.

Problem: it’s March and the weather is getting unseasonably warm. I have an acre and a little over a quarter of pasture that, though the horses have been shut off it for a month now, is smothering in a winter’s worth of horse by-products. And the grass is beginning to grow. Or trying to, at any rate.

This is a big deal. It may not sound like much to ya’ll, but without that grass, I have nothing to feed some 5000 pounds of pet. And you’re really supposed to have two acres per horse in order to have feed even just for the summer. I am a small pasture person. This means, I have to farm smart.

And I do. I picked up ideas back in the beginning, and I have kept five horses fat and alive all late spring through summer into late fall on that tiny bit of ground. I do it by dividing the length of the field up with electric fence: seven tiny pastures that I graze my guys on, 10 days per pasture – giving each small segment of grass over a month to recover from the last grazing.

Amazing. It works. There’s work setting it up the fences. But once you’ve done that, the process is fairly easy—you just have to keep your eye on the grass all summer. And there’s trying to plan things so that the horses are far from the road frontage at times like the 4^th of July (when people who drive by can do unspeakably stupid things).

I do have to drag the field. I try to do it twice a year – spring and late summer. And this is why: horses put out a lot of byproduct. And they tend to choose one area where they live and use that over and over until the grass is buried there and burned (chemical burn). So we have to fire up the Suburban, hook up the rigid toothed harrow and a few other bells and whistles, and drive the whole assembly up and down and over and under and around and around that field until we’ve pulverized every horse apple on it and spread it as fertilizer over the whole thing.

I’d love to be able to do this myself. But I can’t. This is why I’ve included these pictures (this plus the fact that showing off my darling kids needs only the flimsiest excuse) – so you can see my harrow (I own a harrow) – which I bought used. Very used. Weighs a ton, flops around and can kill you if you happen to trip and fall on it. I can’t begin to lift the sections alone. Heck, I don’t even dare try to disentangle the two parts, which are stored Tee-pee-like in a space behind the horse trailer. You need dead weight to do the job when you drag.

So I needed my sons.

This is not to suggest that my sons are dead weight. In fact, they are my heroes. My L. gave up her C for a bit of the morning. I was already down at the barn, messing with manure (you’d surprised how useful the stuff can be) and raking out the places the harrow can’t reach. My phone died there, but I had faith my sons would show – as they soon did, one in his green truck, one in my Mighty Suburban.

And we had a great time. I can’t think of two people in the world I’d rather work with – funny, focused, strong and competent, and they take my direction without mutiny. They pulled apart the tee-pee of spikes, carried it over, hooked it up, while I went into the barn and dug that sweet little seventy pound grid they’re fastening on as a tail there – out from under about a hundred pounds of tiny gravel. I’m stiff today, three days later, after muscling that thing out of the ground; but then, when you are in the company of giants, you have to do great things.

M drove the Monster car – they love this, zooming around all that space, tearing up grass, air, silence at about seventy miles an hour – that clacking, smacking, moaning assembly bouncing along behind them, decimating months of manure and feeding and aerating the grass in the process. Try that on your ride-on mower. M finally slowed down long enough to offer C a chance to drive, but the older brother waved him on. “I’ve been eighteen already,” he said to me, grinning.

The best part came after we’d finished the field. Now we had to drag the arena, which meant we had to chase the horses out into the field. This is not hard to do. Horses who have been penned up in even a large arena for a month – and who dream at night of field and grass and wide open spaces – add a little spring breeze to this – horses like this, I say, are like a force of nature.

C with his HD camera, and I with my digital still—we readied ourselves, choosing good angles, as M got those horses all het up and excited, finally running over to throw open the very back gate. Horses at attention, blinking, unbelieving. Horses looking at each other, like—“Are they kidding?” Horses, beginning to travel – fast, then faster, in case somebody should realize that gate was actually wide open.

Horses shooting through the gate.

My little red horse.  Zion.

The baby, known as Hickory or Tiger or Getouta There – supposed to be a pony.  Surprise!!

Sophie, flying foward.

Then, oh, the dancing and posturing and acrobatics – tails high, noses in the air, manes flying – the turns and jumps, the fake fighting, the digging in of those sharp hooves and the flex and launch from that massive machine that powers them from behind.

Up and down the field they tore, and we made M chase them, keep their blood up, while we took pictures the best we could. I had the wrong lens on, really – and couldn’t keep up with the focus – honestly, it all happened so fast, every moment, so fast. Such power, such joy, such glory and rejoicing.

Tiger, coming right at me.  Are you impressed with my confidence?  Stupidity?

Zion on a banked turn.  Imagine being on his back – I’ve actually ridden this!  Like flying.

Zion, racing the lovely captive Arabian neighbors

Jetta, an old barrel racer: the old girl’s still got it.  Tiger.  And the fine and magnificent Dustin.

The Arabians give up.  They will race me and the fertilizer spreader presently.

Just for fun – a dash back into the arena – and then out again.

Finally, they wound down. And while they were out there, trying to scare up a real blade of grass in all that brown (which gives the phrase Easter egg hunt some real meaning), we shut the gates on them and dragged the arena – this time, using C’s truck. Thus, we put to bed worries I’d had for months – how was I going to get this done? Especially with G gone. Before the rains, when the field is all mud. But here came my sons to the rescue, and a looming task is now nothing but a great memory.

M and apple picker.  Or maybe that’s the rake.  C’s turn to raise some dust.

Portrait of man and boy.

The boys went off to do their own things—C to his young wife, M to the animation studio—while I stayed to fertilize my 60,000 square feet, galvanizing  the beautiful bay Arabian horses next door (who love to play frightened and make a big party out of it). Another major spring event, laid to rest.

I like Saturdays like that—where you’re all together, and you work your head off and you get dirty enough, washing your hands actually makes a visible difference. And then you’re finished, and you’ve changed something, started something big—a different kind of work than the vacuuming/paying your bills/cleaning out the dishwasher stuff that is the structure of our lives. I like having finished something. And after I finish, I like being invited to my son-and-daughter’s house to dye eggs and laugh and feel like a person who has actually done something with her day.

Now G is back (after an eight hour journey) and events are rolling on. Chaz will be gone another two weeks (assuming that the fraud alert company doesn’t freak out because her visa’s being charged in Japan and shut off her card, in which case she will have to work her way home on a slow steamer). And soon L’s baby will come, and so will Gin and the baby and Sultan. There’s still stuff to do. And horses to train.

But Saturday, I had sons. And now my pasture is ready to face the summer.