I’ll have to admit that for several weeks the picnic assignment really had me
stumped. Research didn’t help; I discarded the idea of “great picnics in
literature,” and I was finally reduced to looking through the file cabinet in
my office to take my mind off picnics. That’s where I found my
inspiration. The first picture I found was actually a postcard advertising the
Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival in 1988. I’d kept it because the John
Temple’s artwork was so evocative of an outdoor Texas meal. There are no people in the picture. In the distance, an old pickup is parked
in the shade of a live oak tree at the bend of a creek. In the foreground, a
Texas Star quilt is spread on a field of bluebonnets. On one side of the quilt,
a cowboy hat leans against a weathered pair of boots; on the other, a
be-ribboned straw hat hangs on the corner of a wicker picnic basket. There’s a
baguette and some cheese, a bowl of colorful vegetables, gigantic steaks and
whole mushrooms fresh off the grill, and two glasses of wine poured from one of
the bottles iced down in a bucket. It’s so lovely, so achingly romantic.
I can sense the woman’s anticipation as she dresses and packs the hamper. I
can see the two of them laughing and singing as they bounce along a country
road in the dusty old truck. I’ll bet she hesitated only a minute before
shucking her new hat and sundress to go skinny-dippin’ in the creek, and I can
imagine her reclining languidly on her grandmother’s quilt while her cowboy
grills the steaks. It’s pretty obvious that somewhere along the way, they lost
interest in the food.
A few minutes of that reverie and I realized I am entirely too cynical and
distrustful of romance to write an entire piece about a romantic picnic. After
all, the last time I planned a romantic picnic, it poured rain and we ended up
eating in awkward silence on the living room floor. An article about
that particular disaster would ruin everyone’s appetite. So I opened
another file drawer and found the pictures I’d been looking for all along.
There are four of them, small black-and-white photos taken the summer I was
four years old. It was the summer of the exploding canned tomatoes. My sister
and I spent several weeks with our maternal grandparents because Mother was
about to have a baby. Pop (my grandad) was retired from a 40-year career with
the Pioneer Natural Gas Company, and he loved any excuse for a trip to visit
his brothers and sisters in northwest Texas and southwestern Oklahoma. Although
they aren’t food pictures, the faded photos zapped me back to that hot summer
and the picnic we had the day two of them were taken.
That morning, we had gone into Tishomingo, home of the Chickasaw Indian
Nation. In one of the photos, a smiling, four-year-old Ginny Beth is standing
next to the porch in her brand new moccasins and the now politically incorrect
feathered war bonnet. In the other picture, Pop is sporting the war bonnet, and
he and a skinny male cousin whose name escapes me now are having a good laugh
posing for the picture. There is an amused little smile on my Nana’s face, but
the little girl in the picture is intently adjusting the new moccasins and
isn’t even looking at the camera. Great Aunts Mattie and Bessie are on the
other end of the porch, looking out in the yard. Maybe they are planning
dinner.
On the way back from Tishomingo, we had stopped at several roadside stands
and
the purchases had been impressive: a dark green, rotund Black Diamond
watermelon; juicy, blushing peaches; fragrant cantaloupe; deep ruby beets; and
a crate of fresh corn with gleaming golden tassels. The Kentucky Wonder beans,
plump black-eyed peas, and vine-ripened tomatoes had been picked early that
morning in Mattie’s garden before we went to town. At that young age, I must
have taken such bounty very much for granted. But I’m grateful for the early
training. Roadside stands and farmers’ markets have a magnetic pull on me,
still. Now, I proudly count the blossoms on my tomato and pepper plants every
day.
After a nap on the screened porch, we kids spent the afternoon in the shade
giggling and laughing while we snapped peas, hulled beans, and shucked corn.
Aunt Mattie was a no-nonsense old gal and she had carefully instructed us on
the proper techniques. Snap the stem end off the green bean and pull the
strings down both sides, then break them in half into the colander. Despite her
directions, I figured out that if I snapped the stem end off of the black-eyed
peas just right, I could run my thumb down the length of the pod and send peas
skittering into the bowl and other people’s laps.
Corn shucking really required bigger hands than I had at the time, which was
no great loss. After I encountered a wooly, fat worm in the first ear of corn,
shucking lost all of its appeal. I steadfastly refused to pick tomatoes more
than once because I felt exactly the same way about tomato worms. Mother still
kids me about that sometimes if I brag about my garden too much. What I
remember about the melons was the condensation on the Mason jars that held the
quarter-moon slivers of sweet cantaloupe and washing off in the big tin washtub
in the backyard after a very sticky watermelon-seed spitting contest.
After our splash came the most important job of the day. All the kids took
turns sitting on a couple of folded towels, cranking the arm of the old wooden
ice cream maker. Under the watchful eye of my grandfather, we cranked until it
would crank no more. Then he would ceremoniously remove the metal cylinder,
carefully wipe it off with one of the towels to insure that no salty water
would ruin the precious ice cream, remove the dasher, and set it in a deep bowl
for us to clean. The frosty container would then be sealed and put back in the
ice, recovered with the towels to hold in the cold, and left for dessert. Pop
loved ice cream, and this activity would be repeated many times through the
years until his diabetes and the fact that I never outgrew my “baby fat” forced
us to switch to diet root-beer Fizzies for our shared sweet refreshments.
The memories of that day are really only mental snapshots. There’s no way to
distinguish between what I actually remember and the family stories that
have been repeated over the years. They didn’t call it a picnic; it was “dinner
on the ground.” But the Double Wedding Ring quilt that Nana spread out in the
yard for the kids to eat on is in the other room in the closet, far too fragile
for such treatment these days. The meal had to have been piping-hot, buttery
ears of corn – or as Aunt Mattie said, “roasting ears” – slices of homegrown
tomatoes, and thick slabs of cornbread covered with black-eyed peas and their
pork-flavored pot liquor. If there was meat, it was ham, because Pop loved it
and his sisters really doted on him.
In the picture in my mind, we are sitting on that quilt in the warm Oklahoma
twilight, gobbling up our bowls of Pop’s favorite peach ice cream. I see that
picture every time I look at the quilt and every time I use my wooden ice cream
maker. These days, I use an electric model, but I still follow Pop’s ritual
with the towel and the dasher. And romance to the contrary, I really do love a
good picnic.
Food-O-File
This article appears in May 19 • 1995 and May 19 • 1995 (Cover).