BUTTERNUT WISDOM

The garage roof and that of our neighbors were crusted again in their generous sifting of the powdered-sugar snow overnight, like two vast teacakes awaiting a Brobdignag fete on the lawn.   We've had the last week's foot or so still unsullied on both lawns, and only dark strips down the drive for the trash bin and tire tracks of my sweet neighbor who ferried me to Kroger last week.   It's hanging on like we live in Maine, and these insulated, warm days of sweaters and Beloved Pants have reminded me so of Gladys Taber's life and writings that I've been reading again some of the books.    I still have to look out the great leather file of her columns, collected by me in my first young married life, cooking and home-keeping like a New Englander in our wee house in the HOT South.     

I've just learned today that the columns that she published in Ladies' Home Journal back in the Thirties and Forties were a popular, comforting presence to GIs overseas during World War II.   I'd never thought of that---those sturdy, stalwart soldiers seeking such a tangible taste of Home in all that strife and uncertainty.   Can't you just see a recipe for Apple Crisp or Brown Betty hanging in the barracks beside those coveted pictures of Betty Grable, or folded in a worn wallet beneath a sweetheart's photo?   It's sweet to think that their cold bodies were warmed by the apple-roasts-by-the-fire of the Taber hearth, kindling memories and thoughts of HOME when time and place held so much to fear, and no comforts in sight.     I take that into my heart as the most wonderful thing I've learned in a long time.   Stillmeadow imaginations all the way to the Eastern Front, and her small domestic ramblings set down in such evocative stories as to bring them life and warmth in the cold, stark battlefields.  

It's the BUTTERNUT WISDOM columns that I have shelved away somewhere, clipped from the back of  Family Circle for years---engendered by my childhood's great longing for at least one Summer Camp in Maine, with swimming before breakfast, after sleeping in a comfortable lattice-array of cots on a screened Sleeping Porch.   AND TO HAVE BEEN THERE FOR GETTING SNOWED INNNNN!   That would have truly iced the cake.  

She woke to birdsong or snowcover, drank her strong stove-perked coffee, and stirred up some sourdough pancakes from her own decades-old starter. Butternut Wisdom, indeed. They're country books, walking-the-woods-with-a-dog books, pot-of-beans-simmered-all-day-while-writing-her-columns books. I love her line, "I think beans in any form are elegant."

The books are dated by their devices, their appliances, the cutting of wood for the kitchen stove and the hold-your-hand-in method of judging the oven temperature, as well as the political references and topics of the day, but I still re-read them and the great three-ring of her columns I clipped for years from women's magazines. There's a great peace to the telling, day-to-day happenings small as a new-found bird nest, and the immense quiet of a snowbound week with a full larder, a woodbox to hand, and the sure knowledge that no one could break the solitude before the melt.

The hometown eloquence of Mrs. Taber's stories stands so vividly still today, that generations of readers have sought their comfortable ramblings, for the recipes or the memories or the general aura of such a gentle life, lived so simply and with vigor and exuberance in her quiet way.   And Today's just the day, after the umpteenth sifting of snow onto everything in sight, and the 27 promising to drop its trousers to unspeakable chill---a warm cup and comfortable chair will be a perfect afternoon with snow sparkling through the sheers, and a book-load of Taber stories.   

PS:  I went to Amazon to see if many are still in print---our love of them still prospers:  The first one  I saw was Butternut Stories, with a price of $470.   What a lot of Beans that would buy!