The Lipstick Chronicles

Rhubarb Summer

by Barbara O’Neal

My grandmother has been haunting me a little the past couple of weeks. I can almost smell her perfume some days.  A couple of days ago, I even found myself  taking down an old cookbook she gave me when I married, just so I could look at her handwriting. 

Then I realized that I’m starting to garden, puttering around with plans and making lists of companion plantings I want to try.  We have a big project underway this year, and I’m very happy about it.  

My grandmother, Madoline, was not a gardener. In fact, she insisted that she could not keep anything alive, and in terms of houseplants, that would be absolute fact. (She also claimed not to sew, which was probably self-defense in her generation.)

So I don’t know what possessed her to grow a garden the summer I was twelve. Maybe it was the slave labor available in me and my three siblings, marooned in the little town of Sedalia during the week while my mother worked. My grandmother was living in a rented farmhouse with an acre or so of land around it, and she got it into her head to plant a garden. 

And not just any garden. It was enormous, with rows and rows of corn and squash and tomatoes and lesser vegetables that have escaped my memory.  We were forced to help weed and water, me more than the others because I was the oldest and also liked my grandmother more than almost anyone on the planet, so more weekends than not, I stayed over. Our family had just moved to a new house in a new neighborhood, and I was lonely there.  Much more fun to read endlessly at my grandmother’s house, and hope for an appearance of my uncle Tex, seven years older than me, glamorous and wild and impossibly handsome.  He wrecked a motorcycle at one point that summer, broke his arm and skinned the flesh off several other spots, so was laid up on the couch at his mother’s house for a few days.  I was in heaven, fetching him glasses of tea and turning the channel when he wanted me to.  

Anyway, we gardened, my grandmother and I.   The corn sprouted high, and the tomatoes started putting out fruit.  Meanwhile, rhubarb grew to the size of small trucks, and my grandmother, who really didn’t can or even freeze food was left with cooking it into every variation of rhurbarb treat you could possibly name.  Rhubarb and strawberry crumble.  Rhubarb and apple crisp. Rhubarb cookies and rhubarb pie and rhubarb stew. 

 

 

Before that summer I kinda liked rhubarb.  It has those big shapely leaves and in my child’s mind, it was amazing that something just grew like a weed and you could just eat it for heaven’s sake!  When it’s raw, it has a sharp, sour bite like pickles and we loved plucking it to pucker our mouths.

But have you ever smelled rhubarb cooking?

It has been many, many years, but I can still put myself at the top of the stairs in that old house and feel surrounded and smothered by the stench of rhubarb baking. It was an odor with depth and power and weight, like a hundred sweaty shirts, like forty-three socks left damp in a locker room.  It almost had a color, a sickly acid yellow green that stained the air and stuck to my skin and was utterly inescapable.

Until I retreated to the garden and the heavenly relief of loamy earth and tomato leaves baking in the sun.  My grandmother's orange cat, Goldy, who adopted her even though she didn’t like cats, wound around my ankles and stalked bugs through the corn. Whatever time of day it was, I liked the garden better than the smell of the house.

And that’s when I fell in love with gardens, growing things. I can’t remember how successful we were.  I’m pretty sure we harvested corn and squash (who could not harvest squash?) and maybe some other things.  I remember day-dreaming about the fallow side yard, another half acre that could be planted with something or another.  Maybe flowers, I thought, because my mother let me plant some bachelor buttons at the new house and they were pretty. 

My grandmother never planted another garden again, but that lone garden of hers provided me with a rich setting for a lost pregnant teen in How to Bake a Perfect Life, when Ramona and her aunt Poppy live in that very house in Sedalia and tend that very garden. Ramona shared a kiss with a boy she had a kiss on, but I never did. 

That accidental garden turned me into a gardener for life.   I’m not particularly talented, but there is something so soft and luscious and rewarding about the alchemy of earth and sun and rain, even hail.  At the end of a long day at the computer, my head is weary of words and it’s a relief to wander into the garden and admire a dahlia, shoot a photo of a squash blossom, pluck some weeds. It’s color and shape and mood, no words at all.  Novels also take a long time to grow and harvest, so there is a deep satisfaction in planting a seed and watching it sprout, then bear fruit.  Voila!

The one thing I have never done, ever, since that summer is eat so much as one mouthful of rhubarb. This grieves my beloved very much, since he is English and they serve rhubarb all over the place there.  If you are like he is, you might like this recipe for Strawberry-Rhubarb Crumble I tracked down for you, by Smitten Kitchen, whose photos are so gorgeous that she makes even me want to try it, though my beloved would say there is nowhere near enough crumble on that dish.  

 

 

I also understand that Nancy M has the All Time Best Rhubarb Pie Recipe in the world, her own mother's, so perhaps she will share that, too. 

Are you a fan of rhubarb? Gardens? What makes you think of your grandmother? 

 

Rose-colored glasses

by Barbara O'Neal

My name is Barbara and I am an optimist.

Oh, sometimes I pretend to be a cynical snarky type. Sometimes I can trot out a droll and cutting commentary on the state of the world, but it’s only because I’m trying to get all you cynics and pessimists to think I’m just as smart as you are.

If you’re an optimist, you’re seen as a foolish little dweeb without an ounce of sharp-thinking.  If you’re an optimist and maybe fo cus on how things are getting better in the world than about how awful they are (both things are actually true), the think tankers and literary PhDs and politicians think you’re naïve.  If you are a woman, a writer of upbeat fiction, they sneer over your books and your opinions in an even bigger way, inventinglabels like “women’s fiction,” and “chick lit” to separate that work from the serious, important Manly Fiction that features all manner of darkness and disaster.  And neverforget that romance novels are by far the lowest of the lowly forms of fiction, those idiotic treatises of finding a mate and living happily ever after.

Because that never happens,in real life, right? Like, no happy married couples anywhere. 

Bad things happen all the time.  I get that. There was a hideous car accident here yesterday, the kind that gets in your head and makes you wish you had not heard of it (I had to write a whole book once to get a car accident out of my head).  The earthquakes in Christchurch are terrible, too, and how many people have died in the revolution in Libya? 

Optimists are not blind, just ready to believe in goodness. Optimism is seen as a fool’s game, left tothe simple-minded and hippies and crusaders. Bah, those pesky crusaders! That silly head Martin Luther King, that foolish, simple minded Nelson Mandela, those crazy visionaries who cameup with a silly social network that seems to be changing the freaking world! 

Imagine that!

When I was in college, I knew a group of Libyan students. They were mostly very wealthy guys, having a little time-out in America before they went home to do the work their fathers had set up for them. They liked to party and hang out with fast American women and—nearly to a man—dreaded going home.  This was not true at all of the Syrians and the Saudis and the Kuwaitis. All of them were having a good time, too, but they wanted to return home.  The Libyans did not. 

And most of them didn’t. They stayed, by hook or by crook, or went to Europe, did whatever they  had to do to stay out.  One night, I made a sly comment about America, and one of them (a devastatingly handsome and standoffish man I had a terrible crush on) gave me a fierce lecture on
the beauty of democracy and the American constitution.  “You just don’t know,” he said. “You don’t.”   (Which of course only served to deepen my smittenness.) I keep thinking of them as I watch Khadaffi’s regime fall.  Wondering how they feel.  It’s unclear at the moment how it will all work out. Sometimes a dictator provides stability along with oppression.

Optimism provides the courage to change things. Optimism says things can be different if we work hard and look to the future.  Optimism says things will get better the more we understand.

The book business has been a big shaky the past month or so, even shakier than in the preceding year, when everyone was already nervous.  The cynics are predicting the end of the world as we know it. The optimists are saying, “Hmm. Maybe not. Maybe this is a big shift, and scary, but maybe it’s leading us into something exciting, even revolutionary.”  Maybe so many books, eventually all the books that have ever been written, available at the touch of a button mean that there will be more educated people in the world than there have ever been before.  Imagine! All those books available to anyone who walks into an internet café in any village in any corner of the world or downloads them into their cell phones.  Any book. On any subject, in any language. 

Imagine that.

I think the difference between optimists and cynics is, in the end, that optimists see the big picture, while cynics are focused on the now.  Yes, people are dying in Libya as power shifts, but perhaps this will lead to a better life for most people there.  Perhaps that unrest will eventually, free Iran, too.  (For some great insight into why that matters, check out Laura Fitzgerald’s two novels about an Iranian woman coming to the US for a chance at new life, Veil of Roses and Dreaming in English—upbeat women’s fiction, but oh, so illuminating!)  

Yes, in the short term, we’re in the midst of a sea change in the book world, too, but I’m an optimist. Writers will still write, books will still be published, editors will still be passionate about finding books and helping to shape them into the best they can be.  And in addition, books will set the world on fire in a way that has never been possible in the history of mankind.  Amazing to consider, isn’t it?

In the end, optimists and pessimists are equally right. It’s just that the optimists are healthier and less worried in the  meantime.   That’s my take on it, anyway, simple minded as it might be. 

What side of the line do you fall on? And how’s that working for you? Do you feel you have to defend your point of view? 

 

Yesterday, when I was nineteen

by Barbara O'Neal

This morning, I am drinking Good Earth tea. This is not unusual.  It has no caffeine and comes in a yellow box. The tags have little quotes on them, like “A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck,” attributed to James A. Garfield. I make it in giant mugs with two tea bags because if I write and drink coffee, it makes me jittery and nauseous.  I don’t have to add sugar, also a bonus. 

What is unusual is that as I brewed my cup this morning, I was suddenly transported to another day in my life.  A couple of lifetimes ago, as Joan Baez might say, when I was 19. 

At nineteen, I lived with my boyfriend in a tiny house on an alley.  Behind us were a few trailers plunked down behind a used car lot; in front was the main house, one of two remaining houses in a neighborhood that had gone commercial. At one end of the block was an apartment building with three floors filled with people as poor as we were, only some of them had children and we were still technically kids ourselves.  

A block or two in one direction was a Sears, and on the corner across the street from the apartments was a strip club.  If you walked six or seven blocks toward downtown, you came to a florist with a sprawling greenhouse where my friend Nancy  and I went to buy Swedish Ivy and coleus.  I first developed a taste for cyclamen and African violets there; Nancy and I had a contest to see who could grow the healthiest, most robust houseplants, for which we wove macrame hangers out of jute, which is a material you probably only know about if you, too, were bitten by the macramé bug in the late seventies.  She was the star at that, even making things like hanging tables and wall hangings with elaborate knots, even when she smoked weed, which was a lot.  I sometimes smoked with her, before we went to the greenhouse, especially. Walking through the hushed rows with my camera, a Minolta SLR that I had saved a long time to buy,  slightly high on Mexican dirt weed, is one of the most peaceful memories in my entire library.  I fell in love with the kaleidoscopic hearts of tulips and the mathematical sawtooth edges of pilea involucrata.  I desperately wanted to work in a greenhouse, an ambition from which I’ve never entirely recovered.

The little house I shared with my boyfriend, a dashing cook who rode a red motorcycle, was pathetic from the outside, covered in some awful white shingles  that had seen better days, but the entire inside was paneled in deep, polished pine, even the bathroom. It gave everything a deep glow in the afternoons, all that beautiful wood casting out golden light as if we lived in the very heart of a forest.  The rooms were all in a row, bedroom to the east, with three windows, a double bed and a dresser I brought from my parents' home; minuscule living room furnished mainly with plants in front of the long windows, kitchen with exactly enough room for a stove, a fridge, and a sink below the high narrow window. I lined up coleus cuttings in tiny crystal jars I bought at Goodwill and shot photos of them against cloudy skies.

At nineteen I was restless and wrote novels in spiral notebooks in the afternoons before I went to work at a downtown restaurant where I wore slick black uniform and a velvet hat.  But while I lived there, a restaurant opened across the busy street by my paneled house.  Food was served from the counter and had a smattering of inexpensive tables and chairs in the sunny dining room. Too sunny, since it faced south and the hard traffic of Platte Avenue and it would get hot and smell of exhaust fumes from the big cars people drove in the late 70s.  (I recently passed by and noticed it has been turned into a head shop medical marijuana clinic.)

The menu was the thing. It was salads. All salads, and you went to the counter to look at the menu on the wall, just like any fast food place, but instead of a hamburger and fries or tacos and refritos, the list was entirely salad ingredients—lettuces and fresh spinach, diced tomatoes and broccoli, grated cheese and sunflower seeds and croutons.  For a set price you could have six ingredients, for a little more, you could add others.  They served generously, lots of sunflower seeds for the money, lots of cheese, all on a big bed of whatever greens you’d chosen. 

And they served cinnamon tea, iced or hot.  It may very well have been Good Earth, which has likely been around since then. 

On days when I’d made a lot in tips, or I didn’t have to go to school, or one of my sisters had driven up to see me from Pueblo, I would cross the busy street and order my salads, not feeling so much healthy  as besotted with all those fresh ingredients.  I didn’t love meat and didn’t want crap in my body (except cigarettes, of course, and beer, and, oh yeah, the occasional joint).   That menu gave me a chance to experiment,  dark green flexibility of spinach, especially paired with creamy dressing and sunflower seeds.  I’d never eaten fresh broccoli or cauliflower or uncooked peas. I filled the bowl with romaine and soft butter lettuce and red leaf lettuce, with cheese and nuts and seeds of all varieties, and ate it all with hearty freshly baked wheat rolls with butter.  The tea, sweet without sugar, was powerful complement.  

Hippie food, my friends teased me. Maybe, I said, shrugging.  I liked it.

It didn’t last long, the restaurant, and anyway, I moved out of that house to another one and my life took a turn.  I found a job washing dishes in a tiny music café where the menu was fresh and vegetarian, soups and bread and salads served by waitresses who didn’t always wear bras and the music was acoustic and bluesy.  I learned that I loved fresh food, that when it was good and real, it didn’t need a lot of heavy fat or meat to make it taste good.  It was my first adult shift in food choices, and it stuck.

When you are nineteen, the world is still fresh and you are still mighty—and a lot of who you become shows up. I still love taking photos of greenhouses and the hearts of flowers and I’m eyeing a very fancy new digital camera. I still have too many house plants (one fern is older than my children) and I love fresh ingredients.  I have traded the smoke for good wine, but I’ve kept the cinnamon tea.  

Out of curiosity, I looked at the tag on one of the bags in my cup just now and it says, “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” 

So it is.

Do you remember the first time you liked something that made you feel like the adult you were going to become?  What do you remember about being nineteen? What stuck? What did not?  

 

Sisters Sisters Everywhere

Sisters Sisters Everywhere

by new Tart--Barbara O'Neal

I was having lunch with a friend of mine the other day and she is reading my new book (How to Bake a Perfect Life) and wanted to know if there were sisters in all of my books. 

I had to stop and think—are there? What I realized, much to my surprise is that not only are there sisters in nearly every single  one ofthe 38 books I’ve written, but quite often, the relationship between the sisters is a plot point (trying to find a sister who is lost, making peace with sisters in the present, bidding farewell to a sister who has died).  There are mean sisters and cheerful sisters, good relationships and bad.  InHow to Bake, the sister dynamic is charged and difficult for reasons that are somewhat mysterious.   I’ve had shocked letters about the grade-school-aged sisters in a previous novel, The Secret of Everything, because the two have violent, terrible fights.  (I thought, you must not have had sisters!)

Sitting with my friend the other day, I had to laugh and admit that yes, I do have sisters in nearly all of my books.  And that is, of course, because I have very strong sibling bonds with my own sisters.  I am the oldest, the artist and dreamer.  My sister Cathy is a nurse, with the stalwart clear-sightedness of a WWII era WAC (she thinks she’s the oldest).  The youngest is Merry Noel, born on Christmas, and a sickly little girl who grew into a woman of great compassion who teaches middle school and seems to actually like it.  

Oddly, most of my friends do not have sisters.  I’m never sure if I am seeking out friendships with sisterless women, or if I give off a sisterly vibe that draws them.  But it’s true.  Most of my best friends over the years are not blessed/cursed with sisters,  to the point that I have to train them to tell me the truth about things.  When I ask you, for example, if this outfit/lipstick/hair style looks good, I actually want you to stop me from going out into the world wearing something that is not flattering.  I had sister eyes to help for twenty years, and I am dependent on them. 

A sister will say, “Do not wear that.” She will bring you a lipstick that is right and say, “I thought of you when I saw this.”

Not that it’s all sweetness and ribbons (although one of my sisters did actually used to braid my hair whenever I wanted her to).  Sisters remember every idiotic thing you have ever done.  They love to trot out the time in junior high when you and all of your friends brought every form of flavored extracts you could find in your kitchens—vanilla, orange, etc—and drank them, thus getting all seven of you suspended for drunkenness.  (Really? On extracts?) Or when you had that little spell where you lost car keys and house keys and every other kind of key, thus requiring rescues at all times of day and night. Sisters will leave scars on your body—and your heart. No one in the world can betray you with quite that eye toward perfection, and no one will ever regret it more. 

One of the few friends I do have with sisters was born into a family of 18 children (and her mother was/is a spry, bright creature—you would never believe it).  She was somewhere in the middle , with a grand total of 8 or 10 sisters, and honestly, none of them needed any girlfriends.  That tends to be rare.  Most women who have had sisters tend to have a lot of strong relationships with other women, and in fact, need them.  I tend to make and keep strong female friendships wherever I go, and have a handful of very long-term relationships. 

So, it is not surprising that there are sisters all over my books. What is hilarious is that I never noticed. But perhaps that isn’t odd, either.  Sisters to me are like the sky or the earth beneath your feet—of course they are there. Of course they populate my novels, just as they occupy my world.

How do you feel about the sibling bond? Do you have sisters? And if so, how have they influenced your life?