MountainMornings

They say you can’t go home again, not once you’ve left and established a separate life, an adult life. But today I tasted a real poppyseed strudel at the City Market, the kind my Slovac foster mother Nell used to make, and it brought me right back there, to Victory Gardens.

I tried making it once. I had to buy a new peppermill to grind the teeny poppy seeds, since there was nothing else I could think of in the 70s to do the trick. My attempt failed miserably and I just assumed you’d have to go to Czechoslovakia to find a poppyseed grinder. Julia Child lived around the corner in Cambridge, MA and I almost stopped her in the street to ask her how I might duplicate this luscious European pastry, but I guess I didn’t have the nerve. If only we had Twitter!

This week has brought back many memories. The Bride was just two years old when we started bringing her out to Martha’s Vineyard. We’d pack up the car and caravan with the dogs and our BFFs Lee and Al to a little, old, grey clapboard house at the wild end of the island, Gay Head. We’d dig for clams and bake bread. We’d ride our beach bikes past the dunes and watch fishermen docking with the day’s catch. We’d shower outside after an afternoon at Menemsha Pond, and pick ticks off the dogs in the evening. In short, it was always a delightful Spring.

Being with the Love Bug now reminds me of that toddler sense of wonder, the kind I experienced on the Vineyard with her mama. She looks for our neighbors’ horses, she sings to herself in the car, she bravely goes down a water slide twice! We run in the backyard to pick blackberries. When she takes a bite of a ripe peach, I see that same joy. Like a picture I have of the bride sitting at our Gay Head table with lobster, clams and butter all over her face and hair.

Sandy sheets and ballon animals from the City Market dance on my laundry line of time.

The Bride waiting for the ferry

And sometimes I feel like I have gone home again.

The Bug with a blackberry stained mouth