CB Adams

The Editorial We: Because, Living On Snob Hill, We Are Amused

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There is a tale of the unfortunate equery who ventured during dinner at Windsor to tell a story with a spice of scandal or impropriety in it. "We are not amused," said the Queen when he had finished.-- Caroline Holland, courtier to Queen Victoria, in her Notebooks of a Spinster Lady, published in 1919

The impetus for this blog is simple: Stories from our lives on Snob Hill, especially those with the whiff of spice, scandal, and/or impropriety, are indeed amusing to us, and to you as well, we hope. We have always been guided by the words of the esteemed Southern social philosopher Claire Belcher, who said, " If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me," in Steel Magnolias.  Such people have been sitting next to us, sometimes invited, sometimes not, for 20 years now, and we thought it was high time we sat next to you, dear readers, and spread that spice and scandal, those vanities and humanities, and boners and bon mots, collected here, among 12 humble households, on a private private drive somewhere in Middle America.

Life On Snob Hill: The Stuff of Bittersweetness

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We were reminded this weekend of the adage, “Be careful what you wish for.” This can be interpreted or applied in any number of ways. For us, it is a bit of an admonishment as we look at some long-wished-for family items that we removed from the house of a now-widowed father. One the one hand, we could be pleased that we “finally got” some items that we’ve wanted for years.

On the other hand, we obtained these items only after the death of a mother and a father’s decision to sell his home of 30-plus years and downsize. That’s the price of these pieces. It makes us assess our own home, especially as we just celebrated the marriage of a son. In those wedding preparations, we never heard the phrase, “Setting up housekeeping” or “Building a home.” Those were common phrases when we were married, and we heard it often in reference to our own parents’ post-wedding responsibilities. Wedding gifts were mostly directed toward the necessities of young newlyweds as they set up their new household.

Our son and daughter-in-law have been together for several years, and they explicitly have stated they don’t need “necessities” like a toaster or everyday dinnerware. Instead, they have requested funds for their upcoming European honeymoon. Fair enough. That’s their reality. Ours was different.

When told we were free to pick up some asked-for family pieces (is ‘heirloom’ too grand a word?), we felt gratitude and excitement. When we arrived, we also had the opportunity to unpack some storage bins and review the contents of a couple of cabinets. There was a yin-yang about this process. As the mid-century bun warmer was discovered and bestowed, there was a visceral, sense-memory of the smell of crescent rolls wafting up as the shiny, penguin-festooned warmer was passed around at parties and holidays. The piece is still in pristine condition — proof of how lovingly a mother had taken care of this wedding present. How small it seems now, and how small those crescent rolls must have been compared to the supersized ones of today.

But the hope and love and care that gleamed from its surface is shadowed by the loss of the person who cared for it. Preserving it, even. We would gladly return it to have her back.

Our domicile on Snob Hill is no manse. It is a modest-sized home, yet perfectly sized for us. When the other set of parents downsized, we made a few cross-state trips, U-Haul in tow, to bring home the furniture and other items that we wanted. Then we faced the challenge of how to incorporate those items into the tight, puzzle that is our home. It took months after each trip to rearrange and accommodate those items — usually at the expense of pieces we had acquired at estate and tag sales. Family pieces always trump items we had purchased more recently.

That still holds true. We are now the proud owners of a grandmother’s wrought iron, glass-topped table. It came from the best home furnishings store in southeast Missouri (which may or may not be damning with faint praise). This grandmother had impeccable taste, and we were anxious about whether or not it would be transferred to us. It was, and it is now displacing a larger similar table that already fills our sunroom. Hello, Craigslist and Marketplace. We will be sad to see that table go (and we just had the seats and backs reupholstered last year), but after repainting the ‘new’ table, we are happy.

Not everyone wants to be the steward of family heirlooms — or has the room for them. We have certainly curated the pieces that will best fit into our home. Some, sadly, will go out of the family. We can’t take it all, and the next generation won’t take most of it. There are plenty of stories about the youngins not wanted grandma’s china or tchotchkes, and so we go into that here.

We filled the bed of our truck with the items (and there are still others we want). We were reminded of and couldn’t help feeling acutely the sentiment in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” in which, a city daughter visits her mother.

“‘‘Oh, Mama!” she cried…I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints,” she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee’s butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something I wanted to ask you if I could have.”’

We feel the need to ensure that we didn’t seem greedy or grubby, yet still wanting to emphasize how much we wanted certain items. It’s hard to know where that line is. We are still stung by the words of the mother who so carefully cared for that bun warmer, one of the rare times when she was handing over another family heirloom: “If I give you this, I better not find out you turned around and sold it!” There’s context to that incident, not for here — and maybe not for ever. It’s probably moot now that she’s gone, anyway.

And that’s just what happens. Couples make a life together. Create a home with stuff — something borrowed, something blue, something new. We can feel all the hope that goes into housekeeping because we experienced it. But nothing is forever. At some point — sometimes sooner (divorce, death, etc.), sometimes later (as in this case) — the stuff of coupling must be released.

Driving home with the truckload of items, items we remembered from our formative years, we hope to honor the transfer of tangible, touchable family history. Yet it is also a truckload of bittersweet reminders that family ‘time’ is never static, always changing. And can merely haul that notion around.

Which brings to mind the opening stanza of Mark Terrill’s poem “Down At the Gate”:

“You could never add up

all the years it took

for this time to finally come.”

Family heirlooms destined for Snob Hill.

Behold! The Holy Grail of Nut Grinders!

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So, why the fanfare for this humble item? We are reminded of the quote, “I am haunted by waters” by Norman Maclean from the ending of A River Runs Through It. We have been haunted by this nut grinder — not by it’s presence, but by its absence.

For years, we have followed the example of countless PBS and cable cooks who chopped nuts with a knife (not to mention wending our way through Martha Stewart’s Christmas Cookbook). Sure, it was quick and efficient, but not even our best Damascus steel could provide the tactile delight we felt turning the crank of this humble grinder. Walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, and, we admit, the occasional cinnamon stick, fell through the tin chute and were transformed by circular tines into the nut gravel required for cookies and cheese balls. A culinary chipper-shredder.

Remember, we would say (sometimes out loud, more often just to ourselves)? Remember how fun it was to chop nuts with that old grinder? The one our great-grandmother bought at a Christmas Bazaar at the Methodist church and gifted to our mother. Yes, that one.

As Tim Burton once said, “Things that I grew up with stay with me. You start a certain way, and then you spend your whole life trying to find a certain simplicity that you had. It’s less about staying in childhood than keeping a certain spirit of seeing things in a different way.”

The problem was, of course, memory and its damned specificity. We scoured garage sales, estate sales, and antique malls. We found plenty of nut grinders — plastic ones, electric ones, hand pumped ones, but never that one that we remembered. It had to be that one or nothing.

Imagine, then, a Thanksgiving day as our family gathered. Imagine it was this year, for instance. Imagine, too, our mother who extends a brown bag with handles, brimming with colored tissue paper. Imagine setting this “hostess gift” on the counter and turning to baste the turkey, only to have your mother pick it up and hand it to you again. Imagine as she says, “Please open this now. I think you’ll be pleased.”

And imagine your childhood flooding your eyes and the back of your throat as you pull it from its nest.

It may not be the prettiest item. It may not be the latest and greatest in nut grinding technology. It not even be exactly the color and pattern, neither of which you remember. But the design, the glass bottom, and, of course, that little handle. It’s almost — but only almost — better than the memory of it.

Beware nuts of the world. Behold, the holy grail of nut grinders.

Fare Thee Well, FUBAR Gardens

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And really, we don’t know what Paul Simon meant when he sang about the “sounds of silence” because life on Snob Hill is usually peaceful and relatively quiet, but never silent.

People speak about the chirping of birds as the harbinger of spring (but honestly, don’t birds sing year round?) (on the other hand, tulips announce themselves with color rather than sound) (though maybe, like dog whistles, our ears don't hear them)).

We know summer by the sound of the lawn mower and leaf blower operated by our imposing neighbor Mr. Vonk across the street. Mr. Vonk lets us know when the grass is dry enough to be cut (at least twice a week or more, it seems), when our leaves have invaded his expansive personal air space, and when all weeds need whacking. We look forward to the day when, like one of those hurdy-gurdy one-man-bands, Mr. Vonk will don all his mechanized equipment and mow and blow and whack simultaneously. If this occurs, we promise to provide some proof, like one of those herky jerky films of Sasquatch (apparently only the palsied camera-challenged are eligible for an audience with Pope Gigantopithecus) .

We know that autumn is upon us by the sound of acorns falling on the plastic (call it “composite material” all you want, but it’s still plastic) carport that our neighbors attached to their house like a piece of mismatched Lego. To gank a phrase from an old commercial, we wish they would “leggo that Lego.” Such a structure is unbecoming of Snob Hill.

As autumn approaches, we lie in bed, especially in the morning, and listen as the accords begin to drop – propelled at first slowly, prompted by slight winds, and then building into a crescendo as the temperatures cool and they are stripped by gusts from the North. It is as if the Mother Oak finally decides the time has come for her acorn children to go out a play…permanently. And try to not to get under foot!

All of this is leads us to our current feelings of good riddance toward our gardens, especially the vegetable garden. Sadly, our mantra, as we stand before them, surrounded by the plunk of freedom-seeking, plummeting acorns, the steroidal whine of Mr. Vonk’s leaf disturber, and the obnoxious natterings of the amateur announcer from the nearby stadium that describes the silly scurryings of third-tier college athletes, is simply, “Just die already.”

We have been known to be autumnally melancholic, morose even, as we contemplate the gathering gloom, the abbreviation of daylight (and increasing Vitamin D deficiency) and the inexorable slide into winter. We are reputed to be Fall People, fixated on the strip search and confiscation of the other three seasons of flora. This year, all of that flailing has been replaced with an overwhelming  “Oh, Get on with it!”

In the spring, we began with such high hopes. We moved what seemed like a ton of pavers from the back yard  to the front of the yard as we lined our new vegetable garden. We hired Rototiller Man (an archaeological descendant to Piltdown Man?) to break the earth and outdo Mr. Vonk’s landscaping motor madness, at least for an hour and a half. Then we furtively pored through seed catalogs like plant porn addicts, amended soil, fertilized, cold composted, and visited nurseries and Home Depot’s garden center.

We were inspired by a passage from Gary Paulsen’s Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass, describing some uncles during planting season:

Pick up the dirt and smile and say:

“Drop a seed in this drop a goddam seed in this, and you won’t make the edge of field before it’s up to your knee tripping you.”

Pick up the soil and taste it, taste a piece of it and smell it and throw it down and smile and say, “Clabbered dirt, sweet grass,” even though dirt doesn’t clabber and sour, but sill, still there is a thing to taste there that tells things.

Oh, such was our springtime Pollyanna hopes for the garden. Now, these several months later, we have devolved. We began like Big Edie in Grey Gardens when she said, “I love the smell [of Grey Gardens]. I thrive on it. It makes me feel good.”

Now we are like Little Edie when she said, “I can't stand being in this house. In the first place, it makes me terribly nervous. I'm scared to death of doors, locks, people roaming around in the background, under the trees, in the bushes, I'm absolutely terrified.” (Is it no wonder that The Grey Gardens: The Musical CD had sold approximately 30,000 copies as of November 2007?)

So we are terrified of our gardens. We could list the many reasons why we have allowed them to fall into their current state of disrepair, but, really, are minor foot surgery and two months in a “cam boot,” poorly staked tomato plants, two gusty, bamboo-trellis-destroying rain storms, preparations to send our youngest child off to college, general professional obligations, aggressive avoidance of OODW, Lady Macbeth Syndrome (Out Out Damnned Weed), and the threat of West Nile really enough to offset and properly explain our failures as stewards of the soil? We think not.

Our gardens are FUBAR. If you don’t know this military acronym for utter failure please Google it. Propriety prevents us from such potty mouthings at present. Best now to metaphorically plow them under. Learn from our mistakes – apply a dab of disambiguation.  And spend the winter listening to the wailing soundtrack of Mr. Vonk’s snow blower. And preparing to do it all again next spring.

Such is the nature of gardening.

The Family Sedums

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We received the call a few weeks ago.

Well, not that call, but an important call nonetheless. We are referring of course to the call from Mother, who wanted to know if we would like the family sedums.

Some receive the family jewels, others, apparently, the family sedums. They were currently in pots on her deck and, despite her best efforts, something insisted on eating them, “to the quick,” as Mother put it. Every morning she would look outside to find another sedum reduced to a sad stub. She had moved the pots all year, from driveway to walkway to deck, trying to make them inaccessible, in successive order, to the deer, the squirrels, the chipmunks, groundhogs, beavers, slugs, and gypsies, tramps, and orchid thieves.

To no avail.

The solution, Mother had concluded, was total exile, to secret them from her house in another county to ours … if we wanted them. We did, but this begs the question, “What if we said no?” The answer is, of course, “Not an option,” which sounds like the catchphrase from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that is our life. We are the inheritors of the family jewels and the family sedums.

Her offer came with some precedent. We already have the reputation as the repository of the family flora. Already rooted are the Hen and Chicks we were given in childhood by a great-grandmother who gave us “starters” from hers that she grew in strawberry pots, and Old Bastard, the maple tree flourishing in the backyard that is the progeny of the magnificent specimen a grandfather (the eponymous Old Bastard) had in his front yard before the Missouri Highway Department cut it down to widen the road.

There are no plant import regulations between St. Louis and St. Charles Counties. The sedums arrived in pots so large and heavy Father had brought along a ramp to slide them into the child-sized red Flexible Flyer wagon, the only wheeled conveyance we had since the red wheelbarrow’s tire went flat and we felt too cheap to spend $32 for a new one.  Who knew so much would have depended upon it?

Any of our looky-loo Snob Hill neighbors were rewarded with the sight of two 75-year-olds and two 53-year-olds (one limping along in a cam boot) guiding the sedums down the uneven stone walkway the way those people in the Macy’s Day Parade handle the giant Snoopy balloon on a windy Thanksgiving day. After safely seated on the front patio, our neighbors no doubt continued to be entertained as we stood, gesticulating over the pots, which Mother was quick inform that she wanted back.

There were three varieties of sedums, each with its own history and all of which are botanically unexceptional. They are just garden variety sedums. Mother pointed. Father pointed. We stood with hands on hips, trying to follow their disagreement about which sedum came from which side of the family. We can only be certain now of this: there is one from each side of the family and one that was purchased years ago by our parents. With a knowing glance, we acknowledged to each other that in a few seasons, after the sedums became established and spread in their new home, the confusion would only grow.

What our neighbors could not hear next was the story Mother told of the sedums from her own mother’s garden. This grandmother was a wonderful and giving woman with a tragic taste in men. She married twice after divorcing mother’s father (the only good one of the bunch). The third was a carpenter named Raymond (forever ruining that trade and name). Our grandmother was no gardener, but she liked to have a few flowers to brighten the yard that overlooked an interchange on Highway 55. She could never get anything to grow because Raymond delighted in running over with his riding lawnmower whatever she had planted. Tulips, marigolds, and Black-eyed Susans – all succumbed as he rode over them, laughing.

The only plants he could not kill were the sedums that she protected in beds, built of unattractive concrete blocks that lay along the basement foundation. During the last year before she died, Mother dug up some of the sedums and took them home. She nurtured them for more than 20 years and when she moved to two new houses.

Now this sedum legacy continues on Snob Hill. Family folklore blends with family plantlore – proof that love has the capacity to outlive cruelty for as long as we care to tend it and pass it on.

And Mother has her pots back.

--CB Adams

The Difference Between Snow and Leaves

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We are digging out from yesterday's 14-inch spring snow storm. The weather people were right for a change; it arrived on time and in the predicted amounts. After a few years of paltry snowfall, this one is spectacular, even if a little late. We were inspired at first to offer our paean to snow. But from our perch in the kitchen, watching shovels, snow blowers, and helpful grandchildren materialize, something else seemed worth mentioning.​

Most of us on Snob Hill emerged about the same time this morning, intent on clearing paths for our selves and the mailman. The municipality will not plow our street because we live on a what the others call a private drive. We do not, as a neighborhood, think of ourselves as private drive people. That's a slippery slope. Next we may become a gated community. So we pay a man and his truck and his plow to clear the street.

What struck us this morning is how we all helped one another. Mr. W from two houses down, brought out a snowblower that looked like he needed a license to operate it. He cleared his next door neighbor's circle drive, and the driveway of the two younger families across the street. One of us helped an elderly woman from across the street, and she reciprocated with some kitty litter to help us extricate the Jeep from a snow bank.​ We all made sure to place snow piles in convenient places.

Snow, in other words, is a unifying event. The writer Jean Stafford got snow right when she instructed the this to be engraved in her headstone, “The snow was a benison, it forgave them all.”

Not so with leaves.

Snob Hill is filled with mature trees whose leaves fall throughout the hill at the whim of each prevailing wind. The leaves are like one of nature's united nations, all mixed together. Yet, it is hard not to be resentful raking large sycamore leaves when one does not "own" a sycamore. We should only be responsible for the leaves that are indigenous to our own property. The operators of leaf blowers have been known to "return" leaves to their rightful owners when the rightful owners aren't home. Others have the philosophy that if they ignore the piles of leaves long enough, eventually they will blow next door or across the street.

Snob Hill leaves, in other words, are not unifying.​ They bring out our lesser angels.