Coda KATRINA VANDENBERG
On COld-Weather Vegetables
GNARLED SWEET POTATOES, tips curling like the feet of witches. Hubbard squashes, big enough
to sit on, warty, blue. Mushrooms flaring
their gills. Back in July, the tomatoes and
corn the farmers o=ered were cheery,
Crayola-bright. October is scary: it holds
out every child’s most despised vegetable
in its wrinkled claw.
Cold-weather vegetables are demanding. They require a little muscle behind the
knife, and their hard shells can’t be sliced
as much as hacked at. Inside, their flesh is
richly colored and dense. They’re messy:
eviscerate is the word that best describes
how we scrape stringy flesh and seeds from
a pumpkin to ready it for carving. We wrestle with them. They refuse the ease of the
salad bowl and insist on a long roasting.
They are either bitter (Brussels sprouts,
kale) or, in the case of the roots, sweeter
than the uninitiated might expect. They’re
acquired tastes, ones I didn’t love until
I was in my thirties, my husband an even
more reluctant convert than I. But this
time of year and at this time in our lives,
our meals together are changing. When
the air begins to bite with cold and the
smell of decaying leaves, the colors and
tastes of what we eat begin to deepen.
I watch my husband from the kitchen
window as he pulls dead morning glory
vines from the trellises. I love him di=er-
ently than I did the day I married him. In
the fifteen years we have been together, I
have helped bury his father, he has cleaned
up my vomit, we have both been bored by
stories we’ve heard dozens of times. We
have lost two pregnancies. Two falls ago, in
one five-week stretch, we were each separately taken to the emergency room in an
ambulance and had to start thinking about
what it would mean to lose the person who
has witnessed so much of our lives. Eventually, surely, one of us will be left behind.
Andre Dubus describes the meals be-
tween married couples as not mere eating
but a “pausing in the march to perform an
act together,” a sacrament that says, “I
know you will die; I am sharing food with
you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.”
My husband and I have eaten together
maybe ten thousand times, in three
states, in various rentals and then our
house, at the same oak trestle table. Watch-
ing us, you could chronicle changes—
I quit vegetarianism, he learned to cook, we
started to say grace — but the act remains.
