It was almost freezing this morning – 35 by the indoor / outdoor thermometer in the kitchen, and the atmosphere was crystal clear as it is on some fall days “in these parts.” When I walked onto the entrance deck, cup of hot tea in hand, the smell of autumn woods drifted toward me, and the golds and reds of falling leaves were a seasonal blessing.
With no warning, I had one of those mental de-frag moments, and a memory from years ago made me laugh.
It happened the fall that I got my first car. I mean, I had picked it up at the dealership only the month before. It was a cute car, as befits a teenaged girl, white with a bright red interior, and I was madly in love with it. Like all teenagers in that blissful position, I wanted to drive everywhere. Weekdays I had been content to fulfill that need by using the new car to meet the routine of home-school-work-home. Saturdays had been for running errands and serious shopping. Then one Sunday afternoon, I knew I had to take my new cutie out for a real spin. No boy friend. No girl friend. No sisters. Just me and my new red-and-white love.
It was a gorgeous fall day. Cool, colorful, and with that briskness in the air that is underlaid with an odd sort of possibility. I mean, I was keen to gosomewhere, and the whole world seemed to open up before me. Out of habit, I headed north, toward countryside where my grandparents had once lived before moving to town. I started out on a major highway, but quickly turned off onto a narrow, two-lane road that I remembered vaguely from trips with my parents. It was beautiful countryside, open with the occasional farm house, and the warm sunlight almost seemed to glaze the red and gold of the trees. Zipping along, window down, radio blaring, feeling totally grown-up and independent, I was in the kind of mood that is so good, you feel you must share it or bust.
Up ahead, I saw a small cluster of cars around an old roadside farm stand topped by a sign: “Apples and Sorghum.” Sorghum! That was one of those things often mentioned nostalgically by my father, who’d grown up on the edge of a small town and spent time with his grandparents on a big farm. I’d never even seen sorghum, so I guessed it must be pretty rare. I wheeled off the road and almost slid to a stop beside the stand. I would take some sorghum home for my father! Out of the car and looking over the farmer’s wares, I quickly discovered two things: (1) the sorghum was being offered for sale only in two-gallon containers; and (2) sorghum isn’t cheap.
The heavy container was carried to the car by the farm stand operator, who carefully lodged it in the floor of the back seat and then rechecked its screw top. “You don’t want this stuff to turn over or you’ll get a mess that’ll make you realize what a mess is.”
It wasn’t a comforting thought and I was careful going over bumps as I definitely did not want a river of sorghum flowing through my red-and-white cutie. Still, I was in a wonderful mood. I had found some genuine, straight-from-the-country sorghum. My father would be thrilled!
I reached home with no sorghum spill. No one was there. Great, I could get the sorghum inside where it could await my father’s return on the breakfast table. I set it up on a place mat in the middle of the table. The metal container looked kind of cold and unwelcoming, hardly suggestive of the wonders that lay within. I went into the yard and broke off a low-hanging branch of bright maple leaves. Inside, semi-wrapped around the base of the container, they did help the look. I still wasn’t satisfied, but decided that it wasn’t the appearance that mattered, but the thing itself.
We’d never had this rare item around the house, and it suddenly hit me that I had no idea of what sorghum looked like. I cautiously opened the screw top. It was dark brown, not a very nice brown I thought. And it smelled funny. Not like honey or the maple syrup or Yellow Label syrup we kept around. It was strong, almost acrid. It struck me as pretty gross, actually, but it wasn’t for me but my father, who would, I knew, be incredibly, amazingly surprised at the appearance of this rarity. He was one of those fathers who was always doing for us. It was fun to be able to do something for him that he would think was a real treat.
I went into my room to study. After a while, I heard the front door open and close. I waited a few minutes and slipped out of my room. My parents were home, and they had found the sorghum!
“That surely is a big container,” my mother was saying. “I guess Linda must have driven into the country and found it at some farm stand.”
“Yeah,” my father responded.
Just then the phone rang. It was my boy friend. We talked for a while; and when I hung up I realized my parents were in the yard, doing something. The sorghum was nowhere in sight. He’d already put it away! He must really be looking forward to it. I decided not to say anything about it, but to wait and see what he’d say after opening it.
A couple of days passed, and nothing was said, nothing. I needed something from under the sink later in the week, and when I opened the cabinet door, there it was, that expensive, gargantuan two-gallon container of sorghum, unopened, sitting pushed to one side in the area where we stored cleaning supplies. About that time my mother came in.
What’s the sorghum doing down here?” I asked.
She had the grace to look momentarily embarrassed. “Well, Fred wanted to throw it out, but I was afraid it’d hurt your feelings, so I put it down there. I thought someone might visit who likes it.”
“But Daddy likes it,” I protested.
“Oh no,” she laughed. “He always says that was one of the greatest things about growing up was that he never again had to eat sorghum!”
After I thought about it, I realized that he’d never said he liked sorghum, just that it was always around.
I never knew what happened to the sorghum. The big metal container sat under the sink for months, then one day, it was no longer there. I guess my mother decided a decent-enough interval had passed to enable her to get rid of it with a clear conscience. Probably, even now, in some distant landfill, that metal container of sorghum turned to sugar is rusting away. So much for good intentions.
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