Before it got hot this week, I brought in the rest of the rhubarb growing in our yard.  It’s not as big as the patch of it as that grew in our yard in Pe Ell, and what came in wasn’t enough to make an actual pie, so I made rhubarb sauce instead.  How did I do that?  The way Evie always did it—cut up the rhubarb, placed it in a sauce pan with a covering of water, and simmered it over a low heat for a while—fifteen minutes or so. I then added sugar to taste.  That’s it.

The tart flavor of rhubarb is bright on the tongue, and it speaks to me of spring.  But having rhubarb sauce always reminds me of my mother, Evie, and of someone else as well—my maternal grandfather, AG (Andrew Gottfried) Anderson.  He loved rhubarb sauce.

In the spring of 1970 while still working on the reservation, I got sick.  I’d go to school one day and then have to stay home the next.  Finally I went to see a doctor who diagnosed me with a case of walking pneumonia. That caused the cooking responsibilities to fall to my then husband, and he wasn’t much of a chef. His idea of dinner was to throw two venison steaks in the toaster oven and then cook them until they were tough and leathery. 

It wasn’t exactly a diet suitable for someone trying to get back on her feet, so I went home to my mother and, more specifically, to my mother’s cooking.  It was an unplanned trip. I arrived, it turned out they already had company—Grandpa Anderson and my mother’s two older sisters, Edith and Alice, were all visiting from South Dakota. Fortunately there was enough room at the inn for me to stay over.

After dinner a night or so later, Evie brought out dishes of freshly made rhubarb sauce.  That’s when things went south.  Edith and Alice went to war with my mother, claiming that rhubarb sauce would be too hard on Grandpa’s stomach.  He ate it anyway—with gusto.

When Grandpa Anderson came to Bisbee, he customarily went out walking every morning, covering several miles in the process and soaking up the sun and the clear blue skies.  The next morning, when he was heading out for his walk, it seemed to me that a walk might be good for me, too, so I tagged along.

We walked out of the yard and turned right on Border Road.  We hadn’t covered a whole city block, when he stopped short and said to me in his thick Swedish accent:  “You know, Yudit, sometimes it yust ain’t wor’t it!”  Then he turned on his heel and went back to the house.  

I think the embarrassment of having his three daughters duking it out over whether or not he should have a dish of rhubarb sauce was more humiliation than he could handle.  Soon after he and my aunts returned to South Dakota, Grandpa Anderson was diagnosed with stomach cancer and passed away within a matter of months.  But I believe the day we went on that very short walk was the day he gave up and decided he was done.

And so this week, as we’ve been having our rhubarb Sundays—cereal bowls containing sliced up Twinkies on the bottom, a scoop of vanilla ice cream in the middle, and a spoonful of rhubarb sauce on top—I’ve been thinking about Grandpa Anderson.

I pretty sure he would have loved them.