My in-laws recently came
back to Lebanon from an extended stay at the family cottage in Newfoundland.
How they lasted several months alone on a windswept, rocky outpost thousands of
miles away from the frenetic bustle of Beirut is a mystery to us all. The
cottage is perched above a beautiful cove but there is nobody for them to
talk to. Some of the neighbours are quite friendly, but things never progress past polite interest.
For my in-laws there is a
language barrier on top of the ordinary challenges of making friends while
vacationing in a small, remote village whose inhabitants are nearly all related
to one another and a whole culture removed from you. My mother-in-law doesn’t
speak English and although my father-in-law does, he misses a lot if it’s
spoken too quickly or with an accent. I’ll leave it to you to imagine him
trying to follow a rapid exchange between a couple of rural Newfoundlanders.
It’s a shame because both of my parents-in-law love to laugh and those
cod-swallowing, shanty-singing Newfoundland folk have a fantastic sense of
humour.
It seems that my in-laws
filled the long hours of their trip with food-related activities. I don’t mean
that they ate too much, though that is an unparalleled way to pass time on
vacation, but that they spent a great deal of time talking about, acquiring and
preparing food.
First it was caplin, the
little fish that roll onto Newfoundland shores to spawn in early summer. The
locals go down with nets to scoop them up and my in-laws were right there,
gathering up bagfuls. For some weeks the consumption of fresh and then frozen
caplin was their reason for getting out of bed in the morning. They fried them,
poached them, grilled them and ate them in garlic sauce.
Then it was cod season and
new methods of preparing and cooking were needed to stave off boredom. My
mother-in-law put a portable burner on the front step and made homemade fish
and chips out of doors as salivating seagulls stood watching from the roof, hoping
to find the plate of fish unguarded for a moment (they never did).
When the cod fishing season
was over my in-laws looked to the land for employment. They planted parsley,
mint and purslane and hunted for strawberries in the lanes. Then the wild
blueberries ripened and they threw themselves into the task of collecting every
berry within a ten-mile radius of the house. Like everything in Newfoundland,
the blueberries there are tiny and grow close to the ground. My father-in-law
would do the picking each morning, grabbing up whole clumps of berries along
with their leaves and bits of stem and carrying them home for my mother-in-law
to clean. He must have developed a distinctly gorilla-like hunch during that
period, roaming the endless meadows above the rocky cliffs, head lowered, eyes
scanning the ground. With his arms dangling low to the ground he would have
only had to shape his hands into claws and drag them through the dense scrub
like a human hay rake, filling his plastic shopping bags with the prickly
harvest.
My mother-in-law spent a
couple of hours every third day or so cleaning the blueberries. Sitting in
front of the tv, she would pick them off the stems, throw out the bits of twigs
and rubbish, and then wash the berries. She would spread them out to dry on the
table and when all the water was evaporated she would put some aside for
immediate consumption and the rest in ziplock bags for the freezer. The fresh
berries she pulverized with a wand blender and she and my father-in-law would
sit outside in their twin chairs overlooking the cove, sipping their blueberry
juice and discussing with satisfaction the anti-oxidant benefits they were
getting.
When they weren’t
harvesting the produce of the land my in-laws would take shopping trips into
St. John’s. These journeys were executed in such a way as to deliver the
maximum amount of diversion for the smallest outlay of money. They would spend
the morning looking in clothing stores and hardware stores and wandering the
enchanted aisles of Walmart but what they were really there for were the big
supermarkets. These they would save for last.
The supreme over-sized
supermarket is, of course, Costco, and through its hungry doors they would
eagerly step, my mother-in-law with a steely glint in her eye and my
father-in-law with a steely grip on his wallet. They have been fascinated by
Costco since their first trip to Canada years ago. Naturally, they were amazed
by the quality and prices, but it was the size of the packaged products that
excited their imaginations. Here, in the magnitude of granola bar boxes and
wheels of cheese was an explanation for the size of Canadians. They had been
wondering about that ever since they got off the plane but now they wondered no
longer.
Two senior citizens
who grow their own salad vegetables don’t require many groceries, and Costco
doesn’t let you escape with a small quantity of anything. If you want Shreddies
then by God, you’ll get Shreddies. You’ll have to carry the box home strapped
to the roof of your car but my, what a good price per gram! There just aren’t
many products in small-enough portions for my parents-in-law but they always
found a few things, especially among the fruit and vegetables.
And so the weeks passed.
Then it was time to return to Lebanon and my mother-in-law packed empty
Metamucil tubs with blueberries she’d been saving up. She had my father-in-law
seal them with duct tape and double-wrap them in plastic bags and then she put
them – four in all, one for each kid – into her suitcase. At least she didn’t
try to bring back any fish. (The first year I was there our kindly neighbour
Sadie tried rather vigorously to get me to take back to Dubai a block of frozen
cod fillets. Citing the risk of fish juice leaking into the suitcases of four hundred
strangers who would understandably want to kill me, I refused.)
Yesterday my in-laws were
over at our house for coffee and my mother-in-law was fondly recollecting the
superior quality and better price of the Costco lemons compared to those in the
local Dominion while I fought to remain alert. It’s hard for me to muster
interest in grocery shopping at the best of times but there is something
particularly numbing about vegetable prices. The information just
seems to float out of my head. You could say to me, “Remember this: tomatoes at
Hairy Bill’s Veggie-Mart are 80 cents a pound”, and then five minutes later ask
me how much the tomatoes are at Hairy Bill’s, and I wouldn’t have a clue.
It’s not that I judge my
in-laws for their interest in vegetable prices. It’s a sort of hobby, and a no
less useful one than knitting or making twig furniture and -- if you come down
to it -- a lot more useful than painting pictures of yellow warblers or
writing mildly amusing blogs. It just seems a pity, as I said before, that that
is all they could extract from their weeks in Newfoundland.
Part-way through my
in-laws’ visit I had to leave the room to fix supper for Dude and when I came
out again they had gone. Clearing away the coffee cups, I saw a small package
lying on the table. “What’s this?” I asked M.
“Oh, the neighbours in
Newfoundland gave that to Dad,” he said.
I picked it up. It said
“Official Newfie Mosquito Trap” on it. Inside the clear covering was a
miniature leghold trap, and a diagram of how to “trap” a mosquito with it.
“Ha,” I said, “that’s pretty funny. Did your mom and dad get a kick out of it?”
“Not exactly,” he said.
“They didn’t realize it was a joke. Dad was asking me how to use it.”