Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times Read Online Free PDF Page B

in case of emergency. I saved enough to live on for a year, as long as Nathan and I don’t get any fancy ideas aboutgoing to high tea at the St. Regis. The problem is what comes after a year.
    When the Great Depression started, did Nana think it would be over soon, as politicians were no doubt trying to reassure the frightened public? My 401(k) and my savings account were meant to bolster my income when I got older—I stopped saying “when I retire” a while ago, when Nathan and I realized that retirement is probably out of the question for our generation, even though we live modestly. Now it’s out of the question for my parents as well; they can’t see a day when they’ll be able to afford to stop working.
    No one knows how long this “economic situation,” as the financial experts call it, will last, or what life will be like when the dust settles. This explains why I’ve been doing things like making Recession tea—letting a teabag steep for half the time it should so I can use it again for a second cup later, which I have with the other half of a home-baked muffin. It ain’t high tea at the St. Regis, but it’ll have to do for now.
    • • •
    “Are we heading for another
Depression
?” a morning news anchor intones dramatically over scenes offrantic customers banging on a failed bank’s doors. Some of them brought suitcases so they could withdraw all their money. Nathan, who’s watching the little TV in the kitchen while sitting at the counter, stops eating his bagel in mid-bite. We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetime; it looks like the part in
It’s a Wonderful Life
where the townspeople mob the Bailey Building and Loan—except it’s real.
    I don’t recognize the name of the bank that failed today—it’s not one of the big ones getting bailed out by the government—and to me it doesn’t look like much of a bank. These days, my idea of a safe place to keep money is a Chock full o’Nuts coffee can.
    Coffee cans were a fixture in both my grandparents’ home in the Bronx and in my mother’s apartment in Manhattan, but for different reasons. In the fall, Grandpa started saving up bacon fat, pouring it from the skillet into an empty coffee can and storing it in the fridge to harden and keep. It got bitingly cold by the shore, and sometimes the water froze over. During the greyest days of winter, Grandpa would take the fat-filled can and a bag of bread ends and go to the water’s edge. The seagulls knew him, and when they saw him coming they’d swoop overhead, waiting. Grandpa usedthe stale bread to scoop up the bacon fat from the coffee can, and he tossed the pieces up, laughing as the seagulls caught them in midair and gulped them down. “The fat will keep them from freezing to death,” he explained.
    Back in the city, my mother used a coffee can for another kind of sustenance: “We’re saving up for a vacation,” she announced one day. “Every bit of spare money we have is going into this can.”
    It occurs to me now that we didn’t exactly have much in the way of spare money in those days. My parents divorced when I was two, and most of our bills couldn’t get paid on my single mother’s salary until the words FINAL NOTICE appeared at the top. We lived in a small one-bedroom apartment where the living room doubled as Mom’s bedroom and our dining room, depending on whether the convertible couch was opened or one side of the drop-leaf table was up. When I told her our television was broken, Mom said we couldn’t afford to fix it. “What am I supposed to do until you get home?” I whined. “Go to the library,” she said in a voice filled with warning, “and get a book.” (My reading level shot up from fifth-grade to highschool level that year.) Since economizing was our regular way of life, what Mom meant was that we were going to cut back even more than we usually did.
    • • •
    SEPTEMBER 1971
    NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
    “I won’t eat it.”
    “It’s