Digging Rutabagas

Digging Rutabagas Digging rutabagas in autumn, earthy, tart, a cold crop—they tasted good with horseradish spread, my uncle told me. I feared I wouldn't like sandwiches made of rutabagas, but I didn't say that. Instead, I asked him why he put forked sticks between the apple branches. Paperhanger during the days, my uncle knew the town's houses intimately by their wall colors and patterns. He moved among the owners' narrow lives with a lover's tenderness. He gave me his paper scraps, flocks, stripes, chintzes, for a dollhouse I'd made from a cardboard box. Sometimes I pretended the box was my own house, and in that house of scraps my mother and father laughed and touched. When I was thirteen I wanted to know things I couldn't find in books (not even my biology text) so I watched him often— he wasn't married like all the other grownups. 233 When I peered from my stair window late at night, I saw his lamp burning. Up reading Playboy, the neighbors gossiped— or is that what I remember they said? It's been so long. Years afterward, writing a sonnet to someone I had lost, I made myself a rutabaga sandwich. It left a bitter taste that wouldn't go away. Susan Elizabeth Gunter Westminster College ofSalt Lake City 234 ...