I really should tell you about the time I lived under the kitchen table, since it is an "autumn" memory. I don't remember if it took place in autumn, but it is part and parcel of sweet potatoes, and sweet potatoes are autumnal to me. Here is what happened.
I had just rented a garage apartment only three or four blocks west of The University of Texas. I was about 24 years old. The garage apartment would not be ready for another few days, but the girl who had rented the big house that went with the garage said I could stay there until I could move in. Ahhhh, well. It turned out that "staying there" meant sleeping under her kitchen table, for her house was over-crowded with young people who were already staying there. It was the heyday of the 60s, you see.
She had dragged a mattress or a pallet of some sort under her large old wood table, the kind of table I call a "farm table," although I'm not sure if that is a type of table. And, yes, it was in her kitchen. It came with a longish tablecloth, too, and was very much like sleeping in a canopied bed, come to think of it.
I must re-create the scene with fabric someday, but for now all I have are photos of sweet potatoes.
The sweet potatoes are here because the first morning that I woke up in my little hideaway under the kitchen table, I found myself surrounded by four bare feet and two voices whispering, whispering, and the oh-so-quiet muffled rattle of a wooden spoon here, a mixing bowl there, paper bags being opened, knives slicing through things, the refrigerator light flashing on and off.
Two people were cooking up a little storm in the kitchen.
Later I would find out that they were making a sweet potato pie. But I was not to know that for a couple of hours. Meanwhile, I could only get a glimpse here and there of one or the other from under my kitchen tablecloth canopy.
He was Jack Sprat, and she was Jack Sprat's wife. And I can't help but wonder if they have a memory of a very shy girl with long brown hair who must have eventually emerged from under the tablecloth and said hello.
All I was ever to know about them was that they had come from Appalachia and were on their way to California, a kind of 1960s "California or Bust" sort of story. They were the very jolliest couple, as down-home as you can get, and with a backwoods language that needed a translator to be understood.
At the time I thought they were older than the rest of us, but looking back, I think now that they were probably only in their twenties, too.
I have never made a sweet potato pie myself. I can tell you that theirs was delicious, and that it was not made from a recipe, but was thrown together from some ancestral memory that these two souls were invoking in this particular kitchen on this particular day, so long ago now.
My husband is the one who cooks these days, and really, neither one of us cooks very much, but on the weekends he likes to whip up a country breakfast, and sometimes this means he fries some sweet potato slices in an iron skillet. He dips the slices in milk, and then flour, and then fries them in a quarter-inch of canola oil. Salt and pepper to taste.
And they fill our kitchen like incense.
Sweet potatoes do have the loveliest aroma. They fill a house with memories of good old comfort food, of home, of the gatherings of people under one roof for shelter, nourishment, and companionship. I find that gingerbread will do the same thing.
As we approach Thanksgiving Day in the United States, I hope I can hold on to my memory of living under a kitchen table and eating sweet potato pie with the most amazing assortment of people. I will never be that footloose and fancy free again, but I wish might.
