CABIN RITUAL

SEPTEMBER 5, 2021 – Whenever I hike to the old family cabin, I think about our grandparents, Ragnar and Hilda Nilsson. “Ga,” as we called our grandmother, and Grandpa followed long-established cabin rituals, which fascinated us impressionable kids.

Ga came from Småland, a southern province of Sweden. She’d grown up on a farm and attended a country school through eighth grade and journeyed to America soon after turning 18.

Via connections with local Swedish immigrants, Ga worked as a cook for the Dayton’s—a “fancy family” in Minneapolis. From this work she learned refinements expected of the “hired help.”

Having an innate sensibility for quality, Ga adapted easily to this cultivation and exuded elegance in everything she did.  Even when engaged with mundane tasks—peeling vegetables, stirring a simmering pot, or loading wood into the stove-top—she exhibited gracefulness.  I was mesmerized by how she turned everything into an art form.

It followed naturally that cabin meals were an sumptuous production.

Breakfast preparations began while we kids were still cozily asleep. Ga was in the kitchen loading wood into the stove and Grandpa was outside, gathering more wood off the pile. By the time any of us appeared on the scene, Grandpa was seated at the kitchen table, eating his four prunes and Ga was stirring the oatmeal on the stove. Invariably, she greeted us with the lilt of her Swedish accent, and Grandpa teased us about “sleeping in” way past his alarm clock.

As Ga dished up our oatmeal, Grandpa had already consumed his four prunes and discarded the prune pits but not the residual juice that occupied his bowl.

“You’re gonna eat your oatmeal with prune juice?” I’d ask.

“Why not? It doesn’t hurt any,” was Grandpa’s reply, as he drizzled a tablespoon of honey over his oatmeal.

Everyone else except Ga stirred milk, sugar, and oatmeal until they became one. Ga, on the other, didn’t stir. She just administered sugar, then poured the milk; no stirring. With wonder I gazed at her bowl. The heap of oatmeal looked like a mountain range surrounded by snow. I considered this to be unfinished business, at odds with Ga’s perfectionism.

After the oatmeal came soft-boiled eggs, timed so that the white wasn’t runny but the yolk was richly liquid. Toast came from an old-fashioned toaster with flip-down sides. To avoid burning required Ga’s undivided attention—while she was also monitoring the egg timer and the bacon, baking in the oven, and serving the cinnamon rolls she’d made from scratch the day before. Once the perfect toast was on your plate, she’d cut it into four strips, which you then dipped into the yolk of the soft-boiled egg. There were few alimentary pleasures in the life of a kid that could match that yolk-soaked strip of toast touching the tastebuds.

One rival pleasure: oven-baked bacon, and . . . my sisters would say, “Ga’s fresh cinnamon rolls.” I didn’t share their enthusiasm, because I didn’t like the raisins in the rolls. In deference to Ga, however, I always ate one roll.

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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson