Crawfish, rhubarb and moving on

I love rhubarb.  I just finished a week of eating it everywhere in every dish I could during a work trip to Switzerland where spring was a little more advanced than ours. In fact, I love it so much, I own a cookbook called “The Joy of Rhubarb” which I bought long ago in an attempt to replicate an amazing muffin we used to love at the French Meadow Bakery from our days living in Minneapolis.

My memories of rhubarb go way back to pulling a stalk in my dad’s giant rhubarb patch and sucking on the sour bits like an old time equivalent of sour patch kids. But the very best was when my mom would produce the first rhubarb pie of the season after waiting an entire year.  She’d bring it by our front porch to share on a spring evening or even better, phone us up to come over for dinner.

Those days are gone and in fact, a rhubarb pie is the last pie my mom ever capably made. I  distinctly remember because she served one up burnt which was a sure sign to me that her memory loss was taking a stronger hold than we’d realized.

This year in my back yard, I’m now nursing a few shoots I took from dad’s garden.  My sisters did the same and I’m hoping between us, we’ll manage to multiply this patch and keep it going for another generation.

In fact, digging up a bit of this rhubarb was one of the last things we did after two years of working together to sell off our family farm house and the barns and all the things in them. All this means that I’ve spent a lot of the last two years looking backward. It seems really fashionable these days to talk about one needs to “be present”.  But let’s be honest. Sometimes you can’t.  The last two years of cleaning and sorting and constantly resurfacing bits of your childhood while also missing my dad and caring for two aging mothers has meant a lot of looking back. It’s been an unexpectedly tough season that forced me to think a lot about days that won’t ever be again.

Then something happens like this weekend’s crawfish boil hosted by my daughter and her Louisiana-born beau. This was the second annual such event.  I found myself standing around a table full of tasty crawdaddies and sausage and corn and potatoes — surrounded by our kids and their friends and too many dogs for one small backyard. But all of it reminded me that new traditions will fill a void. That on the other side of sadness there’s joy that “comes in the morning” as the Bible promises. Life leaves us with lots of room for memories to be made, and it’s important to make them and live them and relish them. And eat them (in the case of pie).

The best part? This year it wasn’t my mom who made the first rhubarb pie of the season, but my own daughter. She sourced some Chicago rhubarb and turned one out with my mom’s recipe. Time will march on, whether you like it or not. But the sweetest things are sometimes right under your nose. So smell the roses. Crack the crawfish. Taste the pie. Hug your kids and enjoy the fact that on a sunny Saturday afternoon you can sit back and watch all of them laugh and have genuine fun playing games together — something that twenty years ago you never dreamed would be possible.  Even though the games might involve solo cups and a ping pong ball — it’s still all good.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.