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karla k. morton: Chow Chow
Relishes originated from the need to preserve vegetables for winter. This notion is consistent with the word “relish,” which first appeared in English in 1798 and comes from the word “reles” meaning “something remaining” in Old French.
~
It could be a religion, this relish—
what’s left over,
fall’s last stand
before the death-breath of frost.
Three days spent in the kitchen,
chopping, salting, cooking,
ladling into hot Mason jars,
one half-inch of space left at the top,
easing the glass into boiling water.
Gummed seals preserving
a season’s bounty,
mother and daughter hand to sticky hand
before the dark months.
We believe we know
what becomes of us in winter,
but think chow-chow,
deep-shelved in the back of the pantry
to pull out one bitter day
when sun cannot hoist his head,
barely opening his mouth
spoon by spoon
to the summer of ’16.
Think vitae and mellow mornings,
the ripe heat of sunset.
Think heads of cabbage,
hearts of green tomatoes,
crisp hollows of bell peppers,
enough onion to make you cry.
~
Copyright 2023 karla k. morton from Turbulence & Fluids (Madville, 2023)
karla k. morton is a professional speaker, award-winning author, photographer, the 2010 Texas Poet Laureate, and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
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A delightful poem to read as our own garden wanes under the late summer sun in Colorado.
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My introduction to karla in person was over poetry she wrote for the Texas Poets Laureate cookbook we did at Texas Review Press. Asking these poets to focus on food turned out to be a really fun, rich experience. And karla brings so much feeling to her readings. You think the poem reads well, but it’s even better when karla reads it to you!
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What a great idea for cookbook!
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Um-hmmm.
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This is a delicious poem!
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Yes, a tasty poem that brings back memories for me.
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I love how a poem can spark an image at a tangent. I’m back in the rental with fruit trees grandma had one year and the plums she had to “put up” with more bother than help from my little hands.
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But your little hands ended up feeding readers the plums of your wisdom. Right? thanks so.
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And they weren’t cold from the ice box.
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Pot luck Church suppers at Holy Cross Lutheran in Houston. My Dad, who grew up on a sharecropper farm in rural Georgia, taught my Wisconsin urban mom how to make and can fig preserves. A survival food in his youth, that turned into a ritual of love in their later years. I like that the tears at the end of the poem are from an onion. The religion mentioned at the beginning ends with an onion, but no, the religion goes on until the rebirth of spring. There should be way more poems like this. thank you, karla morton
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We have had the most wonderful figs this year, Jim, and they have had my grandmother on my mind. Yes, we put some preserves up.
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Most people know more about a fig leaf than a fig. And they are tough to come by in Minnesota. Err, figs or fig leaves. morton’s poem takes many of us far afield from chow chow. We each seem to remember our own “relish” after reading her narrative. A sweet recall by many, not just of the preserving, but of their folks who did the work. Thanks for replying.
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Thanks for bringing back the memory of my Grammy and Aunt Catherine chopping and mixing the end of summer into a porcelain tub large enough for an infant’s bath. Their chow-chow, rich with vinegar and sugar, filled the kitchen with its perfume. Karla’s poem captures that experience with heart.
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Thanks, Luray!
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A very sweet poem—I love that connection to season and tradition, laid out in the certain everlastingness of chow-chow and human lives still tempered by those things, as if we do still live somewhere. So much of the past century has seen us accomplish the doing away of such in our suburban if not urban lives, conditioning and in a sense, loosing that thread. Those jars in the pantry contain far more than their simple ingredients.
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Thanks, Sean. I grew up in East Texas and the poem brought back the church dinners and picnics we had.
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Yes, the certain everlastingness at the heart of the poem and the processes described– Your chow chow words offer much here, too. thanks
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