City Girl in the Country

Angola, Indiana
Three Weeks at Crooked Lake
While the Bus is Being Renovated

I’m a city gal myself. Believe me, if Tarrytown, where I have spent the majority of my life, were anywhere else in this country outside of New York or California, it’d be a city.

But this is Indiana, as middle America as it gets, and that means farm country. Northern Michigan, where I recently spent three weeks, is cherry country. George Washington would have had a ball with his little hatchet. Here in Angola, the crop they boast the most is corn. It’s everywhere. Even in little neighborhoods, every one of which has at least one mobile home among its ranks, people plant corn.

In Michigan you can’t go 6 blocks without a cherry stand: Clean! Sweet! Fresh Cherries! In Angola you don’t make two blocks without seeing those homemade signs, each inevitably claiming Sweet Corn! $3 per dz! Best Corn for Miles! And sporting varietal names like Obsession.

To me that’s a perfume. To the Hoosiers, that’s prime corn.

And by the way, here’s an instance of Mother Nature’s brilliance. Corn grows in the middle of the stalk, sort of hanging out there for you to see it and pick it. Good thing, because if it were at the top, the stalk would break from its weight and you wouldn’t have “Sweet Corn!” You’d have “Dead Corn!” So if corn is the seed of the corn flower – not to be confused with cornflower, which is something else entirely – then what are those wispy things at the top of the cornstalk? I’ll have to Google that one.

And here, I’ve twice seen cows in the corn. Is that a bad thing? Should Little Boy Blue come blow his horn?

I stopped at a Sweet Corn sign yesterday and as luck would have it, this was an equal opportunity home gardener. I picked up eight of the most beautiful vine-ripened tomatoes I’ve ever seen or eaten. We used to grow tomatoes in our garden when I was growing up, and remember my mother walking outside with the salt, picking a tomato off the vine, salting it and eating it like a fruit. Yum, she’d say, the luscious juice dripping down her chin. This, in spite of the fact that she was allergic to tomatoes, and by tomorrow would have little bumps all over her forehead. Some treats just cannot be forsworn, even if they have troubling aftereffects. Tomatoes, as you might guess, have both a gastronomic and emotional appeal for me. And these babies really delivered. I made a salad of one red and one yellow, dotted it with slices of avocado, and that was my dinner.

As Mom would say, “Yum.”