Sometimes you just need a little sugar

MY HUSBAND CALLS me over to the edge of his vegetable garden by windmilling his right arm, a gesture of extreme excitement. His second crop of the season is poking its curly green leaves through the grass and creeping charlie, following on the heels of his first crop—onions in his vegetable garden, unpicked last fall and ready now to eat as scallions, once the soft outsides are peeled away.

The onions are accidental, gifts that result because they never showed up last year, or shed their leaves and went unnoticed before the first snow fell.

This second crop is intentional—planted years ago when a neighbor’s plot outgrew her appetite: rhubarb. Planted by my husband.

Ron is excited, pie thoughts racing through his head, even though the red stalks beneath the curly greens are minuscule at the moment.

But it has not always been this way.

Ron spent our sons’ entire childhood decrying their passion, and mine, for rhubarb pie. When I finally tasted my mother-in-law’s version, I realized why. His distaste didn’t result from the pie she’d made that had become a part of family lore because she substituted bacon grease for the lard she’d run out of. That one was a banana cream pie. No, to sweeten her rhubarb pie, she added just a pinch of sugar. If that.

Ron’s stated aversion to rhubarb didn’t dissuade the rest of us, and so, being a dutiful gardener, he spent a little time every year planting rhubarb for us. It would start out okay, but then it would die.

I resorted to making do with rhubarb stalks that I got from fellow teachers, a request they never refused, since asking for rhubarb from somebody with a successful patch is second only to asking for kittens as a way of getting what you’re after and endearing yourself to the donor in the bargain.

A year or two after our kids—my fellow rhubarb-eaters—left home, on a spring day that lives in memory, someone brought a rhubarb pie to school, a recipe so unique and so delicious that she just had to share it with her lunchtime companions. It was a rhubarb custard pie, but the custard was made with orange juice instead of milk and the base was a buttery crumb crust thick with pecans. She was distributing such huge pieces that I took half of mine home, secure in the knowledge that it would remain untouched by my rhubarb-hating husband.

But it didn’t, probably because between the green rhubarb and the creamy custard, it didn’t look like what it was. When I went for it and it was gone, I scolded, “Do you know what you stole?”

From that day on, rhubarb pie was a spring treat he eagerly anticipated, even nagged me to make if I didn’t produce quickly enough.

But though he’d eat any version of rhubarb pie, it didn’t mean that he was ready to consume rhubarb in each and every form.

One April, while walking through a bazaar in Buhara, Uzbekistan, he spotted something that looked vaguely familiar. Curly green leaves stuck out of a shopping bag, but the red stalks were shorter than any I’d ever picked. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

I spotted more of it stacked up on a stand. I had to consult my dictionary, since rhubarb had never come up in my college Russian class. I asked the vendor if it was reven’. “Da,” he answered, and handed me a piece, apologizing for not being able to supply me with the salt that everyone sprinkled on the stalks before eating them raw. He handed a piece to me alone, because Ron was now hanging back. “Take a bite,” Ron urged me. “Don’t insult the guy.” As if insulting the guy wasn’t just what Ron was planning to do.

There’s one more thing about Ron and rhubarb, and I’m not making this up: The spring after he stole my piece of pie, he did what he’d done for years. He bought a rhubarb plant and brought it home and planted it at the edge of his vegetable garden.

It thrived. It made it through that winter and several more winters. As if some chemical in the skin of his hands had been altered by his newfound enthusiasm.

And when we moved to the farm and inherited one large clump of rhubarb from someone who was reducing her patch, he divided the clump into four and planted all of them, “Just in case they don’t make it.” But they all did.