A time to put it down

and a time to make egg salad

Big sister

It’s strange to think about summer afternoons spent inside the cottage on a wintry day like today. But that’s what’s on my mind. It’s July, I’m 12 years old and my legs are flopped over the arm of the chair. The old velvet, the brown black colour of sealskin, is rough under my bare legs. But it keeps me awake. I am reading David Copperfield and have to get to the end of the chapter. That is the deal made with my Dad - read a classic novel, and I’ll take you down the road to the go-kart track. 

The track is a paved oval sitting in a hay field behind a little yellow house a few kilometers down the road from our cottage. The owners live in the house. I walk up to the steps to the front door and press my face against the screen. I often see a family member sitting at the kitchen table eating their lunch. They get up and come outside, pull the karts from the corral, find us helmets, rev up the engines, then send us off, one at a time. 

It’s so funny to see my little sister with such agency, flying around the track, her tiny legs bent on either side of the steering wheel. I roar up behind her, my hair billowing back over my helmet, and try to pass her. We whiz around and around, crash, then start again. We are just getting the hang of it when the kid from the yellow house flags us over to the pit stop. I lurch in, unsteady with the breaks, and bump into my older sister’s kart. 

Twenty-five cents a lap goes by so fast. 

This is why I am plowing through David Copperfield’s sad early life. His mother has married the cruel and controlling Mr. Murdstone who beats David, and of course David bites him, who wouldn’t? So David gets sent to boarding school. Things look up when he makes a friend named Tommy, but then he learns that his mother has died giving birth to his infant brother, who also dies. David is now a penniless orphan. Things aren’t looking good. 

I never should have let my Dad choose the book. I want to be reading Are You There God It’s Me Margaret. I want to contemplate life, friendship and puberty in easy bite-sized morsels. I want a silver lining. I want to drive a go-kart.

It’s January now and I am reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book Demon Copperhead. In an interview Kingsolver said that for years she wanted to write a novel about the opioid epidemic in Appalachia, the area of the southern United States where Kingsolver is from. But she wrestled with how to do this; no one wants to read about addiction, she thought, or about the orphaned children of the addicts. She pondered this question while sitting at a desk at a hotel in England, and it was Dickens himself, she says, who chimed in with the answer.¹ People do want to read about orphans, Dickens told her, but let the children tell the story. So Kingsolver wrote a novel about Demon Copperhead, a boy born in small town Virginia to a mother passed out from drug and alcohol abuse. The story continues with strong resemblances to David Copperfield - Demon’s real name is David, he has an abusive step father named Stoner, a friend named Tommy, he becomes an orphan, he is hungry, he finds family. The same but with a twist, made bearable because Demon is so likeable. We want him to win, but things aren’t looking good. And this is why I have put the book down for now. It’s so important, it’s so good, it’s so brutal. And I’m only halfway way through with Demon. I have a way to go.

So I make egg salad. This sounds trite, but it’s what I have and need right now. 

I bring a pot of water to a boil and lower two room temperature eggs down into the bubbles. I set the timer for 8 minutes - not too hard, but not jammy. When the timer chimes I peel the eggs and mash them with a little feta, a little mayonnaise, a pinch of toasted and crushed caraway seed and chopped parsley. I spoon it, still warm, over a piece of toast and add some greens for colour. It’s less mixture that I’d hoped for; I had to share it. 

I’ll start reading again tomorrow. 

1. Barbara Kingsolver on Demon Copperhead - via Youtube