Free Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times by Suzan Colón Page B

garbage. “Something wrong with it?”
    “No,” he says with a shrug. “I’d just had enough.”
    I realize I’ve crossed over into a bad state of mind when I have to keep myself from turning into his mother and asking him if he’s nuts, throwing away perfectly good food like that. With one of us out of a job, the insane cost of health insurance, and my retirement plan and his stocks both practically worthless, who on earth would throw away half a banana? Even though I knew I was overreacting, I could swear I heard Grandpa tsk-ing in solidarity with me, all the way from the sweet hereafter.
    Salvaging food is something that my grandfather, Nathan’s mother, and anyone who went through the Depression did. In fact, I don’t remember anyone inmy family throwing away food, either because we ate everything before it spoiled or because there was never so much that it had a chance to go bad in the first place. Occasionally we’d nearly lose something, but Grandpa would refuse to let the patient die. “You just cut the moldy part off the cheese,” he’d say, wielding his scalpel. “See? It’s fine.”
    “It was
green
,” I’d say, all wrinkle-nosed eight-year-old. “I don’t want it.” As far as I was concerned, eating a piece of cheese that was clearly on its last gasp was one of Grandpa’s weird food habits, right up there with chomping on raw potatoes. Whenever he made mashed potatoes (which, since he was Irish, was often), he would take a big bite out of an uncooked spud like it was an apple. “That’s what the French call it—
la pomme de terre
,” he’d say. “ ‘The apple of the earth.’ That’s the way I ate potatoes when I was in France.”
    “He did that to keep from starving to death during World War I,” Mom explains. “And did you know that he, not Nana, was the real cook of the family? She learned to cook when we moved to Saratoga, but he’d been doing most of the cooking before that.”
    “Wait—how did Grandpa learn to cook?”
    “His stepmother,” Mom says. “She told him, ‘Men should know how to do everything well,’ and she taught your grandfather and his brother, George, about the thread count in bed sheets, how to mend clothing, how to select the best cuts of meat, and how to cook. It was good advice, because your grandpa was a bachelor for a while—after he was married …”
    • • •
    APRIL 1915
    THE BRONX, NEW YORK
    Fifteen-year-old Charlie Kallaher thought his father, Edmund, would be proud to hear that he’d left the military academy to fight in World War I, enlisting with his older brother, George. But Edmund merely sighed with disapproval. “Well, Charles, you’ve done things your own way.”
    Charlie was sent to France, where he was shot at and gassed, and on one terrible day he had to amputate a buddy’s leg right on the field. Sharp beyond his years and determined to stay alive, he defied a commanding officer who, whether knowingly or not, was ordering his men out of a foxhole and directly into the line ofenemy fire. “Over the top, Johnny! Over the top!” he shouted as the men leaped out and were killed, one by one. “Over the top, Johnny!”
    “After you,” Private Kallaher responded.
    “
What
did you say, soldier?” the officer demanded.
    “I said ‘After you,’
sir
.”
    The argument ended when a shell landed nearby. The commanding officer was killed, and the soldiers scattered away from the hail of artillery fire and flying shrapnel. Charlie and his buddies hid from enemy troops in a barn, and in the morning he woke up with rats nestling against his body to stay warm. For food, the men ate potatoes straight out of the dirt.
    “You’d think he would have hated eating them raw again, considering the memories that must have brought back,” I say to Mom.
    She shrugs. “The taste reminded him of how they kept him from going hungry,” she says. “That’s a good memory.”
    Charlie came home alive but no longer a kid, having seen too