JANET JENNINGS
Root Cellar From the German, rathskeller, underground passage, root, rot, Latin cellarium, meaning storeroom. I get stuck in etymology to avoid the cellar. Your brother and I flew out of Anchorage on a small bush plane, open cockpit. We flew low and saw caribou moving through a tiny forest, as if in a diorama. Lichen, furred trees, moss on the north side. This was twenty years ago, longer. What I remember is, we visited you out in the bush at the fishing lodge where you were working as a guide. But wait. I met you first on the stairway of your parents’ house. I was in college, sneaking out of your brother’s room in the early morning, hoping not to be discovered. You appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Sometimes we make choices and don’t know it. Your brother and I visited you in Chico that summer. In the evening, you cleaned your guns. I was afraid to be in the same room. Guns. Too real. I’d only seen them in the movies. This remembering, long overdue. At the fishing lodge, salmon season had passed. The spawners barely moved as they molted and decomposed in shallow pools. Once so silvery, so vital, pushing upstream. I made distinctions then, between us, the salmon, the caribou, and the great brown bear by the river with her two cubs, pawing salmon out of its pools. You looked at them with something like praise. We kept our distance. Later, helping Louise with dinner, I offered to go down to the root cellar for onions and green peppers. I climbed down the ladder, past the russets packed in a box of sand, past the pint jars of strawberry and blueberry preserves. Not long ago, my daughters surprised me too early one morning. They were not quite four and delighted with the blueberry tart they had made for me, in a terra cotta plant saucer with its dose of Raleigh Review | 17
