JANET JENNINGS Root Cellar

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

minerals, dirt, and mold. Thawed blueberries arranged on top—Lord knows what else. Flour, sugar, colored sprinkles. Four hands purpleprinted on the white cupboards, dragged chair. Purple sweeps in thick trails on the floor, abandoned paper towels. Sugar crystals crunching underfoot, that sticky sucking sound when footsteps are released. A beautiful mess.

I am willing all these detours I have taken. Grateful for delay. Haven’t thought of that cellar for years. You came down to the cellar, too. Moved near me in that cramped bounty. Apples emitting ethylene, ripening nearby tomatoes too soon. You helped me gather the vegetables.

You were so close, and though we didn’t touch—electric, heated air. The air. Your smell—salt, sunlight, forest. Too bad, you said, my brother saw you first.

And if we could have tunneled through to the woods and the caribou, followed the moss, migrated north, lived by rivers that sparkled with salmon, in that simplicity, would that have been more true? That knowing between bodies.

I wanted—that salmon part of me—to leap, cover myself with you, not think. Pine and cottonwood shimmer their leaves in the wind. The rust fur of the caribou. How solid you were. The big Alaskan sky. I still remember that space between, close, not touching, silvery, alive.