flashquake Nonfiction

HARVESTS
by Danielle LaVaque-Manty

My husband Mika and I are in Finland pulling slimy potatoes out of his mother's garden. They have some kind of disease this year and come out of the ground all covered in slippery goo. I usually love my mother-in-law's potato dishes, loaded with wild mushrooms she picks herself out in the forest, but I'm not looking forward to eating these.

Yesterday, Mika and I spent hours in the woods collecting a dark, floppy, tube-shaped mushroom called "trompettes du mort." Despite his fifteen years in the urban U.S., where mushrooms are rarely to be hunted, my husband still has an excellent "mushroom eye" and still knows where the best ones hide out, like these little trumpets that spend their time in shady spots on the hill.

In a flatter part of the forest, I saw something right out of Alice in Wonderland — a six-inch tall red mushroom covered with big white polka dots. I had always thought those were strictly story book creations. There are some pretty mundane things on our side of the Atlantic that Mika and his little brother used to think were made-up, too, like hollow trees and chipmunks. He could never figure out why Chip and Dale were such funny looking squirrels when he was a kid — no tails!— or how you were supposed to hide something in a tree.

My father-in-law comes out of the house and takes Mika off to help him light the wood-burning stove in the sauna building. At least we'll get to sweat all this slime away before dinner. I've been wiping my hands off in the grass after every other potato, but I still feel like I've been dunked up to the elbows in a jar of Vaseline.

"Look!" my mother-in-law says, as soon as the men are out of sight. She flips over a two-by-four to show me the huge black snake hidden beneath it. I shriek and jump back. "I killed him," she confides.

"How?" I edge closer.

Her English is good, but sometimes she resorts to charades with me anyway. She picks up her hoe and re-enacts a beheading.

"Oh!" I say.

"What would you do, if you found him?" she asks.

"I would run far, far away! And scream." I glance down at the snake to see if I can find its severed head, but that end of it is still covered by the board.

She looks at me like I've said something outrageous. "But would you kill him?" she asks. Apparently the depth of my snake phobia is not coming across.

"No!" I cry. Her face falls, as if I've accused her of something.

My husband and his father come back from the sauna then, and I point at the snake.

"What happened?" Mika asks me.

"She killed it!" I expect him to be impressed. Instead, both men turn to my mother-in-law and scold her in Finnish.

"You see!" she says to me, looking oppressed.

"It's an endangered species!" My husband is indignant.

His mother stands her ground. "He has poison! I don't want him to bite the dog!"

I don't want the snake to bite the dog either, and I start worrying that the yard is full of hidden snakes, but Mika says there are really very few of these around anymore.

"ENDANGERED species," he reminds me.

That evening, I describe the snake murder to my own parents over email. Snake-phobes like me, they admire my mother-in-law's wielding of the hoe and ask me to tell her that she would have made a good frontier woman. I pass this on, but the American reference misfires.

"You think I am a barbarian!" she cries. I try to explain, and she pretends to understand, but she spends the rest of the evening joking about how all the Americans think she is a "wild woman."

We have potato soup for lunch the next day. I squeeze my eyes shut and imagine myself far away, seated on giant red and white polka-dotted toadstool, as it slithers down my throat.

Copyright 2003 by Danielle LaVaque-Manty

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