EHave you ever played with the big leaves of rhubarb? It’s a kid thing. You can make an umbrella, which is the easiest thing to do. Rhubarb leaf umbrellas are useful on a hot summer day. Or you can make a fort out of several leaves or simply crawl into the stand of rhubarb and pretend it’s a fort. The advantages of a fort are that it is cool, and it smells good.
But the best thing about rhubarb is making and eating rhubarb sauce or rhubarb pie. Yeah, you can add strawberries, and that’s good, but plain rhubarb pie is wonderful. It is very important, though, to remember the sugar.
My sister loved rhubarb sauce. One suppertime, Mom brought the sauce to the table and Carol immediately took a big helping and then a big bite. As her mouth closed on the bite she looked up. Her mouth puckered. Her face reddened then got redder. Her eyes began to water. Unable to open her mouth she pounded the table. Finally able to speak she only said, “WHANG!”
Mom grabbed up the bowl of sauce and scurried to the stove to add the sugar.
Rhubarb is incredibly hearty and easy to grow, at least in Montana. My mom was born and spent her childhood in a log cabin with a sod roof along the Musselshell River in Montana. Her parents, four sisters and a brother grew their own food, had a milk cow and chickens. In the summertime there was incredible bounty. Grandpa would go out to the field with his saltshaker, pick a tomato and sit down to eat it. I still have the saltshaker. Or he would take a whole watermelon and throw it on the ground to break it open and eat the heart. I can imagine Grandpa sitting in the warm sun with the smell of grass and vegetables around him, hearing the murmur of the river and enjoying his feast.
About 70 years after the family left their little farm, Mom and some other relatives got in a four-wheel drive vehicle to go see it. They could easily find the location by recognizing the part of the river that the house had been on, but the Earth had reclaimed the land as her own. There was no house. No foundation. No garden. No fences.
Only a rhubarb patch.