Strawberry-Rhubarb Crisp

The last week of August, and I told Joy about Magnolia House. I drove to Pathways on Saturday and sat with her in the garden — the garden where she grows tomatoes and zinnias and the particular kind of chaos that Joy brings to everything she tends. I said, "Joy, remember the house with the art room we visited?" She said, "Paints." I said, "Yes, paints. You're going to live there. With friends and paints and a garden." She looked at me for a long time — not confused but considering, the way Joy considers things, slowly, thoroughly, without the urgency that the rest of us bring to decision-making. Then she said, "Will you visit?" I said, "Every Saturday." She said, "Okay." And that was it. Okay. The word carried no grief, no anxiety, no resistance. Just okay. The acceptance of a woman who has been accepting her life as it comes for thirty-five years and who has found, in the acceptance, a peace that the rest of us cannot imagine.

I cried in the car afterward. Robert was driving. He did not speak. He reached across the console and held my hand, and the hand-holding was enough, and the silence was enough, and the enough-ness of both was the marriage distilled to its essential gesture: two people, a car, the road between one thing and the next, connected by the hands they chose to hold when the holding was all they had.

James is three weeks into his sophomore year and has declared a double major: political science and English. The English addition was unprompted and unexplained, and I did not ask why because I know why — the Morrison novels, the Faulkner, the Tocqueville. The boy who wanted to argue for a living has discovered that the best arguments are made with words that matter, and the words that matter are in the books I put in his hands, and the books are in the shelves his father built, and the shelves are in the house that holds us all.

Mama had a week of fragments. She called me Naomi on Monday and Joy on Tuesday and "the girl" on Wednesday. She hummed on Thursday and was silent on Friday. On Saturday she touched my face and said, "You look like your daddy," which I do not — I look like her — but the looking was the seeing, and the seeing was the love, and the love is the last thing to go.

I made peach preserves — the annual August project, the jars that will carry summer into winter. I canned twelve jars, labeled them "Peaches, August 2019, Naomi," and the label had only one name this year, not two, because Mama could not help with the canning, and the solitary name on the label was a fact that I wrote with my librarian's hand and felt with my daughter's heart.

The preserves were done by noon — twelve jars cooling on the counter, the kitchen smelling like August at its sweetest — and I still had rhubarb from the garden and a flat of strawberries I’d bought thinking Mama might want to hull them with me, the way she always did. She couldn’t, this year. So I made this crisp instead, the kind of thing that doesn’t ask much of you and gives back everything: a warm, jammy pan of summer you can eat right now, no label required, no name but yours.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 45 min | Total Time: 1 hr 5 min | Servings: 8

Ingredients

3 cups fresh strawberries, hulled and halved
2 cups rhubarb, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold and cut into small pieces

Instructions

Preheat oven. Heat oven to 350°F. Lightly butter a 9x13-inch baking dish.
Make the filling. In a large bowl, toss together strawberries, rhubarb, granulated sugar, cornstarch, and vanilla until evenly coated. Pour into the prepared baking dish and spread in an even layer.
Make the topping. In a separate bowl, stir together oats, flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Add the cold butter pieces and work them in with your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse, clumpy crumbs with some pea-sized bits of butter remaining.
Assemble. Scatter the oat topping evenly over the fruit filling, covering it in a loose, uneven layer.
Bake. Bake for 40—45 minutes, until the topping is golden brown and the fruit filling is bubbling up around the edges.
Rest and serve. Let the crisp cool for at least 15 minutes before serving. Serve warm, with vanilla ice cream or a spoonful of heavy cream if you have it.

Nutrition (per serving)

Strawberry-Rhubarb Crisp — The Summer I Canned Alone