Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times by Suzan Colón Page A

with.
    Aside from the obvious benefits for a city child like me, the weekend and summer arrangement worked very well for Mom. She was a devoted mother who worked hard during the week, but when the weekend came, she was still a young, beautiful, single woman who wanted to go out. (And dressed to go out my mother was something to behold. This was the late 1960s and early ’70s, so she had the long blond fall cascading around her shoulders, the hot pants, and the boots made more for dancing than for walking.)
    After Nana died when I was seven years old, it was just me and Grandpa, and I’d sit on his lap while he wiped tears from his eyes and sang to me:
    You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
    You make me happy when skies are grey …
    I was too young to understand the reasons behind his taste for raw potatoes or why he felt the need to save food by any means necessary, and, anyway, he had many more eating habits that met with my approval. He kept big Hershey bars in the fridge, took sweetened condensed milk in his coffee, and always had Entenmann’s Crumb Cake on hand. (I routinely pinched all the crumbs off, which drove him crazy, but he never tried to stop me.) He also provided for me and took care of me in a way that I could understand on a simple, almost primal level.
    Grandpa was a big, barrel-chested guy with blue eyes and wavy hair the color of iron. He was robust and strong well into his seventies. Mom gave him a fishing captain’s hat one Father’s Day, and he wore it always, tilted at a rakish angle. My grandfather brought a lawn lounge chair into the living room and parked it by thewindows facing the bay, and from this command post he would scan the waters with his binoculars. When he saw a particular type of churning, he’d shout, “The blues are running!” I never saw him move as fast as when a school of bluefish was coming into our part of the sound. He’d run and grab his fishing rod, go tearing downstairs, shout to his friend and landlord, “Ted! Ted, the blues!” and head around the house, down to the concrete patio at the end of the yard. He’d cast his line before he came to a stop, knowing he didn’t even have to bait the hook—the bluefish, in a vicious feeding frenzy, would bite down on anything. He’d haul up one for me, one for him, maybe another to freeze; if he hooked another fish before the landlord arrived, he’d give it to him on his way back upstairs. Then the churning school would move on, the whole event taking less than five minutes. My grandpa was the Ernest Hemingway of the Bronx.
    He also caught flounder, which was less exciting but just as delicious. And when the tide was low, he’d take me clamming with him. His equipment consisted of a pronged clam rake and a laundry basket with an inner tube around it, which he tied to his middle with a rope. My tools were a diving mask and a toy shovel. We’dwade out until the water was waist-deep on him, which was over my head—I hung on to the floating basket.
    “Think this is a good spot, kid?” he’d ask.
    “I’m not sure,” I’d say, frowning. “Let me check.” And I’d take a deep breath, dive down in the murky water, and have at the sand with my pink shovel. If I resurfaced with a clam—“Found ’em!”—Grandpa would start digging, putting the mollusks into the plastic basket. He never took too many, about two dozen or so, but they went a long way. After a successful clamming expedition, I knew we’d be having clam fritters, spaghetti with clam sauce (always red, never white), and his variation on Aunt Nettie’s clam chowder recipe. (He wasn’t much on parsnips, and he added a bottle of clam juice to the water for flavor and put the clams in at the last stage to keep them tender. I like the parsnips and keep in all the vegetables, and I add about a quarter of a cup of white wine and some salt and pepper.) But Grandpa would use the clams only after keeping them in the vegetable bins at the bottom of the fridge