Tuesday, November 22, 2011

meet joe fox

yesterday morning i decided to make a pot of vegetable soup.

it was a snowy morning and that just sounded like the right thing to do.

i went out to the frig that's in the garage.
up top in it's freezer, i keep frozen berries, apples, pumpkin and cherries and in the lower part i keep potatoes, onions, drinks and carrots.
my carrots from the garden.

i gathered a few assorted shapes n sizes and brought them on into the kitchen.
i peeled them carefully and then went to slice them.
my knife crunched through the first giant orange thumb and woah! the aroma was so powerful!
it was SO powerful , it transported me back in time. back to 1975- i think.

i lived and worked in kalispell montana. i got a job at a healthy food deli.
joe fox
we served everything with alfalfa sprouts. the soups were artisan, the sandwiches were mountain high and ya know, everyone who worked there had long hair.


kila

one of the gentlemen who worked there was joe fox. i quiet man from vermont who was quick of wit and loved to laugh. he lived in kila. a little settlement in a beautiful valley just 10 mi? outside kalispell.
he invited us to his house one day and we rode on out there in our 48 willys wagon.
his house was an old old house, and we were surprised to see, when we went inside, he had insulated the entire house with stacks of newspaper tied in bundles. it was a bit dangerous, but we were young and didn't really think about those kind of things. it seemed like an excellent idea!
he heated and cooked with wood. it was snowy outside and  it gets very cold in montana.  it was getting near dinner time so  he said, 'lets go out to the garden and get us some veggies'.  we got our coats on and went out to the snowy covered patch.
dead remnants of herbs and marigolds, tansy and sunflowers stood like three dimentional shadows drooping toward the earth.
he got a shovel, and low! and behold! he started digging up carrots and turnips ! (this was before i had ever grown a serious garden so this was really something!)
eureka! we hit gold! i think we even had to pump our own water but in the end, i cooked us up a stew i'll never forget. nothing like a cast iron dutchoven simmering a home grown stew on a wood cookstove.
i had many little adventures in montana. such hard working idealistic folks there. you had to have some kinda fire in your own belly to make it through those 20-40 below winters. but there never was anything more beautiful than the stars that hung above the rockies. i can see why they stay.
those montana rockies

2 comments:

  1. WOW WEE::::::::

    Have you kept in touch with Joe Fox?
    Shall we send out the posse and look for him?
    Google search?

    Regardless, I Loved your story + sentiment.
    I can smell the carrots from here!

    Aint it wonderful how smells & scents can bring you right back to a certain day + time?

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  2. Inspirational story. This makes me want to move to Montana for a winter just to say I did.

    ReplyDelete