Hannah Wallace

After the Fall

I wrote this story a few years ago, after my family and I helped move my beloved great aunt Holly into a nursing home. I was so pleased when my friend Adrian Hale, the writer and editor behind the Communal Table, asked if I'd consider publishing it in her Age issue. 

My hope is that it will serve as a resource for other families who have elderly relatives living on their own in big cities. 

 

It was early June, and I had just returned to my cubicle from a lengthy editorial meeting. I had dozens of new e-mails, a pile of manuscripts to go through, and five voice mail messages. I sighed. My phone rang. It was Ed, my cousin.

“Holly had a fall last night. She’s OK, but she’s in the hospital,” he said. He gave me a second to let the news sink in. “It was so odd,” he continued. “I went out to move my car last night, which I’d parked near her apartment. I saw an ambulance at the door of her building and thought, ‘What are the chances?’”

Holly was Ed’s aunt, his mother’s eldest remaining sister. She was 86 and still lived by herself in the same rent-controlled apartment she’d been in since I was five. Holly had no children of her own—so Ed and I, her only relatives in the city, had been keeping close tabs on her. Only Ed, who lived just ten blocks south, bore the brunt of this responsibility, since I lived in Brooklyn—an hour-long subway-ride away. Still, I often made the trip. Holly had long been one of my favorite great aunts—and when I moved to New York City in 1995, we grew even closer, seeing movies, having dinner at the Cottage (her neighborhood Chinese restaurant), or hitting the museums at least once a month.

When I asked how she’d fallen, Ed told me she’d tripped over the Moroccan coffee-table on her way to the bathroom. This ornate copper table was nowhere near the bathroom, but I let that slide. Holly, I knew, was prone to midnight ice-cream raids. She probably stumbled over it on her way to the kitchen.

Though she didn’t break anything, Holly sustained a few bruises and was rattled enough to call 911. The EMT guys must’ve taken her down the elevator in her bathrobe. As they were lifting her into the ambulance, Ed rounded the corner. He jumped in and rode with her to the hospital.

Now, on the phone, Ed gave me Holly’s room number, saying she’d only be at the hospital for a few days. What he didn’t say was something neither of us wanted to talk about: Holly couldn’t live on her own anymore.

Continue reading here. 

*****

The Power of Selection: Plant Breeder Frank Morton

I got to write about superstar organic plant breeder Frank Morton for Communal Table, a new literary and food publication created by the talented Adrian Hale. Here's a teaser, below, but you can read the whole article here. 

Frank Morton with Lane Selman, agricultural researcher at Oregon State University, brandishing a mix of Stocky Red Roasters, Joelene's Rustic Italian, Little Bells, and Gatherer's Gold [Photo by Shawn Linehan] 

When I moved to Portland four years ago and began frequenting the farmers’ market, it didn’t take me long to become obsessed with Gathering Together Farm’s vegetables. The farm’s stand drew me in with its bounty and its kaleidoscope of color: crisp peppers in green, red, yellow, and purple; fragrant bundles of fresh basil; and singular specimens that I’d never seen before, like watermelon radish and delicata “zeppelin” squash. But it was the lettuce—hulking heads of it, bursting with uncommon vigor—and several types of kale (not just lacinato but White Russian and a frilly magenta-stemmed kale called Red Ursa) that stopped me in my tracks and caused me to exclaim out loud to complete strangers.

Before I ever tasted a nibble of lettuce, I knew Gathering Together Farm was special. What I didn’t know until recently was why some of the farm’s most popular vegetables are unique and uniquely tasty.

The wild salad mix, the kale, and the delicata can all be traced directly to one maverick plant breeder named Frank Morton. Little known to the general public, Morton is a rock star in plant breeding circles. A seed saver who grows heirloom plants that are at risk of extinction, Morton is also an organic plant breeder who creates never-before-seen varieties that have improved yield and disease resistance as well as culinary attributes such as texture, color, and enhanced flavor. He’s also an indefatigable activist who sued the USDA in 2008 for failure to require an environmental impact assessment before Roundup Ready sugar beets were introduced in the Willamette Valley.

Plant breeders have been overlooked in the local food movement, but they shouldn’t be. Without them, we wouldn’t have any heirloom tomatoes to delight over at our farmers’ markets or improved varieties like Frank Morton’s addictive Stocky Red Roaster sweet peppers. “Breeders are architects . . . the people writing the original recipes,” says chef Dan Barber in The Third Plate. The type of breeding that makes headlines these days is genetic engineering, a technology introduced in the 1980s that involves splicing DNA from one plant or animal into an entirely different plant. (“Golden rice,” for instance, is endowed with a gene from corn and a gene from a soil bacterium.) But what Frank Morton practices is old-fashioned Mendelian crossbreeding, which humans have used for thousands of years. He crosses a plant that has a trait he likes—say, Merlot lettuce, which is resistant to downy mildew—with another plant he also likes—say, Reine d’ Glaces lettuce, which has dark-green lacy leaves and is crispy and sweet—then saves the seeds from this union and plants those the following season.

Continue reading here...