I first saw that old, rusty skillet hanging on that old, tattered cedar fence. It hung there for years before the 2-3x visits per week I’d made for those three years I passed by. A nail through a small hole in the helper handle secured it to that fence that was now starting to teeter and totter. The fence was as old as the skillet and both were about to find their ends…until I came by one day and the fence wasn’t there. But where was that skillet?
I used to be a hospice nurse assigned to the outer region from the Boise, Idaho metro. The “Backwoods” folks in other words. These were my people. Most of my patients were alert, oriented, walking, talking, and “doing” when I became part of their lives. Some remained in their beds or chairs for the duration of each day and others continued to run their family-owned businesses up to the end. My lady there on those 81 acres enjoyed a few things in life and one, so it seemed, were my visits.
Some lived on large farms and cattle ranches, others ran their own saddle and tack shops, some lived in modest homes and apartments, others lived in grand houses, and others hacked their whole lives out of whatever resources they could dig up. My lady there on the Snake lived in a trailer house that was bricked over…modest indeed…on 81 acres with hundreds of yards of Snake River frontage.
Now, let me pause a bit…we hospice nurses do not take gifts from our patients. We never take advantage of our folks. Many of them have old and valuable items in their homes that they remember getting as a gift, buying, building, or finding and “it all seems like yesterday.” Their possessions are not seen as being “valuable” in regards to monetary value; they are valuable as to the memories they recollect. They’re just like you and me, though instead of packing around “all that stuff” for 20 years, they’ve been packing their treasures around for the past 50-years and many were “quite tired of looking at it.” They may remember (and resent) their mother insisting they take her mother’s Griswold cast iron with diamond logo and use the tried-and-true cast iron instead of using that new steel or aluminum cookware she got as a wedding gift from her Aunt Shirley, “God rest her soul.”
Seems older folk’s notion of time is different than “newer” generations. 100-year-old folks think back to “20-years-ago” and their minds kick back to 1972. “Yep, it was something like 20-years-ago, back in ‘72…” I’m starting to see that in myself too. I am 52-years-old and I still say about my wife, “we met 20-years-ago” and my wife reminds me that it was 30 years ago (she’s still like a shiny new penny to me anyway). Anyway…
My one lady’s home sat on the Snake River in southeastern Idaho and atop a mound of buried Model Ts her husband plowed under to sure up the river’s edge many decades earlier (as she shared that story). They got the land for a deal because it was kind of an old junk yard area way back at the bend of an old dirt road (now long-since paved) sometime before World War II. After they bought that spot of land to farm, he covered those old cars and junk using his brand new Ford tractor and planted young poplar trees over the site. Decades later when I drove up, those river-drunk poplar trees were massive and their shade was so nice. And in that shade still sat that old tractor over by her great, great grandson’s 4H pig pin.
She lived on those 81-acres off the river without a thought or a care of the land’s value (a story for another day). She even owned the island out in the middle of the river from her property. Land was not where she found her comfort. At almost 100-years-old, she found contentment in time with her family and spending time with Andy, her sorta-adopted, once-a-boy-and-now-aged-to-over-70-years-old son. He was a fella she would bring home to the farm from the school where she worked. Back then, he was a young boy from the State School (another story). And, one day she brought him home and he just stayed there.
Andy could cook fried chicken like none other and I (shamefully) scheduled my visits on Thursday evenings…fried chicken night (and sometimes doubled-back on a Friday if there was more chicken than could be eaten on one Thursday evening).
Her daughter lived on gifted land just a rock-thrown from her mother’s (my patient’s) home with a stretch of cedar fence that separated the two properties. That old, leaning cedar fence had been up since the 70s and was starting to “give into” the weight of the farm implements, buckets, horseshoes, and a single, large, rusty skillet that decorated the bordering structure.
One Thursday, I pulled up around 3pm anticipating a nice 4pm “first dinner” (I am still ashamed of myself…not really) and saw the fence was gone. There was nothing left of it. My lady’s son-in-law came over to the house where I was visiting with my patient and was holding an old rusty skillet wrapped up in a paper sack; it was filthy with remnants of old wasp nests and even bird nests from decades of hanging bottom-side-out off that fence.
Keep in mind, this is in Owyhee County, Idaho. This is a high desert country. Dry. The average moisture from the sky is about 10 inches per year. And when it’s cold, nothing happens. Cold and frozen or hot and dry. Lucky for that old skillet.
“Here. You want this?” The son-in-law handed me the paper sack-covered skillet with a gloved hand on the inside holding the rusty handle. I took the bag end and looked at his gloved hand covered in rust residue. Inside the bag was that old, rusty BSR skillet. A beauty-to-be-reborn. It didn’t spin and there was no pocking. Nonetheless, those decades as decoration left it a deep, reddish-orange color.
“Yes! But are you sure? This is still a very nice skillet.”
“Yeah. Nobody else wants it and if you don’t take it, I’m going to go put it out for the trash.”
I can’t very well argue with that, now can I?
My evening was spent cleaning up that skillet. After a few days, I brought it back over to show it off. Black. Seasoned. And clean as a whistle. And, it just happened to be a Thursday. Go figure.
That skillet has been with me now for the past 10+ years and those first few weeks I owned it, I’d show up on Thursdays with my skillet in tow. After all, how do you make good fried chicken even good-er? Cast iron baby! Cast iron!
Here’s a link to a recipe I often prepare in this 14-Inch Cast Iron Skillet: https://beerandiron.com/2022/12/creamy-beer-mac-cheese-greens-chicken
Specifics of My Treasured Skillet: Number 12, 13 7/16 Inch, Birmingham Stove & Range. It was part of their 1970s-ish Century Collection.
