Onion Goblins

Frost, Mystery, and the Re-Do Blues

We first noticed the sharp scent of onions when we were hanging, for the second time, the glass door in an exterior wall of what would one day be our new home in the country.  Which circumstance (the re-do), as anyone who has ever hung a door knows, is a loaded, fraught event. High stakes, low (plummeting, even) endorphins. Therefore, given the setting, the waft of onion in the frigid night air felt like a snicker from the universe.  Or at least from the hood, which up until the onions suggested themselves, we loved with unabashed abandon. 

(Look at this place, we said to each other.  The best kept secret. Mountains fields sky, river running through it).

We froze nearly to the marrow that night, but the door– now free of some cleverly hidden shipping brackets– ah, at last, the door hung plumb and true, and the onions became inconsequential.  A weird twist of fate that had nothing to do with us; a tardy (or lost) onion harvest on some nearby farm. Anything could happen on a nearby farm.

And anything does.  I can tell you this now.

(Maybe this is a good time to be clear about complaints; we’re not complaining.  We still love the hood. We love it even more now that the house is finished and we’re settled here. It’s just that we’ve been noticing things– acclimating to the eccentricities. Which eccentricities seems worth mentioning).  

Frozen, and Onion Tears

November became December, the temperatures became ever more embittered, the skeletal house took on the meager sinews of plumbing and ventilation, and we began pulling wire through its bones.  Always a tough, monotonous chore, for me anyway. With the falling Fahrenheit, the smell of onions in the frigid night air showed up again and again; it was chronic. With each iteration it became more consistent, pervasive, undeniable. It would start at dark, and become so strong that my eyes would anticipate the peculiar dryness, the arid slow burn of onion tears. 

I thought of my grandmother, who died a few years back.  In her youth and even in her agedness, she was a beauty, and she loved beautiful things, including houses: fixing them up, decorating them (she had porcelain figurines: a shepherdess, Rockwellian children at play). She loved keeping everything– her house, her person, her men– tidy and smelling nice.  And– contrarily-wise — she loved onions.  

At her deathbed, I had tried to sing to her the songs I knew she loved, and had sadly failed.  With her imminent departure as tangible as my own heartbeat, tears had choked my voice into a rasp, a ridiculous croak.  Someone said my grandmother couldn’t hear me unless I shouted, but she still once or twice murmured the familiar melody-lorn words I was reaching for, her splayed fingers trailing the wall next to her bed.  Also: I love you, when I half whispered my own love to her, having given up my attempt at singing.

The onion tears, those cold winter nights that Frank and I pulled wire, never came– a fact that made me sort of doubt myself, my senses and perceptions.  Since onions seemed so out of context for the time of year and day and even place (we could see no falling onion tops in a deserted field, no packing plant backlit by a rising moon, no onion silo– are there onion silos?– standing stark and smoldery against the mountains), we would ask each other if onions were really what we were smelling.  Yes? Right? Do you smell them too?  Of course we smelled them. It was as if a horde of miniature iron chefs crouched between studs, shadows in our unfinished walls, making salsa, their little chef knives flashing through piles of onions. I’ve made salsa; I know. All you can smell are onions.

Frank has a Theory, and Grandpa Makes Hamburgers

“Maybe it’s a CAFO”, Frank said as we climbed wearily into the truck after work at the house late one January night.  Whether this night was before or after our construction loan officer sent an email asking us to explain why we were moving so slow on our project, and when we’d pick up the pace, doesn’t matter.  With arthritis in Frank’s shoulders, bursitis in his elbow, my inadequate height, the snow, the cold, the flu, and our amateur skills, we were moving slow, heartbreakingly slow, but we were also working extremely hard, and freezing solid every bleak night of our lives, with only the ambient onion as witness.  Our souls were heavy and frostbitten.

“Mmm… I don’t think so”, I said, using up the last of my daily quota of contradictions (we get three; that is all).  “We’ve smelled CAFO before. This isn’t it.”

“Yes, but maybe this time, at this CAFO, they’re feeding the cows onions,” Frank said.  I stared at him.  Why on earth would someone feed their cattle onions? What cow in its right mind would eat more than one onion?  Because yes maybe a cow, being hungry, might accidentally eat one.  A cow’s bite is large and possibly undiscerning.  But many onion bites, in quick succession?  Images of doomed, mad cows crowded my tired brain.   

Frank had given his theory considerable thought.  “They feed the cows onions to flavor them,” he said.  “Before they’re slaughtered. So when people cook the beef, they don’t have to season it.  Pre-emptive flavoring.”

(Notice how effortlessly my man slipped from “cows” to “beef”. What big teeth you have, my dear.)

I pictured my grandfather, frying hamburgers in a cast iron pan in Grandma’s kitchen on a Friday night, each hamburger laden with finely minced onion. He would have cut the onions himself; when he cooked, he owned the whole project (he was nearly as proprietary as Grandma). Grandma insisted he cover the pan with a screen to keep the fumes and grease from overwhelming her own domain– not only the kitchen Grandpa stood in, but the entire house– the yard outside, even. She had an aristocratic sense of smell, a soulful pact with cleanliness.

The onions (and garlic; we were all raised on garlic) was a signature flavor– as were the Friday night hamburgers. Complete with root beer, possibly ice cream, and a sense of downright contentment. If we stayed the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s, we would wake in a clean bed; the morning air would smell faintly of clorox, pine-sol, and flowers. If the scent of onions persisted, it obliged my grandmother by cooperating with the florals.

I had no words with which to answer Frank (I’d used up all my contradictions).  Had I been my grandmother, a sharp answer would have been most natural, contradiction rule or no.  But now I could only widen my eyes and remain silent (another rule: no eye rolling, ever… we’ve read “Blink”*; we know better).  

Surely, You’re Joking (No, I’m Not, and Stop Calling Me Shirley)

A few onion peels littered the snow near our Honeybucket**, a day or two after we petitioned the help of a roof soffit contractor.  We were desperate for someone other than ourselves to tackle the roof soffit and fascia. The weather was so cold. We were so tired.

Meeting with this contractor, I felt the sharpness of the universe’s elbow in my ribs. We were chatting in front of the house, the familiar scent hanging between the three of us, the snow aglow in the bright winter light with the occasional onion skin, and we’d asked him (because he told us he was practically our neighbor, just beyond that field and that railroad and that other field over there) if he knew anything about the onion smell.  He did not, he said, with a twinkle. He didn’t appear to think it was a thing to wonder about. But there were the peels, scattered anon, and I actually wondered if we’d been caught in a practical joke. The twinkle seemed a tad suspicious.

Turns out I was right to suspect. Maybe not a practical onion joke, but certainly the wisdom in choosing this particular contractor. He eventually sent a guy out– one nice, otherwise retired guy, a fellow with beautifully waving hair who talked at length about the end of the world and had much to say about toilet paper hoarding. This nice guy only sporadically showed up, and at the weary end of nearly four months, left wavering lines of soffit along the eaves of the house. Also he left his pirate plank– an unbelievably heavy, rotten board that he’d used to create a sort of scaffolding between two ladders. When we installed siding, it would be impossible to match our trim to the pirate’s billowing soffits. We cared, but didn’t have the energy to protest; we simply paid our bill, took the plank to the dump, and moved on.

Of Trucks and Men

The day Frank got the truck stuck in a deep drift on the side of the house (a plight that didn’t last long, as our bishop thankfully happened by and pulled us out quick with a chain and the power of his own truck)— and also, possibly, the day that we re-hung the board part of the board-and-batten (another re-do with more high stakes and plummeting endorphins), I happened to glance over from our siding work to the road as an onion truck passed.  Wait, what? An Onion Truck? Truly? Were those onions, piled high and glowing golden in the dump bed?  

Yes. Yes they were.  

Of course I alerted Frank to this profound development, and we watched together in a sort of frozen awe as the truck shrunk smaller and smaller in our line of sight down the road.  We thought we saw it turn right, yes, there it was, surely, driving up towards the bare mountain in an empty field, do you see it there? We squinted; it was out of view. Destination: entirely unknown.  The relative emptiness of fields and road and mountain were all that was left us.  

Hazards of the Road

Then one morning a couple of weeks or a month or three years later (winter 2019 seemed to go on forever), I drove with my daughter Meisha  out to the house so I could meet with our drywall contractor. Also so that Meisha could have practice driving, because she really needed to learn how—such an irony, by the way, this driving in order to learn– one that by its very nature is rife with its own hazards.  A week later, we would be in a bumper-scuffing accident and a world of tears, simply because she didn’t know how to drive yet, but had driven anyway so that she could learn.

To my knowledge, my grandmother was never in a car accident, although the last few years that she drove, she got lost constantly. Once, trying to find my house, she landed on the other side of the state, somewhere around Midnight.

My dad has a boyhood memory of waking up in the bed of his parent’s pickup (I like to think this happened at Midnight, too) as it careened along the graveled road shoulder during the wee hours of a family trip. In the cab of the truck, his mother (my grandma) was asleep at the wheel. It took Dad and Grandpa (who had also been asleep in the pickup bed) a terrifyingly long minute to wake Grandma, the supposed driver, separated as she was from them by the truck’s thick cab window.

Barry, Dad’s older brother, was also in the truck somewhere, but his position seems nebulous; it changes with each telling of the story, or maybe with the teller. When Dad narrates, his brother is in front with Grandma, sleeping just as soundly as she. But in Barry’s version, he is definitely not asleep– maybe Dad is, but Barry is awake, frantically banging on the cab window with Grandpa.

At any rate, I have no idea how they all survived. But I’m grateful.

I always felt safest when Grandpa drove. But I also remember riding just about everywhere with Grandma.

The Onion Goblins Are Invoked

As Meisha and I pulled up to the house, I noticed more onion peels, littering the snow all over the lot. This was epic coverage; our place is nearly an acre.  Red onion skins, yellow onion skins, onion skins sodden with snow, onion skins fluttering in the humid, cold wind. Present, real…and accompanied by that familiar onion smell.  

Meisha laughed, and declared (as she maneuvered the car through a rut) that we had Onion Goblins.  Like it was this cute thing, a bestowal, a gift of notice from some mischievous, supernatural being.  A Sprite, a Faerie, A Witch Under The Mountain. “And for You, Foolish Ones, You Who Linger and Lollygag Far Too Long, Building Your House of Sticks– For You and No One Else,  I Invoke Onion Goblins.”  

I think of one of my children’s favorite goblins, Dobby. A friend to Harry Potter, darling with over-sized eyes and ears and wrinkles, he finds freedom with an errant sock… and is key to managing some of Harry’s most threatening mischief.

Sometimes life seems more…hmm… hospitable? when one thinks of its complexities in terms of whimsy, mischief, fairytale magic? Or views it from the lens of history, with an eye towards one’s ancestors. Either way. One must sometimes squint, blur the edges, apply the golden glow of the past, the glitter of pixie dust.

Enter Shirley

It was with an actual bestowal, a kind and very real gift, that we learned the truth of the onion goblins.  Our Relief Society president** — I’ll call her Shirley– saw our work lights late one night and stopped by with a steaming loaf of bread.

(I will interject here and tell you that this bread was delicious, that its tenderness, warmth, and timing deeply moved me. Also it is important to note that while Shirley is taller than my grandmother once was, her eyes have the same chocolate immediacy that I remember in Grandma’s).

Frank and I chatted (so grateful for company and the gesture) with tall, brown-eyed Shirley for a minute, and then, because the scent was strong that night (the metaphorical Elephant In The Room), I asked her if she knew anything of the onion mystery.

Of course she did.  Knowing things like this seems to be the province of Relief Society presidents.  Ask them, and they will dispel mysteries– both local and remote– in ways that make the world seem more like the one Norman Rockwell celebrated: friendly, humorous, safe.

She spoke of local sheep ranchers, reminded us that sheep are a big deal out here. Indeed they are: a slow moving herd stopped our framer in his tracks months before, as shepherds herded thousands of sheep up the highway, bringing traffic to a standstill.

Shirley told us furthermore that we aren’t just in sheep territory, we are in the neighborhood of Sheep Greatness, one of the largest sheep ranches in the country. Which obviously means that there’s a really big gathering of sheep nearby. And incidentally, Shirley said, these sheep ranchers feed onions to their sheep.

This is sheep, and onions, on a massive scale.

So it turned out that Frank’s CAFO theory hadn’t been entirely wrong, though we didn’t get a sense that the onions are meant, like the witch’s candy for Hansel,  to fatten up the sheep (maybe they are? I don’t want to know).

For as long as our new brown-eyed friend has lived in the hood (it’s been a long time; she’s happy here), the onion-fed sheep tradition has never varied. Sheep eat onions through the winter, every winter, all winter long.  This year, she said, the smell is particularly strong. Some years you hardly notice it. Regardless, it’s an annual thing, beginning and ending with the cold. Onion trucks drive up to the sheep pastures at the foot of the mountain, dump onions out in neat, shimmery rows, and the sheep nibble and graze and ruminate on onion. I imagine sheep bells tinkling as they chew.

(Perhaps I romanticize.)

Something to Hold Onto

We mentioned the onion skins, and she laughed and said, oh yes, we call that onion dust.  It’s a bit messy… gets stuck to your car, blows into your yard.  But it’s just temporary.  

I imagined onion peels, caught in strings of Christmas lights and on bushes, pasting themselves in delicate, glowing, translucent shreds onto living room windows.  A very natural confetti, a compost-able pixie dust (I believe in compost). In a weird but delightful way, celebratory.

I remember Grandma, her hands on her hips, hollering across a partial mile of undulating park at a dog owner who had neglected to put his dog on a leash.  The park rules were being broken, yes, but the dog cavorted harmlessly, far away from us. The dog owner could only look at her, and I remember both wanting to laugh, and squirming a little with embarrassment.  

Certainly Grandma would have had something to say about onion skins clinging to her shrubbery, and the onion goblin crossing her threshold every winter night with his peculiar fragrance.  Had the Sheep Rancher been a Handsome Man, though, her tone would have softened considerably. She had an eye for beauty; besides (as I keep saying), she actually liked onions.

It was obvious that the onions didn’t offend our new friend.  Neither the dust nor the smell. It was just an aspect– a mere triviality– of her neighborhood, a place she felt at home in, filled with people that she loved and was loyal to.

Knowing the power of narrative (and how seniority works), we took our cues from her.  How could we not, with such warm, delicious bread and friendly conversation? And mountains fields sky and river running through it?  My grandmother would have loved the place, the mountains fields sky. And the river running through it.

Unanswered Petty Questions

I still have unanswered, but mostly petty questions. Is feeding sheep onions a common practice everywhere? Why onions? Why not turnips, cabbages, carrots? Is it about nutrition, opportunity, cost, convenience? Tradition? Fond indulgence towards a herd of pets, a convention perpetuated by endemic largesse?

And how do they stand it?  The sheep (or even the rancher, in his nearby home)?  I imagine thousands of sheep, their hooves caked with inevitable winter mud, their deep-piled, off-white fleeces flecked with it, leaning over the rows of gleaming onions,  warm puffs of sheep breath crystallizing in the frigid air. The first ten thousand incisors meeting innumerable onions, muffled bite-shots fired in unison by massive squads of sheep-teeth. Volatile sprays of onion juice rising up from the no longer gleaming onions, rising and clinging to thick eyelashes, coating glittery sheep-breath with onion oil.  Rising and overwhelming downy nostrils. 

I imagine a sheep rancher’s wife, weathering yet another question about onions from a new neighbor, a visitor in her doorway. I have met, since we’ve settled here, at least one sheep rancher’s wife. She is approachable and kind; she has lovely presence, a keen glance. Does she overcome, again and again, the insistent temptation to roll her eyes? To contradict someone… the visitor, the rancher, the avid sheep, the onion goblin?

Even after having been told, after having looked around and seen for myself, this all– the winter/onions/sheep thing– still seems implausible to me.

What ultimately happens to onion-fed sheep?  I admit I feel conflicted about this. I like to think, with Sam from “Holes”, that the onions have restorative, healing qualities, that with their magic they produce such long-lived sheep and such very fine wool, that the rancher would never consider losing a soul from his flock to a butcher.

It’s hard to imagine the wool wouldn’t have a distinct scent though.

To Everything There Is At Least a Season (If Not Absolutely an Obvious Reason)

Grandma did love onions.  I recall watching, captivated, as she ate one.  She ate it like an apple, biting into it fearlessly with straight teeth; brown eyes sparkling with laughter at our awe.  A little like Snow White taking delicate aim at the fatal apple— except Grandma wasn’t soft like that; she was spunky, showing off; she loved drama– and there was drama in each resounding bite. The onion crackled as she chewed— I could almost feel the crisp juiciness, each layer its own vivid crunch— the cascading crunches a sort of singing that made the onion seem unquestionably delicious and caused my own mouth to water, despite the fact that I knew onions to definitely not be delicious.  Which of course also made me wonder if I didn’t really know onions, and complicated the cautionary elements of Snow White’s misfortunes.

I don’t recall my eyes stinging from Grandma’s onion-eating.  Perhaps I forget— but I think not. My eyes sting and water now, however, when I mince onions for dinner (I admit I almost never make hamburgers; Frank wishes I would). Mascara trails past my jawline; my nose runs. My pan screen, similar to the one Grandma insisted Grandpa use, is more or less ineffectual at blocking fumes. It only marginally mitigates grease spatter.

I also remember that when Grandma hugged us, we inhaled her. The commingled scents of her clean, pretty clothes, the vitamin E on her face, her lotion, her perfume, the hint of onion that danced on her breath and emanated from her glowing skin.  No iteration of Grandma’s onions ever offended us. The sheets and pillowslips of whoever’s bed she slept in would smell of her perfume and soap and vitamins– and ever so slightly of onions– when she left. Ah! To bury our noses in that pillow! And wrap up in those sheets! To own them all, and to sleep there in her enchanted spot, the first few days after she had gone!  This was her parting gift, one that made us long for her return. One that motivated us to volunteer our beds when she arrived the next time.

There aren’t always next times, do-overs, parting gifts. The time we get is just enough, the partings final, at least for now. Perhaps all that remains til the eventual tomorrow are the stories: a hand moving slow across a wall, a ragged bit of song, a passing I love you. Mountains fields sky, the river running through it– and yes. Assuredly this: the eccentricities and magic that bring these things into focus: the incessant onion, the well kept sheep.

The End

Footnotes (or a long PS):

(While once upon a time I had mastered a rudimentary approach to the sort of scholarliness that conjures footnotes, I have long since forgotten any formulas or patterns that would lend academic glamour to this blogginess. Sorry about that. But let us sally forth nevertheless, and not get hung up in technicalities.)

*Blink In this book, Malcolm Gladwell discusses all sorts of things worth thinking about– one is the correlation that researchers have found between outward signs of contempt– say, rolling one’s eyes– and the likelihood of divorce. It’s very high. Which isn’t to say rolling your eyes will ruin your marriage. But contempt certainly will.

**Honeybucket What is this? It is the brand name that our porta-potty supplier uses for their portable bathrooms (sans the bath, and honestly, the room). Where a rose by any other name might still smell as sweet, Honeybuckets are nothing like their name suggests. They are, however, clearly an instance of creative (if not altogether astute) branding.

***Relief Society President In a nutshell… imagine women in your community trying wholeheartedly to care for the folk in it, to enable individual and communal relief. There is power and grace in organized endeavors like this. In this case, the woman voluntarily accepts the assignment to lead out in loving all the people. With or without the assignment/title, countless women the world over fill this role beautifully.