One Christmas break when I was 17 or so, Harold Wingard asked if I’d like to make the holiday profitable by working on a barn he was building.
Harold owned a large dairy south of Fitzhugh and was building what was called a loafing barn. It was a big one, maybe 120 by 60 feet, going off memory. It was metal, and he needed a couple of extra
It was metal, and he needed a couple of extra hands to secure the roof to the frame.
Harold didn’t want his roof sailing away on the breezes in the spring, so he had a worker on the roof drive a long screw with a rubber gasket through the roof and the frame and a person on the inside bend the end of the screw over the frame.
The guy on the roof would scoot from screw to screw, but the inside man worked from a front-end loader on a tractor, which another person would drive and raise and lower.
Then, as now, I dislike heights - even if it’s 10 feet off the ground in a front-end loader - and I avoid them as I would leprosy.
But there were limited opportunities to earn money back then, so my only question for Harold was: What time do I need to be there?
His dairy was about four miles from my house, so I would drive home for dinner (lunch, if you aren’t from Fitzhugh) and make a couple of sandwiches.
Along about the third day, it was dinner time and Harold said “come home with me and eat at our house.”
And so I did.
His wife, Velta, had cooked a roast that you could smell when you were still in the yard. I could never tell this to my mother, but the roast she cooked was the best I had ever eaten.
Fifty years later, I can still taste it.
Harold has passed, but a few years ago I ran into Velta at an estate sale and mentioned that roast and told her it was the best I had ever eaten.
She said she didn’t precisely recollect that day, but she was pleased her cooking had had such a profound effect on my life.
Over the past weekend, I found some shoulder roasts on a good sale and picked up three, two that went in the freezer and one that Kindra put in a crock pot Monday morning.
Come Monday evening, I walked in the house and thought I was back in Velta Wingard’s front yard.
Oh, that roast smelled good. It had enough fat to make a thick layer of juice for cooking the potatoes, carrots and parsnips in the bottom of the crock pot and it was so tender that it was hard to fork.
Two plates later, I realized that life had come full circle. It took half a century, but I had finally eaten roast that was better than Velta Wingard’s.
And the best thing is that it was a big enough roast for me to have leftovers for dinner as soon as I finish this column.
The end.