It's Well Over 100 Years Old: My Dad's Gift To Me
One of my Dad's gifts to me is as tasty and beautiful as the warm day when I find it. It is one of those things that you really don't think about, but then suddenly there it is staring back at you.
I'm not sure where it began or how it got there, but I believe my dad must have found it or it was given to him. I don't think that he had it from its beginning. I have a feeling that he was gifted with it from a friendly neighbor. But I do not know. I never thought to ask him.
Now, I find that many people hardly even know what it is. Back a year ago, in 2025, I found only one person that had the courage, and the curiosity to try to make something of it. Audrey was pleasantly surprised when she did. In fact, she was so happy with it, she surprised me, and gifted it back to me.
Lately I have been in a gifting mode, I don't need everything that I have. I find that as valuable as I think it to be, and my dad felt it to be, and that is over a hundred years old, that people don't know what to do with it. I've offered it to a lot of people this year, no one wanted it.
I thought I had one person that wanted to take it. Later, I asked that person, when my gift was ready, if she would come and get it, and she said another freind had given a similar one to her. I was surprised by that.
What do you do with something that your father felt really good about. He was proud to have it. My mom helped him use it. The whole family enjoyed it. And it was actually considered a real treat. And now, in twenty twenty-six I had to basically not do anything with it. Eventually I put it out by the road on trash day.
But since I am optimistic, I know that next spring I will find my gift alive and well and growing on either side of my house, where it was planted probably 50 or 55 years ago.
I expect that where my dad had it, thirty years ago, it's probably still there. It might even be before that at 1 or 2 or 3 other places in Detroit, where my dad lived.
I watched my dad harvest it, trim it and then my mother baked pies with it. Yes, one of the delights of my childhood were the - - - - - - pies my mother baked so often in the summer. When she added a scoop of ice cream the taste was hard to believe.
As a special treat, she would create another pie, which was even sweeter. And sometimes we didn't need ice cream with it.
So if you've ever wondered what could easily be over a hundred years old, it's my dad's rhubarb, and it comes up and it grows high. It seems the more you harvest it, the more it grows that summer and it keeps coming back. It keeps growing for the whole summer, and it doesn't seem to matter if it's on the shady side of the house or the sunny side of the house, it just survives and comes back each Spring.
An interesting thing about rhubarb is that you can take a plant and cut it in half and take the other half as a gift to somebody and the half that you keep comes back to say hello to you the next year. It looks just about the way it was before you cut it in half.
So for anybody that wants rhubarb, come out to my house in the summer when it's here and help yourself to it.
You can even take some of it home and plant it, so it'll be in your yard in another hundred years as well.
The internet and Youtube can explain to you, and show you, how you can make beautiful rhubarb pies, with a lattice-type top crust.
I could almost taste those beautiful pies, particularly the strawberry-rhubarb pie, with a little bit of ice cream, as I wrote this story for you.
Thank you, mom and dad. I don't expect you thought that that pie memory, and the rhubarb would last this long, but it has. Your rhubarb has nourished us for many years.
Jean and her pies
My wife Jean regularly baked Rhubarb pies, and Strawberry Rhubarb pies. She and Mrs. McBride often went over to Long's Farm on Commerce Rd to pick the strawberries. She enjoyed 'her time' creating the pies and especially the latticed upper crust. David remembers eating these yummy pies, as well as making chocolate chip cookies with his mom in the kitchen and mom letting him eat the left over cookie dough -- so yummy! Mom also introduced David to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches which he still enjoys these many decades later. We ate dinner together as a family at the kitchen table. Pass the corn please.