The Healing Powers of Pickled Beets

 If you were following this blog last summer, you may remember that my husband took a tumble on his bike in August, leading to six weeks on crutches. I wrote a post on “The Healing Powers of Pickled Beets,” a piece that led to the following essay that appeared in a recent issue of Woman’s Day Magazine. You can read it here on their website or below:

When our neighbor Julia heard about my husband’s bike accident last summer, she made us an offer we couldn’t refuse:  “Let me bring dinner over,” she said. “I’ve always found meatloaf and pickled beets to be very healing.”

She was right (and the meal she brought over was tasty indeed, especially those beets).  Her act of culinary generosity was just one of an array of kindnesses showered upon us during the six weeks when my husband was on crutches.

While we appreciated the phone calls, visits, and cards, it was the food that meant the most to us.  In one sense those meals weren’t  necessary—Bob was the one who was incapacitated, not me, and I was perfectly capable of putting together a meal. But those dishes carried more than nutrition:  they carried comfort.

Perhaps it’s a Midwestern thing, but in Iowa casseroles follow crises as surely as summer follows spring.  Surgeries, chemotherapy, and deaths in the family prompt friends and family to get busy in the kitchen, for food is the most basic and elemental of gifts, a reminder of our need for nourishment even when our hearts are aching and our bodies broken.

In one sense there was a kind of karmic calculus at work in our friends’ gifts to us. Over the years I’ve made meals for others, and those good deeds returned to us when we were going through a rough patch ourselves.

But during those weeks when Bob was healing, I began to understand that something deeper was at work, something I hadn’t realized when I was on the other side of the culinary equation. I think that when you have a medical crisis of some sort, in a sense you fall out of the boat that is your normal life. You’re suddenly at sea in an unfamiliar milieu of hospital rooms, doctors, nurses, and assorted medical apparatus. Even after you return home, your daily routines are altered.  And so when friends call, stop by, or bring those casseroles, it’s as if they’re throwing you a life preserver and hauling you back into the boat.  “Don’t worry, we’ve got you!” they call as they pull the line in.  “Just hang on and everything’s going to be fine.”

That lifeline of food reconnected us to our larger community in unexpected and  welcome ways.  We hadn’t seen our friends Carolyn, Cindee, and Dennett for far too long, for example, and when they dropped off meals we ended up spending hours discussing kids, jobs, and future plans, slowly reweaving friendships that in our busyness we had neglected.

Those meals also helped ease the stress of my new daily routine, as I found myself suddenly in charge of doing far more around the house. On our own we would have had a lot of take-out pizza and grilled cheese sandwiches, but thanks to the food angels we enjoyed delectable meals like Jan’s barbequed beef, Brenda’s lasagna, and souvlaki from Julia (who graced us with several meals, bless her generous heart). With Bob’s leg up on a chair, we would eat in the living room over TV trays, always beginning each meal with a toast to the ones who had prepared it.

We’re fortunate in that Bob’s medical misadventure was relatively minor and our lives returned to normal after six weeks. But his recovery period gave us a deeper empathy for those who must deal with sickness for many months or years.  We now realize that the line that separates health from disability is razor-thin, and that those who deal with chronic illness need a steady stream of friends bearing food and good cheer, not just a one-time delivery.

Given our experiences, I vow to try to do things differently in the future. While in the past I’ve made meals for friends in need, too often I decided that I was busy and that someone else would likely step forward to help.  Now I’m going to be less inclined to just make a phone call and more willing to get out a casserole pan. I want to keep in mind Cindee’s trick of delivering the chicken in a crockpot so that it’s ready to be plugged in and cooked.  And I will remember that sometimes people going through hard times want both food and company, and sometimes just a pot of chili and quick hug are enough.

I’ll do all this because I’ve learned the truth of our neighbor Julia’s words:  if made by people who care for you, pickled beets do indeed have amazing powers of healing.