The Peanut Trap

Marshall is asleep in my bedroom. Adella is playing happily, singing Primary songs to herself and occasionally conversing with Blue Inga, her colorful, imaginary friend. I am taking advantage of this rare morning quiet time. I am busy on my computer preparing to advise an anxious parent about college admissions, a competitive sport in northern New Jersey. When I finally look up from my keyboard to assess what Adella is doing, I see a neat line of peanuts running the length of my family room rug.

Is Adella playing at Hansel and Gretel, I wonder. Surely she has not left the trail for fear she will get lost in my house.

She catches me staring. “I’m setting a trap for Marshall, Granma.” Then she carefully mounds a hill of peanuts at the end of the peanut trail.

“Who will clean all those peanuts up?” I ask.

She gives me a curious stare and laughs. “Silly Granma. Marshall will. He will eat them all up,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Of course,” I say, knowing full well Marshall could never eat that many peanuts.

And as I look at those peanuts, so deliberately laid, I think of Pearl Buck. Peanuts often remind me of Pearl Buck.  She mentions them in one of my favorite essays, “A Debt to Dickens.” In the essay, Buck describes her loneliness as a child of American missionary parents in China at the turn of the twentieth century who measures the enchantment of her first encounter with Dickens by her undisturbed pocketful of peanuts.

As I spy the open door to my pantry, the Adella's red stool pushed up against it, I think the essay particularly apt. Buck describes the hot August afternoon when the household is asleep and her parents preoccupied and she, a seven-year-old with no playmates, is left to her own devices. She pushes her “three cornered bamboo stool on top of a small table”  to get to “a long row of somber blue books on a very high shelf”--the Dickens, which have been put out of reach by her parents who looked askance at novels. On her way to the veranda to read Oliver Twist, she stops “in the pantry for a pocketful of peanuts.”  

This lazy morning, Adella too has a preoccupied caregiver and is without her playmate Marshall. She too has been left to her own devices, so she has stopped at my pantry and has used her red stool in pursuit of a snack, a 2 ½ lb tin of Kirkland Brand Virginia peanuts. Adella also is not without a literary sidekick. On the coffee table near her peanut trap, she has placed her cloth-bound, pocket-sized book, The Last of the the Mohicans. I know that she has pushed my grandmother’s chair up to my mother’s tall bookshelf in the bedroom upstairs in order to retrieve her favorite volume. I know this because this is part of our ritual. When she comes to my house, rather than choosing my childhood books Make Way for Ducklings or Madeline or some other classic picture book conveniently shelved on the lowest shelf, Adella pushes the chair to the bookshelf to retrieve this particular volume from the middle of a higher shelf. This book then accompanies her throughout her stay. And just as soon as she leaves to go home with her father, I reshelve the Mohicans next to the larger, red leather bound volumes of Kipling that Pop Pop inherited from Baba, his grandmother.

It is a peculiar yet endearing ritual, for Adella cannot read. This novel has no pictures. But it is compact, a pocket-sized book created in an era long before paperbacks. A book sized perfectly for a small child. I imagine she enjoys the feel of the cloth cover in her hands and running her fingers over the silver embossed title and turning its thick, yellowed pages. Maybe someday she will read it, I think. Maybe someday she will enjoy it as much as I did. Which is why I long ago stopped fretting about her destroying a treasured book with her great-grandfather’s name beautifully inscribed inside the front cover. Carrying that book, I hopes, will teach her to love books like her mother and father, and like me and Pop Pop, and generations of her grandmothers and grandfathers. I hope to instill a love of books in her, to lure her to worlds of treasure.

Oliver Twist so mesmerizes young Pearl that she quickly forgets her pocketful of peanuts, noticing they are untouched hours later when she is called to dinner. Adella, being four, quickly moves on from her book and her well-laid peanut trap to a game of Scrabble, which she induces me to play according to her rules. We find all the A for Adella tiles and place them on the board, then she draws pictures on the scoresheets, expecting me to guess what each scribble is. I am not particularly adept at guessing and she begins to suspect as much when I keep asking clarifying questions, such as “Is it a person?” or “Is it an animal?” or “Does it live inside a house or outside?” But soon, luckily, we are interrupted by the waking of Marshall, who happily joins us.

Adella delights that he does, in fact, fall for her trap. Well, sort of. He eats the peanuts, but he does not start at the beginning of the trail. Rather he begins with the mound at the end and then works his way toward the beginning. Until he stops midway. He gets distracted by the Scrabble tiles. Of course, none of this matters to Adella. Her only purpose in setting her trap is to get Marshall to eat some peanuts. Which he does.

I, unfortunately, have a family room with a line of peanuts. As I expected, Adella was a tad bit overconfident in predicting Marshall would eat them all. Once more, my house evidences my status as a granny nanny. As does my peanut tin. For when I later reach for a handful of peanuts to snack on as I read, I discover another Scrabble tile: A for Adella.