The Common Cure August Letter- The Crab Stew

The Common Cure letters are normally just for subscribers, but since I painted this one as a memory painting, I'm sharing the full August letter here. Details on how to sign up are below. 

Dear Friends,

Here we are, somehow in August already.

I have always thought of July as summer's Saturday. School is out, many people are off work, and there is an energy and freedom to it so that the whole day stretches open in front of you with nothing waiting on the other side of it. You can stay up late and sleep in and not think past today. August has always felt like Sunday to me. Still summer, still hot, still technically free, but you can feel Monday coming. There is a school supply list somewhere. There is a schedule about to start back up. You cannot let go the same way you could in July, because some part of you is already getting ready for what is next.

But in our family, there was generally one unspoken rule that summer was not allowed to end without a crab stew. One of my favorite things to see in July and August was when Daddy would pull into the yard with a wooden crab crate on the tailgate of his truck. If it was covered in a potato sack, that meant there were live crabs inside, and things were about to get real. He would heft that crate down off the truck bed and get it settled on the ground near his stool, and when he pulled back the sack, you could see them piled up, slowly crawling over each other, blowing bubbles, a few with their claws locked together. Wet and glistening, that dark teal green of the shell against the vivid blue of the claws with those bright crimson tips. I still paint blue crabs today because of that color. There is nothing else quite like it.

Daddy would then set up his stool on the far side of the smokehouse, the small building he then used as a barn to hold tools and such but which was the building his grandparents had once used to actually smoke meat, with a narrow, shallow creek running along behind it. Every now and then you'd catch a tiny crab that had wandered up that far, though most of them stayed further down, where the creek widened out along Old Lupton Road and emptied into Brown's Creek, where you could see all the buoys marking the pots that held that season's whole bounty. He'd pull on his thick black gloves, turn the hose to a hard spray, and get to work. He'd crack the shell, pull the legs off, pull the dead man's fingers (the gills) out, and then let the water take the rest. He always had to get his mouth right while he worked with his hands, something between concentration, performance, and grimace, and we'd sit around him and watch him do it like it was the best show in town. And it really was.

Cleaning that many crabs took the better part of an afternoon before Moma even had them in the pot with the bacon grease, onions, potatoes, and flour gravy. Then it took another hour or two around the table to eat them, working the meat out with a little crab knife, dipping every bite in the gravy and Old Bay seasoning. When you got a piece of lump meat off clean, still attached to its bit of shell, you held it up so the whole table could see, and say, "y'all look at this one!" Daddy would grin like he was so proud. He used to say you knew it was a good crab stew when the gravy was dripping off your elbows.

ma made the best buttermilk biscuits to go with it. You'd split one open and pour that gravy over it and top it with cracklins, along with potatoes and stewed corn, cracklins on those too. Fried hard crabs were always my favorite, though I never turned down stewed. It was work to make that meal and work to eat it, and nobody minded either kind of work, because you only got that window in July and August. Hard crabs do not keep. You eat them right then, or you do not eat them at all.

Growing up, it was usually just Daddy, Moma, my sister Susan, and me at that table. Before my time, it had been Daddy's parents and grandparents and whoever else was around, and every now and then my grandmother would still come sit in on ours too. When Jason came along, my senior year of high school, he dove right into the tradition without blinking, which meant Daddy had to get a few dozen more crabs to make it worth the trouble. Moma always preferred the sides and would only pick at a couple, but Susan, Daddy, and I could put away a dozen or two apiece on our own. If you got invited to a crab stew, you were somebody special.

The last time we had stewed crabs together was August of 2024. Daddy had turned 71 that July, and we all knew without saying it that this was likely his last birthday. He'd lost most of his appetite by then, but he still loved to eat, or he loved thinking about the next bite or the next meal while he was still working on the one in his mouth. I get that from him. Somebody gave Moma a mess of crabs that summer and she had us all over. I can still see him at the end of the table with his crab knife in his hand, barely touching his plate. None of us said it out loud. We didn't have to. Everybody at that table knew this was the last time he would sit there with a pile of shells in front of him. He passed away a month later.

I have spent two years since trying to figure out what to do with a memory that heavy with love and that heavy with knowing what was coming. What I have landed on is this. The season closes whether you are ready or not. That table, that ritual, that whole loud messy hour or two of us picking crabs together, was never really about the crabs. It was about the tradition. It was about all of us being in the same place at the same time, doing the same slow work with our hands, before the season and everything else ran out.

And that is the thing I keep coming back to. The stew will happen again someday, when we are ready, and it won't be without him there. What we would need… the memories, the knowledge, even Daddy’s personal crab knife… are still right here, waiting on us.

So maybe that is the real prescription this August. Not to hold onto everything at its peak before it turns. To trust that some of what you love most does not run out at all. It just waits for you to be ready to pick it back up.

With love from New Bern,

Audra 

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