After a couple of
hours, MK and I finished the day's long uphill climb and meet up with the five Australians
who are part of our larger group of eleven walking along the Camino de Santiago
in northwestern Spain. We rested briefly at a cafe in a small trail-side
village while having our cups of coffee and some Spanish cakes. The weather was spectacular, unlike what we
had experienced on most of our other days where the rain and wind were our
constant companions. We needed to take advantage of it and make up for the
miles lost.
“Time to get a move
on,” I said as we drained our mugs and licked the remaining crumbs off of our
plates.
“Yes,” I overheard
Tony, the Australians’ 80-year old family patriarch, say to his son as he
lifted his pack onto his back. "Let's harvest and butter the
turnips."
It was a strange, but funny
way to say "it's time to go," a saying Tony had picked up somewhere
in his world travels. It stuck with me, but I never had a chance to ask him
where he had heard it or what its true meaning was. It wasn’t until about a
month after getting home and sharing my journal with this story as one of the
entries did Tony explain it origins.
“I didn’t retell to you the Dutch saying about buttering turnips very well,” Tony told me in an email. “The first I heard it was when I worked in Holland in 1978-80 and shared an office with two Dutch men. One of them - Joost - was a farmer’s son around my age. He had lived in Europe during the depression and World War II. They were very tough times. They survived two near-famines, especially during the war when the German army stripped farms of all the food it could find. The remaining lowly turnips became a food staple. Joost said his father loathed idleness and if he ever found Joost sitting around when there were chores to be done, the father would tell him that being idle would ‘butter no turnips’. The imagery of the saying stuck with me and I just blurted it out but sort of upside down when you heard me use it.”
“I didn’t retell to you the Dutch saying about buttering turnips very well,” Tony told me in an email. “The first I heard it was when I worked in Holland in 1978-80 and shared an office with two Dutch men. One of them - Joost - was a farmer’s son around my age. He had lived in Europe during the depression and World War II. They were very tough times. They survived two near-famines, especially during the war when the German army stripped farms of all the food it could find. The remaining lowly turnips became a food staple. Joost said his father loathed idleness and if he ever found Joost sitting around when there were chores to be done, the father would tell him that being idle would ‘butter no turnips’. The imagery of the saying stuck with me and I just blurted it out but sort of upside down when you heard me use it.”
I was grateful for the
explanation. While its origins arose during one of history’s darkest chapters,
it is a reminder to make the best of your time whether it is to endure
unimaginable hardship or to make up for lost miles during a sunny day.
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