Toad Suck and Twitter Synchronicity

I was sitting outside at Joe Bar today with @ChefReinvented (and Bubba, 'natch), scheming about an idea. 

After the scheming, we meandered on a conversational path that went from the food scene in Seattle to A Very Fun Business Idea Which Is Still Top Secret to how to manage worlds crashing together on Facebook to German cinema to why Berlin is a cool city with a textured identity to the fact that I'm from...

wait for it...

TOAD SUCK, ARKANSAS.

It's an improbable origin, true.  Even more improbable is that my very own father, also a schemer, schemed and dreamed up the now cultishly attended Toad Suck Daze festival.  Yep, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and I am the daughter of the original Head of the Toad Council.  The Head Toad.  Which makes me a Tadpole, I guess, but never mind that.

So @ChefReinvented and I had a good laugh over that and other things, and went our separate ways.  I went back to work, and then home, and then to the gym, and then back home to have a bowl of soup and catch up on what twitterlicious Friday night banter might be happening.

Up pops this tweet from @Herbguy: Proud to say I've been to TOAD SUCK, ARKANSAS. Anyone else been there?

I blink hard and look again.  Still there.  Toad.Suck.Arkansas. Now it's a small world, so I figure, OK, so maybe @ChefReinvented said something, or there was an earlier tweet that I missed while I was at the gym.

But no!  I check, and no.  Nothing was said.  This was out of the blue and @Herbguy is now suspected of being some sort of mindreader or being otherwise omniscient.

Or, it's like one of my co-workers says: "Twitter gets in your head, man."

Behold the fine cuisine of Toad Suck, NOT available on Twitter, in spite of its skillz:

Mary Travers, Rest in Peace

Mary Travers died. 

"And when I'm gone, and when I'm dead, dead, and gone, there'll be one child born and a world to carry on, to carry on."

Laura Nyro wrote this when she was 17.  Peter, Paul and Mary recorded it in 1966. I listened to it in 2009 when I read of Mary's passing.

I can't explain why I sobbed.

Maybe because Peter, Paul and Mary were playing all the time when I was a child and I can sing all the parts to all the songs from some deep place of utterly embodied memory. 

Maybe because Mary sang for a better world, and her death makes me marvel at all that has been accomplished since she lifted her voice so many years ago, thanks in part to her.

Maybe because so much distance is yet to be covered, and her deep, resonant voice won't accompany our journey.

I'm listening to these songs over and over now on iTunes, singing along, and remembering the LPs and 10 Windsor Drive and my mom at the piano and my dad on sax and the harmonies that have sustained us all.

Mary, thank you for being one of the first voices I wanted to emulate, as a singer, and as a citizen of a scattered world.

3 seeds.

My friend Chris came into my office in late July with a bag of "Sarzana" squash seeds from Italy. She asked if I wanted a few, since they produced lovely, delicately flavored courgettes and were compact, plant-wise--meaning they didn't vine and trail off over everything in a 15-foot radius.

I loved the package: so very not "American seed packet" in format, with planting instructions in Italian.

I held out my hand and she tipped 1,2,3,4,5,6 seeds into it, which I placed in an envelope labeled "Sarzana" and put in my purse. A few days later, three of those seeds were in a mound of dirt in the front of my plot, and a few days ago, I harvested my first squash.

I sliced them thinly, lengthwise, dredged them in flour, and fried them up in hot olive oil until they were golden brown with some darker brown spots on each side.

QUICKLY onto a paper towel; QUICKLY a sprinkle of sea salt and a few turns of the peppermill; QUICKLY a squeeze of lemon--just a few drops--and ooooooh, a race to the table to sit down while they were still blistering hot.

That's late summer on a plate, right there.

Twitter, Impressionism, and My Mind's Nose

@fourchickens Pressure cooker growing up in AR was always turnips and greens. I hear that jiggle sound, I smell greens in mind's nose.

Something about the 140 character limit on Twitter posts (like the one I sent above to @fourchickens) aligns well with the impressionistic modality of sense memories.

They, too, are fleeting and concentrated.  The actual smell of turnip greens (which I love) is not nearly as evocative as reading a brief tweet from @shibaguyz about their pressure cooker.  Which leads to calling up the sound in my mind's ear.  Which leads to a scene in my mind's eye. Which leads to the smell in my mind's nose.  Which is inseparable from the feel of steam on my mind's skin as I recall the countless times I stood just behind my mother holding vigil over a live pressure cooker.

And today: @bonnevivante posted an ode to pie crusts made with lard from an older NYT piece.  I read the word "lard" and my mind's tongue tasted and felt Mamaw's fried pies, and my fingers knew just how they had rested in my hand as a child, the grease and flour dust on my palm, wiped surreptitiously on my pants leg, when I knew I shouldn't.

Ohhhhh, is that recipe in the family cookbook, I wonder?  I haven't thought of those pies in years...the extra ones on a plate, tucked in between the Louisiana Hot Sauce bottle and salt and pepper shakers under a square cloth on the middle of the kitchen table...usually filled with the apples or peaches she had dried, but sometimes with chocolate...always gone before the next meal...

I think about what will linger about my life today.  When I'm old, what will I smell or read that will call up "Seattle, late summer 2009" and cause me to stop what I'm doing, throw my head back, and close my eyes?

What impression, what smell will bring me back to this day?  What will lead me to love the moment doubly--the then and the memory of then?

Frank Bruni: "I'm not the guy for this."

Frank Bruni is on a book tour, now that his book "Born Round" is out and he's no longer the New York Times food critic.

I just returned from hearing him chat with Warren Etheredge at one of the "Words & Wine" events that Kim Ricketts puts on in Seattle.  They talked about all manner of things: "eating widely" as a reasonable credential for being a food critic; mothers as stiff competition for Christian martyrs; good and bad food experiences; the expectation people have that you MUST be a good cook if you're a good eater (FB prefers to consume, he tells us); the reality that food criticism is no longer a "local" phenomenon in the internet age, and that a review is as much about a vicarious experience as it is about gathering data on whether a restaurant is worth (or not) visiting; the difficulty of finding synonyms for "tender" without resorting to "toothsome" and other verbal contortions.

I would have been content with hearing much more about any one of those conversation strands, but it was a different topic altogether that intrigued me the most, not at all food-related.

Bruni said that he often thinks, when first being offered an opportunity like New York Times food critic, "I'm not the guy for this."

And I wondered:

How does he get out of his own way in those moments?  How does he drive down the middle between humility and ego?  How does he take his self-doubts, his admitted issues with body image (which he battles not with fad diets but with exercise, good trainers, and a short attention span--being BORED with self-loathing, turns out, is more effective for him than The Cabbage Soup Diet), and STILL step right up to the opportunity and say "Yes.  I am called to do this" and go out and trump self-doubt with self-confidence?

It's not that I'm fascinated by the "imposter complex" as a psychological phenomenon (we'll save my own Ph.D. completion stories for another blog post). 

No, what I am musing on this evening is that, while there are many models of Ego Made Flesh who combine self-aggrandizement with success, they are far less compelling to me than Frank Bruni's combination of success and humility.  The ability to move between direct and honest critique of a famed restaurant and the statement that sometimes a 1/4-pounder with cheese is what's called for; the graciousness with which he indulges audience questions; the lowered eyes and covering of his face when Warren or an audience member points out his considerable attractiveness: these are endearing.

And while I might not say "no" to tagging along with him to a destination restaurant, the truth is that I left the evening thinking I would much rather share a conversation with him among friends, over scrambled eggs.  Or lingering over some modest fare made transcendent by embracing appetite, hospitality, intellect, and spaciousness of spirit around a big table of fellow travelers.

I'm glad he thinks he's "not the guy for this" as he greets the world every day, because if he did...he wouldn't be.

I like to play dress-up.

I don't have The One Big Passion.  I've always thought I wanted one.  To be a Potter.  To be a Weaver.  To be a Writer.  To be a Photographer.  To be a Painter.  To be a Filmmaker.  To be a Singer.  To be a Chef.  I've done or still do or want to do all those things.  But none exclusively.

I've always thought I had some kind of ADD, some deficiency that made me unable to concentrate on just one thing.  Or that I just hadn't found the one thing that would get me to settle down.  I was the Bachelorette of Callings.  No commitments, baby, no tying me down.

But lately I've been thinking it's altogether something else.  I reckon it's not an accident that I loved to play dress-up as a child.  When my parents would go out, I'd go into their bedroom and turn their closets inside out and upside down as I put on one thing after another.  Mom's stuff, Dad's stuff--sometimes combined--and always accessorized with whatever trinkets and oversized shoes allowed me to inhabit and move freely in the faraway worlds in my head.  There were soundtracks in there and smells and furniture and pets and foods.  I would invite my real friends (of which there were few, truth be told, until I got older) to come over and participate, but they got frustrated by my inability to stick with one narrative.  I was in and out of a story before they ever got past "once upon a time" and, really, what was the point of trying to keep up?

In college, my first roommate used to throw her hands up at my habit of sitting in front of the stereo, changing LPs like a short-order cook flipping pancakes, Al Green to Beethoven's "Pastorale" Symphony to Dave Brubeck to Linda Ronstadt and all the time singing along on not one, but ALL the parts.

And now I'm officially middle-aged and on a trajectory toward dotage, I suppose.  I embrace the irony that my depth is my flightiness and I give deep and solemn thanks that I can clap with joy at so many things, all on the same day, and DO.

There's a term for this in German: "Lebenskünstler"--someone who is an artist and whose medium is life.  It sounds much more impressive in German, but really, it's just a fancy way of saying that I'm someone who (still) likes to play dress-up.

culinary stream of consciousness

It started pretty innocently: ever since I moved to the west coast, 3 summers' worth of time, I've been awed by the fact that I can actually get Real.Cherries and Real.Figs and Real.Huckleberries.  Sure, I'm happy about other things, too, but I got over my Salmon.Euphoria pretty quickly, and the catch in my throat when I round a bend and get a glimpse of Mt. Rainier is no longer accompanied by an audible gasp.

But the fruit?  Still inspires actual hand-clapping.  My latest thing is working up glazes for figs, running them under the broiler and then scraping the fruity, bubbly, steaming goo off onto a scoop of hard-frozen vanilla ice cream and then RUNNING to the couch to enjoy it mid-melt.  If I trip, it's no good--pre-melt and post-melt are not the same experience, and plus, there's the mess on the carpet.

Last night I made some with orange juice and balsamic vinegar, and the flavor took me instantly to a childhood place: 711 E. 17th St. in Little Rock, AR, sitting on a counter stool at a bar with a yellow top and a boomerang pattern, watching my great-grandmother, Nanny, making Lane Cake.

I actually hated it.  My little girl palate wasn't down with vinegar in a cake frosting, and Black Walnuts had some sort of acrid thing going on that alarmed me.  And raisins?  Meh.  Too "lunchbox" to be on a cake.  But somehow the taste memory lingered--like a happy virus lying dormant--and it came alive last night, transformed into something that made sense.

Turns out, though, that Nanny's recipe wasn't at all traditional.  I've been poking around on the internet, and hers didn't have candied cherries or coconut or icing, per se.  It was a vanilla-y, butter-y cake (well, oleo-y), and it had a cooked filling that featured vinegar, Black and English walnuts, pecans, and raisins that oozed out from between the layers and down the sides.

So what to do?  I'm thinking of taking my fig/balsamic/orange thing and some of the other components of Nanny's cake and see if I can't come up with a hybrid.   She was a great experimenter, so I feel certain she would approve.

First challenge: I'm not in the Ozarks.  Where do I get Black Walnuts?

 

Good sitting weather.

Sometimes it's not enough to ruminate alone.
Sometimes it's not enough to e-mail and tweet and blog and call and text.

It's good sitting weather outside tonight.

A porch would be called for.

A porch and two rocking chairs and creak-able boards.
And chuck-will's-widows in the distance.
Two friends sitting in the dark, sipping and sighing.

Saying nothing.
Saying everything.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=2745380

And here is a response to this post from my far away friend, Lea, who totally got it:

"If I had a mind to
I think Id like to shuffle on down where
I hear they do hear
Chuck Will's Widow in the air

tinkling icecubes in empty glasses
like soft spoken persuasions of longing
no expectations of flutterings
only constant calling

finally soothing, quieting
knowing the song will always be
for those who need to hear
there, diligent on duty"

Lea

Chris, we hardly knew ye.

My friend Chris is dead. Story is, he took his own life Monday. I wasn't there. Truth is, he was always an enigma. The man could tell a story. He is one of the most intriguing figures I'll ever know. Never at peace. Until now. May he finally have some rest.

burnt toast and cow butter

This morning I made some toast to serve as a vehicle for a slather of thick Greek yogurt and peach preserves. Naturally, I burned the toast. I took it from the toaster and carried it over to the sink to scrape, scrape, scrape the burned edges off and redeem the otherwise perfectly good slab of Macrina goodness from the countertop compost bucket AKA fruit fly hotspot.

I've burned lots of toast in my lifetime, and every.single.time.I.do, I think of my maternal grandmother, Mommo. When I was a kid, I spent lots of time at her house on E. 17th St. in Little Rock, where she lived with my grandfather and both her parents. I adored the rest of them, but had a somewhat conflicted relationship with her.

Here's an example of why: once I returned from a year abroad in Germany, and when I emerged from the jetway at the airport to see all the waiting throng (pre-TSA) after 12 months away, and sporting a super fab and hip German haircut, Mommo frowned, put her hands on her hips, and screamed: "Jenifer, why do you deliberately sabotage your appearance??? I HATE that haircut!!!" But that's a different story...

Mommo also had a tendency to burn toast, and in my stubborn child way, I refused to eat it. It was SULLIED! It was not PERFECT!!! Never mind that the toast had been scraped, that there were no more burned edges--there were no EDGES!!! At all!!! It was aesthetically compromised, and I demanded a do-over.

Now I understand why she was so frustrated with me. It's not even that she had been raised during the Great Depression and to throw away salvageable toast was unthinkable, it's just that I've learned in the meantime that the good bits of Macrina toast trump the uneven edge.

Even more puzzling was my childhood aversion to "cow butter." My paternal grandparents lived on a farm and my grandmother churned her own butter. It was ever present on the table and accompanied the homemade biscuits or cornbread that she made for crowds of Cecil B. DeMille proportions at every single meal. Oh, how everyone fawned over that butter. Problem was, I had seen the cow get milked--an unsavory process, to my teensy child eyes--had seen the churning process, had seen Mamaw's batwing arm undulate and flap as she churned, had seen the clots separate from the buttermilk, had seen the paddling to get the water out...and none of that added up in an appetizing way to "butter" for me.

So while everyone else clawed and scratched to get a bit of that creamy goodness on their bread or their cob of corn or their grits, I demanded Sherwin-Williams colored Mazola. Oleo! I wanted a stick of oleo on the table!

I think now of all the butter I missed. Of all the sweat and love and, yes, duty and fatigue, that Mamaw put into it. Of the biscuits she made every night and put in the icebox to haul out in the morning to come to temperature while she milked the cows or fed the chickens, of the aunts and uncles and cousins and the splendid table and the cedar chest I sat on, and the singing and laughter, and the red, red dirt of the road in front of the house, and the cow that produced that butter, and the ridiculous stick of waxy, y-e-l-l-o-w Mazola.

I want a do-over.

signs of life

Between my apartment door and my plot in the community garden--about a block's worth of walk--is the gazebo of the Cascade People's Center. During the day, the benches are empty, and underneath them are plastic grocery bags of stuff, a sleeping bag here, a piece of cardboard there. As soon as dusk approaches, the people who belong to those things return one by one and prepare to stretch out for the night. This is where they live, but they know to be scarce during the light.

The rats, more plentiful, aren't bound by the fear of being ushered away, and they are brazen even in the bright sunshine.

Across from the gazebo is a small grove of flowering trees, under which is ground cover with small, glossy leaves (cool in the heat of the day) and a few rocks and concrete sculptures with mosaic. During our hot spell a couple of weeks ago, the people who are normally gone by day stayed. They didn't sit in the gazebo, but they sat in the cool ground cover under the trees.

Today I walked past that spot and this is what I saw. A Ben and Jerry's container, filled with dried up roses, blueberries, and other flora. Left behind.

I wonder if it was a shrine. Or a memorial.

Or the kind of sign of civilization that causes people to adorn their dinner tables with vases of flowers.

I hope there was once ice cream in that container, and that the people who ate it had good company and together took some comfort from that cold deliciousness.

I thought about picking it up and throwing it away, but on second thought, I determined that it was not trash.

Oh, to be taller. Or more willing to risk brambles.

Water, water everywhere.

Let the record show: on August 13, 2009, at 5:30 PM, your blogmistress heard thunder. At 5:35 PM, she was sitting in her car with the rain coming down in torrents. At 5:40 PM, she drove past the garden, and could swear she saw the hollyhocks straining upward, the fruit trees smiling from canopy to roots.

And now, at home, the window is open and the rain is still coming down. Not an isolated shower, this. Not a tease of droplets, after a parched summer. No, this is the rain that is rhythmic, that creates puddles, that rolls in waves down Fairview toward Lake Union, that causes cars to rev and scream their way up Denny Hill.

One might curse it, if it were December and the veil of wet darkness had grown heavy and with months of winter yet to come.

But it's not. It's August, after dry, after hot, and with more dry forecast.

So for this evening, it is simply relief and grace. I'm tempted to go to the garden and remember what it feels like to pull a weed out of sodden ground, but instead, I will sit by the open window--TV off--with a cup of tea.

Eyes closed.

Just the sound of the rain.

Blackberries on Mercer

I stopped to wait for the "walk" signal during rush hour traffic on Mercer. I saw these blackberries, growing clean out of the pavement. I ate a few, perfect, sweet, plump, and I wished I had a bucket with me.

For an instant the whizzing traffic was the wind sweeping across the field, and the seagulls were Eastern Meadowlarks, and my t-shirt was an apron, and I would pick the berries and put them in my apron, and I would walk back to the house and the screen door would whine and slap as it shut behind me, and there would be a pie and strands of hair glued with sweat to my brow, and my sturdy prairie husband, after a long day of toil, would eat it with no words but with eyes closed in savoring, in appreciation.

Then the light changed and I picked my way through the jam of cars waiting to enter the I-5 ramp.

I might go back tomorrow.

"You were moving very slowly."

Look. I don't really like light opera. I'm not much of a fan of musicals, either ("Spring Awakening" notwithstanding). But I'm a season ticket holder at a certain local theater, and this month's performance was, well, I don't quite know what it was. Wagner meets a barbecue meets the Porter Wagoner show meets a tractor pull meets...yeah. I don't know.

Still, I'm down with camp, and I figured it would be that. And so I enlisted my friend W, a Texan and a foodie, to go along. We started off with a fabulous cold, roasted chicken with a lovely mayonnaise, a bread-tomato salad, and a little wine at Café Presse. We sat outside. The breeze was cool, the sun was out, perfect! The evening was off to a great start!

Got to the theater and settled in. Check. Heard the announcement to turn off cell phones. Check. I took out my iPhone and dutifully flipped the little side switch to silence the thing and put it back in my purse. The...uhhhh...show? spectacle? hootenanny? started and I found my jaw tightening. Everyone around me was acting like this was the most profound thing they'd ever seen or heard, and I was just starting to analyze how that could be when I heard the tell-tale sign of someone's phone. Sigh.

How TIRESOME. I, and everyone else, started craning necks around in indignant disbelief--I mean, I wasn't so sure I liked this particular show, but it's the principle, people! It was very close to me, and the curious thing was that it wasn't a typical ringtone. It was Pink Martini! Pink Martini singing "Donde estas Yolanda" and that's no shrinking violet of a tune. All of a sudden it hit me. That was my Pandora radio on the iPhone, tuned to the Pink Martini station, and it WAS PLAYING. OUT LOUD. IN SPITE OF THE OFF SWITCH. What the...?!?!

My heart went from a dead stop to pounding out of my chest (oh, great, even MORE noise), and I fumbled with my purse and tried every possible way to turn the phone off without removing it from the muffling effect of its dark home. But, I mean, how do you turn a phone off that you think is already, you know, OFF?

I had to take it out. People are practically surrounding me with torches and pitchforks at this point (in their minds and mine), but I finally managed to turn the thing completely off.

I spent most of the rest of the first act trying to get my core body temperature and heart rate back to "normal" range, and eventually settled back into my low-grade disdain for the Teuto-Texan, Tex-Deutsch, uhhh, hybrid thing unfolding in front of me. OK, it was kind of entertaining, and there were some funny lines and songs, and so all was well.

Intermission came, the lights went up, and people dispersed. I recounted with horror to W what had transpired with the phone, and we had a good laugh.

Until a man and a woman appeared in the row in front of us, standing, looking down at me. "Are you the woman with the phone?" Oh, crap. I'm at Friedrichsstrasse border crossing. It's 1983 and I'm in East Berlin and the border guards know I haven't spent all my 25 East Marks and they're on to me, man. "Yeah, I'm terribly sorry, I didn't think it was mine, since I had turned the switch to "silence" and I..." They stopped me, disapprovingly. "You were moving very slowly." Um, well, yeah, I repeated that I, too was looking around for the perpetrator, since I had turned the switch, and... "We saw you and you were moving slowly. In such a situation you must react immediately and..." OK, now WAIT a minute. I interrupted. "Listen, I understand that. What YOU are not hearing is that I didn't think it was my phone! I had turned OFF the phone feature and somehow the radio app got activated--I don't understand myself--but I.DID.NOT.THINK.IT.WAS.MY.PHONE!" Finally, the woman seemed to get it and said I must have been mortified.

Meanwhile, she and her man friend are still towering over me, still have their arms crossed, are still speaking loudly, are still drawing attention to themselves as The Theater Grenzpolizei and me as the person trying to swim my way through the pan-Berlin sewers.

I think they finally just gave up. There's not much of a narrative arc to "earnest" and so they just shuffled back to their seats and sat down.

Oh, and the musical? The costumes were fun, and I'll never hear the word "hogtied" again without thinking of it.

not a fairytale

My personal trainer at the gym keeps telling me to take a "day off" from time to time, and truth be told, that scares me. I know all the reasons I should: avoid boredom; avoid sense of deprivation; rattle my metabolism; give me tools to learn moderation; blahblahblah.

But the great fear is that I will get off the trail, find some beautiful valley, which will lead me to a mountain, which will reveal this and that and yet another thing I should behold...and, oh, the waterfall! and before you know it...I've lost the trail altogether. I will have eaten all the breadcrumbs I left to find my way back and there I'll be. Hansel and Gretel all rolled into one, reclining on the ground, stuffing her face with breadcrumbs at the foot of a waterfall.

footwashing

The news today is HEAT, HEAT, and MORE HEAT.

And from the middle of this record heat wave, here in the 86 degree INTERIOR of my apartment at 8 AM, I have to say I'm tired of it.

I grew up in Arkansas, so I'm no stranger to heat like this. It's unrelenting there in the summer, and the humidity is always wrapped around you like a shawl of thick soup. And even though almost everyone has air conditioning these days, it was not so when I was a child.

And because I was a child, the standard tricks for cooling off were always linked to being cared for: my mom urging me to drink ice water, my dad placing a bowl of ice on the kitchen table and positioning an oscillating fan behind it and making sure that my brother and I were in its path as we ate our supper. My great-grandmother turning on the attic fan at night to pull the slightly cooler air in from outside and taking me to the bathroom to run cold water over my wrists, just at the pulse points: "it will cool your blood so you can sleep!" My other grandmother making all the children sit on the edges of the beds before retiring, as she moved from room to room in the dark with a basin of cold water and a washcloth, bathing our feet before we put them onto the white sheets.

I couldn't help thinking about these things the last few nights as I walked past the gazebo into the community garden at dusk to water my second crop of mustard greens and my beet seedlings for fall.

There were the men and women who frequent the benches and line the mulched beds beneath trees. Their plastic bags were with them, their pants legs rolled up, their shirts open, their hair plastered with sweat to their faces. They had water...I looked for that. But it was miserable. And though a couple smiled and greeted me and remarked on the misery of such temperatures, there were others who lowered their eyes as I passed.

I got to the shed and retrieved the water key and the watering can and set about my business. I wondered what would happen if I gathered up all those people and sat them down on one of the benches, one-by-one, and poured this cool water over their feet. If I would be refreshing them or just washing away my own sense of conflictedness about the social and cultural realities that structured my life and theirs.

I finished watering and walked back through the lushness (why, oh, why, didn't I plant tomatoes, this of all years? I could have even managed okra, I'm certain, with this weather!), and though I wanted to escape out the front entrance, I retraced my steps.

I walked back through the makeshift encampment, and I met the eyes of everyone who met mine.

There is no message to this musing, no end.

It's still very hot.

I miss my grandmothers.

Green beans for Salade Niçoise at Elizabeth's dinner party. New York, 6/20/09

I harvested some garlic scapes tonight.

I harvested some garlic scapes tonight, in order to allow my garlic bulbs to develop more robustly and juicily. Really? No. I harvested some garlic scapes tonight, in order to bring something back from the garden. To have a need for the little knife Zoe helped me find in the shed. To claim something besides a weed. To walk triumphantly back to my apartment, with dirty fingers and green bounty curling around them. To see something new and just picked in my sink. To make something that promises to be delicious and to put it in my refrigerator and know that when I get home after a stressful day at work tomorrow, there will be sunshine and greenness and dirt and community and sweat and pungent, garlicky hope in there to greet me and adorn a plate of pasta.

Nature, meet culture.