Just Food

Driving in the usual way it's five miles through the State Forest, then five miles on Route 125, then seven miles along the river into town. The long way around it's seven miles through the forest then 17 miles along the river. Both routes share the last seven miles, but otherwise they're different in terms of specific environment. The plants are a lot different. I wanted some cattail shoots, so I went the usual way, out past the lake. In the make-over of park services they've allowed access to a new area, a small cove, and it's thick in cattails. It takes about ten minutes to harvest a batch. These are very good, peeled and steamed, with pesto mayonnaise; and I'd bought a bag of mixed baby greens, which I wilted with hot butter and mushrooms. Wilted salads were a big thing, when I was a kid, fried salt-pork and cornbread. I still love it, though my mother would never have considered morels. As a family we did harvest wild blackberries and wild plums, to make jams and jellies, ate fresh fish twice a week, and had access to the great military commissaries at very low cost, milk and butter and cheese. I never knew we were poor, Upper Lower Class, until I was in college. Even then, the wealthier kids, mostly from the Northeast (going to college in Florida) vied to be asked to dinner at my parents' house. There was usually a weekend fish-fry, shared effort, Dad fried the fish, Carlene made the hush puppies, somebody made slaw, Mom made cornbread sticks, essentially an all-you-can-eat buffet for free. First-time Yankee students usually ate until they vomited. At the same time, I had never eaten a mushroom and never seen an artichoke. It just struck me, the name for tiny ice crystals that fall out of an often clear sky is spiculae, I'd lost that word, so I write it on a slip of paper and pin it to the wall. There are dozens of slips of paper, with words or quotes pinned to my walls, they're part of my memory process. Like some radio shows, this time of year, talking about proms. I went to mine, with Sandra Harper (as I remember), but it wasn't anything special, a night in a rented suit. In my mind, I was already out of there, having accepted a job in summer-stock theater for that summer, which changed my life completely. New England, gay people (who ran theater before AIDS), good and interesting food, and a general intelligence that reached beyond mere survival. A whole new world. That I could do this still mystifies me. I would say that nothing prepared me, but something must have. Now, fifty years later, I'm collecting rain water in a bucket to wash my dishes, reading by candlelight, and drinking moonshine. Talk about success. But maybe it is the measure, what you can do without. It's at least a measure by which the rest can be judged. I love the tension drawn by a line in the sand, not that it means anything, it's, after all, a line in the sand, ephemeral at best. After the hour spent on commas in that last sentence, I spent all of my effort building a small mousetrap from small sticks and string. It didn't work, but it was a fun project. I spent an entire evening gluing sticks together, forgetting the basic tenet of 'outward force', a trapped mouse, like a trapped pig, is always going to push against the fence, so the rails need to be on the inside of the posts. Joel thought it was stupid I'd read Thoreau's journal, which it would be, but I read a lot, so I can spare the time.