A Literary Feast

The Farmer General > Recent > 2016

Archive for

Dancing on a Hot Skillet

Posted on October 14th, 2016

Rain patters on fallen leaves and the maple trees across the street blaze red. The companion oak trees next to them more modestly shift to gold while the conifers and evergreen shrubs hold fast to their northwest green. It’s grey this morning and cars hum by below, spraying water in their wake. The window is open, I sit on the bed, the door is shut. My husband is in the kitchen cooking Sunday breakfast while my nearly 3 year-old sits at the table contemplating the oatmeal I made for him 20 minutes ago. Once in awhile I hear him pick up the whistle his grandma sent him last week, giving an enthusiastic toot every few minutes.   This morning I both asked and took…

Categories: Uncategorized

My Kitchen

Posted on October 14th, 2016

My kitchen needs an upgrade. It is furnished with old painted cabinets…hollandaise yellow on the outside and rust red on the inside. Why anyone painted the interior of kitchen cabinets I will never know. The range is a mid-century electric with two large and two small coil burners. The kind that don’t sit level anymore and laugh at the idea of ‘even heat’. The ‘hood’ is just a GE fan cut into the wall through to the exterior of the house, with a pull string to open. It might be the propeller from a very tiny plane – I can’t say. It starts a few minutes after you open it – perfect for when you have a forgotten pan of oil on the coil…

Categories: Uncategorized

Going To Ground

Posted on October 14th, 2016

The mud under her boot soles rasped and rattled as though it had something to say but couldn’t remember how. It hadn’t rained since the last week in October, and the small river that ran through the cellar was little more than a trickle; along its banks lay little hillocks of earth neither wet nor damp. Dry mud, she thought as she dragged her feet through it, wishing she could kick off her boots and drag her toes through it. She imagined it would feel cool and crisp between her toes, like the scales of a fish that hasn’t been dead for long. She didn’t smile. The ceiling above her bounced like the underside of a drumhead, or at least she felt it did,…

Categories: Uncategorized

Eating Lunch Alone

Posted on October 14th, 2016

“Work is always a little sordid.” –Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer’s Gun The shock of a new job came like fall this year, an icy unexpected blast at the end of a lazy hot summer. After three years at my previous teaching job, my only actual “professional” experience, I had moved on. Nothing had been typical about the position that I left. I founded the school in the South Bronx straight out of Columbia with nine other educators, over half of them under thirty, with all the bright eyed wonder of someone who had moved to New York from suburban Texas only eleven months before. Needless to say I had my teeth metaphorically kicked in, repeatedly, in a variety of different ways. That is…

Categories: Uncategorized

Quack Low, Sweet Chariot

Posted on October 14th, 2016

The cooler weather, that search for thick socks, the first tentative roasting of root vegetables before the sun has set—the day still, somewhat, long. This is how I settle in. I laze and lank on the kitchen floor, pausing to stir sauce, pour wine, sneak rosemary into a roasting chicken, wedge chunks of butter beneath its translucent skin.   None of this can happen without some suspension of disbelief, some willful entry into a land where my eight by six foot kitchen expands palatially, where the hot water pipe that runs up the side of the stove converts to a gracious source of sustaining heat and I am cozy, swaddled, and all the tools of winter—crock pot, wooden spoon, herbs—are within easy reach. This…

Categories: Uncategorized

The Weather Underground

Posted on August 22nd, 2016

1.   How To Have A Body   Here are your limbs and where Oh here is your Head it has these many Places for looking and this line Jaw to hair that a hand Could go, hesitantly   It’s not clear? A finger passage Spells out the unspoken Is an alphabet of unconscious– You mean you just Want the manual, the sockets the Sight and its correction, the bone That follows the other bone, down To where the ground Begins, to where all Sentences end   The allen wrench Of your arteries, the pill That puts you out   Tab A Slot B Requires some Assembly.   2.   How To Be In Motion   It’s been some time, and maybe this is…

Categories: Uncategorized

Pour Lost Ones

Posted on August 22nd, 2016

You couldn’t really call the sound of the saxophone anything but blurry, he thought as he licked the grey foam from the edge of his glass. The beer made his mouth feel grainy and thick. He wiped his nose with the knuckles of his right hand; he leaned forward and licked the foam again, this time trying to taste it. Steel and spit, like the music, a strange empty sensation like the constant blab of the saxophone that blared beneath every phrase like some dark and fundamental presence, something older and grittier than the granite bedrock that kept the town from sliding into the river and out to sea. He ran a jagged fingernail along the wood of the bar and wished he were…

Categories: Uncategorized

Bakery On Premises

Posted on August 22nd, 2016

I grew up in the Northeast, where twenty-four hour Greek diners were a natural part of the eatery landscape. They have names like ‘The Acropolis’, ‘Athenian’ or ‘Parthenon’ – possibly followed by a Roman numeral. It’s the type of establishment frequented by families for breakfast on the weekends; by senior citizens for the ‘early bird special’ – which is at least one page unto itself on the menu – and by teenagers and young adults spending their time in the wee hours of the morning working to stay just on this side of trouble.   The menu is as thick as a newspaper and includes everything from Eggs and French Toast to burgers and club sandwiches to spaghetti with meatballs or veal parmigiana to…

Categories: Uncategorized

Canada, Comfort Queers, and Cynicism

Posted on August 22nd, 2016

Quebec City felt like Disney World felt when I was a kid. My cynical side only saw a series of tricks; some massive money-making scheme to build a pretend French-like town that could easily separate tourists from their money. How old could the buildings really be? This was Canada! (I learned later, quite old actually, but still not THAT old). When we first arrived at our hostel-like-hotel the overly friendly concierge/owner/chef laughed a lot while he pointed out local restaurants to us on a map. His loud bark followed each suggestion and my boyfriend Jose and I became increasingly unnerved by the sound. It was so piercing. After this initial meeting, where he suggested a restaurant called “The Hobbit” (this name was literal- it…

Categories: Uncategorized

Passing Time At The Plaza

Posted on August 22nd, 2016

In a secret life I will never live, I am a doyenne of the swanning set, fluttering here and there with Oysters Rockefeller in steady supply and a gaggle of the whiskery ones doting on my every need. Such a belle donna would take her lunch, naturally, at The Plaza Hotel. This is a secret life and therefore timeless. Happily, the New York Public Library has digitized the menus of my preferred eatery across the decades and I can peruse them at will, recalling all my favorites.   Join me, won’t you, on a gilded settee for our first Plaza lunch. It’s 1899 and Congress has just approved some strange new contraption called a “voting machine” for use in federal elections. While others fret…

Categories: Uncategorized