Somewhere…somehow, it was time to return to food roots; to the heritage. There was a season for fruits and vegetables…the random Indian meal…the nod to Korea or the wink at Turkey and the organic movement and the war against plastic food containers and the dilemma of bottled water versus tap. All very tiresome in the end; back to beginnings.

Why crave potatoes or bread and butter at 11 in the evening and not pineapple? Why sod and not sand? Why does the smell of lush marinating pot roast call one back to the table, to the Sunday meals in the Dakotas; the oily cinnamon sun buckle and the orange chocolate doughnut…the boiled coffee with the tinny aftertaste of cooking metal? There is something latent in these smells…some seething memory waiting to birthe…the forgotten peasant, the sorrowing immigrant, the boy with no shoes and the saving of bits and pieces of thread; the sweat, the pain and the simplicity.

It all comes out in the food. Every smell is a link to more than a hundred years gone by. Eat a potato, redeem the memory. Drink black boiled coffee, receive the courage to continue. Buttered toast cures illness and apathy.

Bid farewell to affluence for the moment; this space we live in now with time to kill in leisure until there is no more time to fill. Remember the days of small education and endless work, the careful, prayerful saving of paper, of threads, of food. If they can’t be remembered, then pick up your shovel and dig. And if digging fails, then eat a potato late at night, save a paper bag and consider these things…

The pumpkin patch is planted. The tomato plants are planted; garden commencement. We christened the patch ‘Patty’ and the edgings of tomato plants ‘Tommy’. I preferred ‘Tuppence’ but they are after all, beefsteak tomatoes and the name rang false.

I assume the fox, who runs scattershot on the rim of this neighborhood, will leave our labor unscathed. In recent weeks, a rabid cousin of our community’s artful-dodger, while running wild and crazed around one of the nearby streets in Brighton, managed to bite and sufficiently terrify six individuals, including a friend of mine. I am therefore, watchful. My friend, after having been badly bitten, fought off the fox with a metal hanging flower basket rod and with assistance from a kind neighbor who walloped the animal with a large rock; subsequently, everyone ran for his and her lives. The nearby woodlands are filled with our own fox’s food and I have observed nothing out of the ordinary.

I have promised pumpkins to the four year old twins next door who watched the planting with great earnest, calling out ‘Hello! Hello!’ until they were sufficiently acknowledged.

It rained today; a damp, off the lake soaking which saved us watering time. Nothing left for this evening but the wind chimes, the faded chatter of children giving up the street to go home and the imagined tread of the fox; watching from the edge of the woods…

Evening rolls out over the street edges…’Angelina, Angelina!’ A young voice answers. ‘She’s inside!’ Raucous laughter. A door slams. Then a lone figure bounces a basketball. Once. Twice. Once more. Silence. Whoever is yelling disappears up the other end of the street. A distant rallying hoot…fades out. The day’s energy is spent.

A chirping bird, a bit late to the night descending, twirtles and flibbits; there’s a rustling in the thick green branches. Silence.

Is this a memory of something I have? Or is it something I have lost? Is that the walking man, walking on by or is it the terrible dream in the night? I call out to him from the edge of our porch. ‘Are you seeing any art exhibits this summer?’ He responds, ‘No, no…I’m in the mountains all summer this time’. I nod. ‘All right then, understandable of course’. He disappears.

Time to go inside now. I hear distant bike bells. The small twins with matching helmets and bikes still dragging with training wheels ride slowly by the front of the house. They are still careful with the steering because twilight is tricky that way. Their father follows behind with a dilapidated dog; too much thick white fur for summer humidity. A duo of yippy dogs growl passionately as the big one limps past on his leash. He could not be less concerned with their yappy antics.

A single car floats by. The mosquitoes are out now; having reconvened during the day, they are beginning to attack with vengeance. The voices are gone.

Is it a memory or something I have lost? I roll up the porch screen and go in the house.

I dreamt last night…in the month of June. You came into the room, wearing your purple checked shirt…all bent over and smiling and pleasant. We chatted and went somewhere and you adjusted your glasses as you always do.

I feel the fabric of that purple checked shirt, the buttons and the fold in the collar.

I heard that death is a terrible thing and that no one should wander through it. But of course…of course…and therein lies the tension. We were not to have had the experience and here we find ourselves in the greening month of June; with the evening air which smells like old wine, touching the checked material of purple cotton and hearing the honking of a lone and lost goose outside the window…

June is not busting out all over. There is not enough crisp in the air to fry a potato; forget sunshine and blossoms and buds. June is bleeding out in a million gallons of beautiful silver slate sheets of endless rain.

Soggy, groggy, foggy, boggy…the emergency flood watch is sounding and it’s raining again and the lake is rising while June is leaking out all over…

A sleepy morning in a Connecticut suburb…the strong smell of coffee permeates…rising up along the wooden staircase, through the door, under the blankets. Far, far in the distance…almost as in a dream, a low drifting apparition…lies the steady quiet rumbling stream of heavy traffic heading into the city, the Big Apple beckoning those still working on this Juneteenth. The sound of moving wind, steady, forward frolling, quiet. Not tight enough to hear the grinding gears…not wide enough to sound like the ocean…just the forever grey twisting traffic ribbon heading down into the canyons.

A rooster crows.

I sit up in the bed. Silence. There it is again. Did I actually just hear a rooster? A rooster in paradise, far from the maddening crowd. It is incongruous. Perhaps a rooster in hand is worth two in the city which never sleeps.

Later, after coffee I enquire. ‘It isn’t actually allowed’ a family member answers and shrugs indifferent shoulders.

I love this. A rooster in Connecticut. Somewhere, in a lonely meadow lying fallow between New York and Connecticut lines, a scrappy rooster, maybe a Rhode Island Red or a Sussex was snatched and brought to the suburbs to soften the manic stream of sprawl and urban clutter. So now he’s here, crawking and muttering and letting go with abandon that high pitched wail…and we all hear and marvel…

I remember riding in the car with my father; no seat belts, open windows, breathing in corn dust from the greening fields. His left arm is bare and resting on the heated edge of the window; his right hand steers casually, thumb hooked over the bottom of the wheel; streets and ruts.

Alone on Route 19, driving past the huge field of sunflowers in the forever sunshine, our destination is the old building on Main Street in Fillmore. As we enter the grey, sagging structure I still feel the splintered wooden flooring under my bare feet. It is a simpler time.

The ancient man managing the store and shuffling behind the counter, quietly makes our treats; forever faceless. I am too young to pay much attention to his ancient eyes.

Dad orders a chocolate coke and I work on a root beer float. He sips carefully, favoring upper gums stitched recently by a dentist. I wrap bare legs around the squeaky iron stool pole and balance carefully on the round seat. The store is silent. We are the only customers in here.

The building is dying. Even I know it as a four year old because the wood smells so, so old. I pay attention to the wood and miss the lines on the man’s silent face. The boards splinter my feet as we leave. The floor is cracking and sagging. I should wear sandals next time.

We ride silently back to Houghton, full of sugar and I hold my arm out the window, fighting the air and letting my hair whip wildly. My feet are filthy and I crawl over the hot seat into the back, lying on the floor, listening to the hum of the heated wheels on the tar.

It is a simpler time…

An afternoon in Danbury…the massage therapist comes to the house and speaks to me directly in Portuguese and I answer, ‘yes’. She is encouraged to continue and I nod and make some sense of it all, a few words hanging on here and there and close to Spanish. It really doesn’t matter. The connection is stronger than any linguistic concerns; women, aches and back issues, strengths and weaknesses, the love of lavender…

The two dogs yip and yap, falling all over each other in their furry enthusiasm and we smile at each other. All the world loves crazed, happy, jumping, joyful canines.

I smell the lavender and the incense upstairs and she is still talking and has headed off to set up her table. I catch her final words as she mounts the stairs…’praise God’ in Portuguese and I answer in Spanish and in English. We’re good. We understand each other from a thousand miles and a lifetime apart.

I quiet the dogs and we settle down; with my book in my lap and her efforts at the table and the rooms awash in scent…

She sliced carefully into the top sugary crusted layer of wild blueberry bread, careful to retrieve any errant crumb which might tumble onto the counter. She placed the thick slice gently on to the blue and white plate. The coffee was boiled and sufficiently layered in sweet cream right down to the bottom of the ceramic mug.

The porch was already heated and the baskets of pink bubblegum petunias swung happily in the breeze, shedding the occasional petal over chair cushions and railings.

‘What do I want?’ She sat down in the chair. ‘What do I really want?’ She murmured the words carefully while staring out over the ripening lawn and flowering bushes. The tiniest bird hopped and pecked on the sidewalk, looking up at her curiously and then went back about his business. The neighborhood was silent.

‘I want this’ she said out loud to no one. ‘I want silence’…

She stood calmly at the edge of the burnished railing, reapplying lipstick. ‘O cappuccino, my cappuccino’ was the name of the lip color. She balanced herself cautiously on the wide deck; the deck itself balanced and floating in the middle of the Atlantic, sailing blissfully over a thousand years of sunken ships, weapons, pirates, bones and memories of long forgotten battles. The caramel blue water lapped gently at the sides of the huge boat.

The moon watched as a few late night souls moved quickly by on the promenade beneath her deck, a scattering of unintelligible voices and they were gone.

The sea was forever…and they were all alone…drifting forward in the midst of liquid miles…