Grains of Salt

My grandmother's recipes came in the mail this week.

I held those papers like pages from some kind of Bible that doesn't care if I have sex before marriage but is deeply invested in my choice of tomato paste, tears streaming down my face in the passenger seat of my Honda until I felt insane.

I have spent years aching to know this woman, who gave me my face and my love for thyme and my urge to run away when I should maybe stay in place a while, the way that granddaughters are supposed to know their grandmothers.

Her smell. The dirt on her boots. The way she sounded singing Celine Dion on her lawn mower. Her laugh when the Sicilian aunts came from New York to help and feed and scold her, and her frustration when she got tired of the judgement and made them leave.

But this feels good.

Reading her instructions for Sicilian sauce and wine-braised sausages, and how to experience the waiting as part of the consuming, feels like reading her diary. Little tricks I never knew before feel like an inheritance.

I didn't get to hold her hand before she died, but I did get to tell her I wish I'd known her better. I can't ask her if her mama used the same tomato paste she likes, but I can add hard boiled eggs to my lasagna like she told me to without knowing she had.

I am stilled and happily drowned in gratitude for the bits I get to keep, and I forgive her for the parts her pain kept from all of us.

Pretend I wrote something incisive about Princess Nails and neutrals and minimalism and gardening but as a vibe and the overlap of recession markers and harbingers of fascism in aesthetic trends.

Pretend I said something about how the heavy marketing around growing your own food and learning to sew is an attempt to profit on the poverty-driven death of convenience so that it's easier to hide the class divide.

Give me your sandstone

altar; I would sink my hands

into your belly,

slip inside and cover me

I watched a series

about dying, and I think

it made me feel safe—

Like a pebble dropped to count

how long it takes to echo.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

And a bright ripple of sound

all the way back up

where I sit waiting, breathing,

Over 100 people showed up despite subzero temperatures to protest Project 2025 and oligarchy in the USA on Wednesday in Helena, Montana. In doing so, we started a local grassroots group of nearly 40 kind souls who want to help.

Say what you will about protests, but they're important. They may never be the reason a despot changes his mind, but they are frequently the reason that a person who feels dangerously alone realizes that they are not. If that's all we did, and we did it for dozens of people? Worth it.

Do I have frostnip on my face? Yes. Did my heart rate get alarmingly fast when I had to do the public speaking? It sure did. But I'd do it again, over and over.

This song reminds me of someone I used to know, who lived his entire life in his father's shadow and will likely die alone for it, but still had enough nose to look down to shit on local ramen and talk about how much better it is in cities he's not brave enough to move to.

I heard someone say that poor people who vote in the best interests of the rich do it because they hope they'll be one of them one day, but I think it's even sadder than that. They know deep down that they lack the ruthlessness to be like the ones they worship; they're not hoping for riches, they just hate themselves enough to grovel for scraps.

I think about this as I roll homemade blueberry and currant jam into thawed cheap Rhodes dough, wincing a little internally at the thought of some of the more pretentious people I know judging me for my working class corner cutting. And then I remember that nobody worthwhile ever looked down at me for something I created, and no asshole I've ever tried to impress with something complicated and expensive ever understood why they should savor it.

pruning split and broken strands

like twigs in the spring.

I could be a tree,

and worthy of that love and care;