"Turkey Pot Pie" by Terry Hertzler + A Pot Pie for Spring

"Time mutates memory."


"Time mutates memory." This truth anchors the final stanza and springs from the page like a kicked ball bouncing into the street before you have a chance to catch it. It serves as a reminder of how memory shapes us, comforts us, and in some cases, angers us, especially when two people remember the same experience very differently.

The poem begins by setting the scene for a date night gone sour, including roses, attending a movie, and eating dinner at a restaurant, but a moment during dinner triggered an argument. By the end of the evening, the flowers were placed in the garbage, never retrieved. The memory had "mutated" in the minds of each person involved. He recalls eating turkey pot pie at Marie Callender's, she insists they ate vegetable soup at Chili's. The poet may know the topic of the argument, but doesn't share it with us, emphasizing that the point of all this is not the subject matter, but how we communicate to each other.

On Hunger + Avocado and Cucumber Sandwich

"The fed versus the unfed. What else is there in the history of the world?" -Mary Ruefle

 

Poet Mary Ruefle said this rather nonchalantly at the end of a reading I attended in February, but it stuck with me. It's a heavy question. Food, after all, is one of the three essentails—the other two being water and shelter—that we need to survive at the most basic level, and the lack of food has dire consequences on the mind and body.

As a well-fed food blogger, my hunger pains are not severe. Sometimes I forget to bring a snack for the afternoon slump at work, or the lack of reservation at a restaurant forces me to wait longer than I would like for a meal. I have the means, the access, and the ability to make healthy choices for myself and my family without a lot of stress involved. Any stomach grumbling I experience are temporary, and nothing to complain about when 50 million Americans don't know where their next meal is coming from.

When you think about hunger, you might envision a malnourished child in the Horn of Africa. Famines cause great peril and are widely publicized in the media, but it's the everyday hungers that are more common, and go largely unnoticed. That's why it's so important to pull back the veil on this issue and take steps to do something about it.

"Last Bite" by Kyle Potvin + Dark Chocolate Bark

Seasons have a way of getting under our skin.

For T.S. Eliot, it's the "cruellest month." For Robert Frost, "mud season." For Edna St. Vincent Millay, this month "comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers."

The dirt, the flowers, the heat, the ice. Any distinctions that befall the month we're enduring swirl in our consciousness like wind slapping the windows, begging to be let in. Over the years, seasons signify milestones and inspire us to burrow, clean, buy notebooks, travel, and cook the food that grows best in February or May or October, and I find there's something both comforting and unnerving about the consistency of these cravings year after year.