Music: short-shorts on a theme

Jim. Sitting on my front porch thinking about you, how you might have died. And where. How do I even know you died? I bet Bruce told me. Or Charlie. We four were part of a group in junior high and played tackle football in the mud, Tilden Regional Park, 1963 or 1964. I wasn’t really in the group, but I did enjoy slipping in the mud, and sliding, trying to block you, Jim. Much later Bruce did try for a PhD, ended up happily enough managing frontline customer service in an academic library. Charlie taught public school math for decades. I taught English for awhile in Community Colleges, then worked in printing and, finally, in public libraries. Maybe my favorite role was disability services. Though I saw you on the streets, Jim, where you lived for years, I saw you in the library too, sometimes on your meds, sometimes not. You always recognized me, greeted me, and I returned your greetings. I thought about how the library could have helped you out more, never figured it out. Makes me sad. After you died, I saw an obit, but all I remember was that a local choral group sang at your funeral, a group you’d been a firm part of. Such a sweet voice you had, the obit author reported.
    - Alan Bern



At the edge of the yard where Gresford colliery once stood, a wheel from the winding gear marks the site where two hundred and sixty six miners died. It was history already when I was a boy, but at “Big Meet,” when brass bands struck up The Miners’ Hymn, old men who worked the blind pit ponies could be seen tearing up. Written as a requiem for all that sorry disaster’s dead I gave it my all on an old Besson cornet. I come from a long line of Durham pitmen. At the end of their shifts, when the vicar falls silent, Gresford is played to send them off.
    - Alan Peat

NOTE: You can hear this hymn played by different bands by Googling the words “Gresford Miners’ Hymn” — highly recommended: the versions played by the Black Dyke Mills Brass Band and by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. The hymn was composed by Robert Saint.



As an adult, I fell in love with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. I, too, wanted to sing, dress in gorgeous costumes, openly express love, sorrow, loss. Then I remembered my musical history. In the early grades, singing lessons were informal, everyone singing together in a shouting mode. Then came the real music teacher, the real music room. We practiced scales, echoed back a note she sang to us, sang lines of songs alone. But when I sang, the teacher frowned. She stopped asking me to sing alone. At the end of term was a concert, each class on stage, taking it in turns to sing. At supper, a week before the concert, my mother said, “the music teacher spoke to me. Because you sing out of tune, you will sit on stage with your class, but mouth the words.” I said, “No, I won’t.” My mother looked across the table at my stepfather, “What can I do?” “Keep her singing around the house,” he said, “all the pop singers sing out of tune. She could be famous.” I said, “I’ll sit in the audience. I won’t pretend to sing. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them why.”
    - Antonia Matthew



Music is a constant companion of mine. Sometimes I’m very particular. But other times I just go with the flow and listen to whatever is floating around in the air. My intolerance of noise is downright wicked, however, so I remove myself from those situations as quickly as possible. Like leaf blowers, or beeping construction machines, or blaring sirens, or kids throwing tantrums, or those automatic hand dryers in public bathrooms. Pleasant environmental sounds are soothing — like cats purring, or bees buzzing, or porch chimes gently tolling in a soft breeze. When I’m feeling particular I become absorbed by Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Mozart’s Requiem, or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Life is full and compelling when I am surrounded by aural beauty. No matter how crazily these present times contort us, music is a gift and a blessing beyond compare.
    - Blue Waters



A beat pulses through wooden risers beneath my feet and the shared breath of exuberant teenagers surrounds me as we sing. We are on stage in the midst of our high school Christmas Choral Concert. The audience is filled with nostalgic alumni who are invited to join us for the grand finale, Handel’s Halleluja Chorus from the Messiah. They pack the stage and the magic begins. No one ever forgets their part. We, members of the the acapella choir, have tingled with anticipation for weeks, practicing four part harmony, every morning in choir class. With a bit of prompting, I can still sing the alto parts of the Halleluja Chorus (totally off key). Singing together bonds us. We breathe the same air, microbes and viruses are shared. Even DNA is shared. When we control breath in unison with others, our heartbeats synchronize with every person in the choir. Endorphins are released in our bodies, as voices swell and ebb and swell again to crescendo after crescendo. We are engulfed in the music. We are the music. This experience is as close to joy as any other in life.
    - Carole Johnston



As a youngster, I’d often “play” piano on the old Ford’s dashboard, synchronizing with the radio. Dad said my long fingers would do me well, but we couldn’t afford lessons or an upright. I couldn’t wait until fourth grade when I would follow my siblings by taking recorder lessons, but a month before finishing third grade, we moved. Instead, I began expressing my creativity in poetry and art. Years later at a party, my husband overheard me share this secret yearning with someone. Soon after, he surprised me with a Casio keyboard. His sweet gesture was heart-warming. We researched local teachers, selected one, and I introduced myself on the call. “Hi Lelia. I’m 64 years old and can’t read music, but I’ve always wanted to play piano. Would you be open to teaching me?” A resounding “yes” came through. I became Lelia’s oldest student, but she loved my passion and enthusiasm. She was wonderfully patient and encouraging, the perfect formula for me. After the first year of instruction, on her birthday, I pulled out three elementary songs for my first recital, including The Old Brown Jug, for a simple duet with her. My fingers trembled, hovering over the keys, but I was ready to make my dream come true.
    - Deborah Burke Henderson



Help me, I think I’m falling . . .  Court and Spark spins on my sister’s phonograph. Above it, a poster of sand-colored walls, gleaming domes. Jerusalem. I don’t spend much time in Felicia’s room. She’s a senior and I’ve just started sixth grade. But today she doesn’t seem to mind, pasting movie tickets and love notes in her scrapbook. Rob Goldman has curly black hair and wants to live in Israel, where he and Felicia met. Aliyah. I look at Felicia’s books: Shakespeare, Keats, Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Rod McKuen’s Listen to the Warm. I make up my own titles: Smell the Darkness. Taste the Noise. Joni Mitchell has stopped singing. Felicia lifts the needle, replaces Joni with Carole. Rhymes and Reason — that’s a good name, almost as good as Listen to the Warm. A napkin from Le Crepe, a playbill from Fiddler. An almost flattened rose. Oh, I’ve been to Canaan and I won’t rest . . . “Carole King went to Canaan?” I ask. “Is she Jewish?” Felicia laughs. I try again. “You’ve been to Canaan.” “Many times.” “I thought only once. In July.” Felicia pastes another photo: she and Rob by the Red Sea. Carole spins round and round.
    - Ellen Orleans



During my growing-up years in the 1940s, it was Beethoven, Mozart, and Puccini that poured from our Zenith stereo console. Later, my older sister introduced me to jitterbug songs like Rock Around the Clock, and in college I got moony over love ballads by Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, and The Four Aces. But country music? Paah! Those whiny songs and twangy banjos? Not for me! When my husband insisted on listening to country music on the car radio, I was horrified. I hated it. He bought albums by Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Tammy Wynette. How could he like that trashy stuff? Then he hauled me to a Johnny Cash concert in Lansing, Michigan, and I heard Johnny sing Folsom Prison Blues and tell the story of how he came to write it. After that I began to actually listen to the words in songs by Patsy Cline, Hank Snow, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn. I learned how to dance to those songs, and in North Dakota my husband and I often frequented bars that featured country music so we could burn up the dance floor. I was hooked. But that was then. Now it’s back to Rodgers & Hammerstein, 2Cellos, Debussy, and — yes — Beethoven.
    - Emily Rhoads Johnson



In the seventies, when I was a child, there weren't many movies on TV, and the ones that were allowed to air were, unfortunately, in black and white. At the time, a British series, The Onedin Line, was in vogue. For several years in a row, every Sunday afternoon, I gave up other activities just to be able to see this lovely program, which helped me escape to another world. I prayed that the electricity would not be interrupted so as not to miss the meeting with the sailors. That's the only way I could hear the pleasant symphony of the ocean waves. I don't remember much about the action, but the song on the soundtrack stuck so well in my mind that it followed me from an early age. I've always been able to hum some of it. I can still do it. One day I wondered to whom this fascinating work belongs, which enchanted me and which in difficult times helps me to move on, and I found out. The author is Aram Khachaturian, and the piece is called Adagio from Spartacus. If you haven't heard of it yet, take your time, it's worth it. You will immediately fall in love with it.
    - Florin C. Ciobica



After returning home from a long work shift on a busy Saturday, I decided to go for a stroll in the large un-mowed field next to the little cabin that I lived in. I wandered slowly through the brilliantly glowing tall grasses and wildflowers under a blazing July sun being serenaded by crickets and birds. And then I noticed another sound wafting in from beyond the nearby woods. It was the unmistakable sound of bagpipes being played. And they were playing Amazing Grace! I stood still and listened intently to the music from an unseen musician that blended magically with the rustling plants and natural orchestra. I was treated to this lovely afternoon concert on several more occasions during that summer. I asked neighbors and fellow bus passengers if they knew who the anonymous musician might be, and did internet searches as well, but it remained a mystery.
    - Frank Muller



When I was a sophomore at UCLA, I took a class in Music History to satisfy the arts requirement for science majors. The class was in a large lecture hall and, on the first day, Professor Sayers strode to center stage where he announced that the course would survey the history of Western Music from medieval times to the modern period, including atonal composers but not jazz, which he called “a barbaric yawp.” Then he seated himself on a small revolving stool at the piano and, stressing each syllable, intoned: “Jo-hann Se-bas-tian Bach!”  From then on, he began each class in similar fashion, reverently reciting Bach’s name like a priest offering the “body of Christ” at a Mass. One morning, a fire alarm went off just as Professor Sayers was lowering his ample rear end. He missed the stool and landed on the floor with a resounding “yawp!”
    - Jack Goldman



The drive from Auburn, Maine to Elmira, New York is a long one even with today’s extensive network of highways. It must have been excruciating ninety-one years ago, in 1931, driving a Ford Model-A with a young family in tow. For my grandparents, it was a journey of necessity — echoed by millions of Americans during the Great Depression — born of unemployment, babies to feed and, often, diminishing hope. My grandfather, a piano tuner who ran his own business, watched his small practice dry up overnight. Piano tuning was a luxury in Maine’s mill towns, which most could forego. With only one prospect in sight, a job posting clipped from a trade paper, my grandfather decided it was best to apply in person for a piano-tuning position at a music store, in a town he had never seen, where work was sparse but available. Driving six-hundred miles, from the banks of the Androscoggin River to the shores of the Chemung, my grandparents carried two infants, a few keepsakes, and a lone letter of recommendation. The store manager, impressed by my grandfather’s pluck yet sensing his desperation, hired him immediately — an act of humanity forever changing the course of our family’s history.
    - Jim Mazza



The Japanese art of “kintsugi,” using gold to repair a piece of cracked pottery, has become one of the tools I use to soothe the pain of my migraine headaches. When a headache hits me, it’s as if someone has hammered my skull, cracking it. Pain races along the fault lines I feel in my skull and down into my neck. My headache ends only after I fall into a deep sleep and my body resets itself. Years ago, I discovered that drugs did little to bring relief and my system suffered from their side effects. With research and advice from other sufferers — using rolled towels, cooling pads for the forehead, and of course, resting in a dark place —  natural remedies were what I relied on to lessen pain until deep sleep arrived. Then I read someplace that soft music could help. I remembered that the ancients (think of David playing the lyre to soothe King Saul) used music in this way. I found that it worked for me. I tried an inexpensive “Best of Mozart” CD and it acted like that “kintsugi” — repairing the cracks I imagined in my brain — easing the pain. Falling into a deep sleep came more quickly. Mozart’s golden tones are, indeed, my personal kintsugi.
    - Joan Leotta



it was in our shared shower sing-along that it all started when i moved into his condo gilbert and sullivan did too it was a wild time at the top of our voices to hear ourselves through the steamy spray it wasn't long before we were planning the full length concert and wedding with an intermission and my three costume changes poor wandering one he played the flute little miss buttercup I sang all three little maids from school and klezmer too . . . oi mama I'm so in love our harpsichordist married us in the five minute encore thank goodness they clapped
    - Kath Abela Wilson



“Stop listening to the notes and listen to the music.” So said George Ives, father of the famous composer Charles Ives. The story goes that the elder Ives was music director of a small church in Danbury, Connecticut, and when a parishioner complained about the lack of expertise among the singers, George replied with his timeless wisdom and continued to lead his joyful, amateur choir. I consoled myself with this story when, as a young woman in Washington DC, fresh from rural Pennsylvania, a voice teacher found fault with my country voice. “Just sing the notes as they’re written,” he said, stabbing his finger on the sheet music for You’ll Never Walk Alone. “Don’t slide into them like someone from the backwoods.” Well, I was someone from the backwoods. My singing was formed by my mother at the old upright piano, chording to songs like Red River Valley and Silver Haired Daddy. My singing was shaped by my brothers, strumming guitars around a summer bonfire, harmonizing to Seven Bridges Road and He’ll Have To Go. These songs, these people, this way of singing, live deep in my heart. They are my very breath. So I ended my voice lessons and gave a silent thanks to George Ives. When I go home for a visit this summer, we will gather again. And we will sing.
    - Kathleen Kramer



wrapped in a blanket of frogs’ voices i half awaken in darkness and  follow the chorus outside faint stars overhead no moon morning light above the rolling mountains almost  sleepwalking feeling my  way deeper into the chorus the sound wrapped like a cape around me yet calling me calling me rising and falling swelling up from the rice paddies rolling all rising into trees where sensing dawn tree frogs voices join the chorus so swelling up from the rippling paddies punctuated by a deep bass soloist who feels the vibration of footsteps and stops until i am back on my doorstep with the frog symphony embedded in my bones
    - kris moon



Sister Mary Joseph. That was her name. I can picture her so clearly: long black skirt and veil, stiff white collar, wooden cross around her neck. She taught piano lessons at my school on Saturday for one dollar a session. When I was ten, my mother decided I should learn to play the piano. I despised the idea. I was such a shy kid that I hated getting any personal attention, and from a nun! I could hide in a large classroom but this was different. It was a painful half hour each week for both of us. I never really practiced enough. I was supposed to keep track of my practice hours in a little red book. My mother was supposed to sign each entry. Fortunately, Sister didn’t look too closely at the signature, but I’m pretty sure she knew. I would  stumble through the pieces she had assigned, with tears in my eyes because I was so nervous. She never said a critical word, but just encouraged me to keep trying. I finally got permission from my mother to quit. When I told the Sister, I saw a funny look come over her face. Would she miss that dollar a week or was she relieved?
    - Margaret Dennis



Dreamin’ - I’m always dreamin’ — I woke one morning recently with this song running through my mind. Why? I barely remember it. But almost every day I wake with an “earworm.” Today it was Brahm’s Lullaby. Occasionally favorite movie songs  — The Time of My Life. Many are dance tunes from adolescence and young adulthood. Stay. Stand by Me. Rock Me Gently. Some are special. I remember who I was with, where, what I was wearing — and I feel the dance. Some hold few, if any, memories. One was Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song. I’m not a big fan of country music but there it was, playing in my head all day. I can’t carry a tune anymore but if I hear a few bars I can remember most, if not all, of the lyrics. La Marseillaise. Where does this come from in the night — this walk through my past? It doesn’t matter. Even if I have to consciously force it out of my head by mid-day, I have opened a treasure trove of often forgotten memories and I am grateful. But it does make me wonder what I was dreaming.
    - Margaret Walker



When I went on an unwanted blind date my last summer in grad school in 1967 I never expected to meet the man I would end up marrying. We were inseparable after that night. With a low draft number, he had already signed up for OCS in Newport, Rhode Island and I had a job waiting for me in St Louis. A Whiter Shade of Pale was on the radio all summer, becoming “our song” by default.  He went to Vietnam as a junior officer on a Navy Supply ship and I was accepted for a job in Hawaii after St Louis, to be there for his break between tours, and so we could get married. After he left, whenever “our” song came on, I felt tears flow, remembering his arms tight around me, wondering if I would feel them again. Even now, long after our divorce, and his death nine years ago, when I hear the song I’m transported back to that summer — our dreams still ghost-dancing ahead of us.
    - Pris Campbell



I am on the freeway driving east through the brown hills of Martinez, California, near the home of naturalist John Muir, dotted with ambling cows as well as a few horses, while listening to Within You, Without You, a song on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, sung by the late George Harrison. The sun is shining, the sky is a soft blue fringed by wispy, passing clouds and the sense of being a separate self dissolves, just floats away. Tears are streaming down my face as George sings the last lines of this unforgettable Beatles song. . .
      When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find
      Peace of mind is waiting there
      And the time will come when you see we're all one
      And life flows on within you and without you
For a fleeting moment, who I am is not an “I” but rather an “us.” And this is quite enough.
    - Robert Epstein



Sometimes I try to recall the music playing in the pink jewelry boxes of my childhood. I had a place to store carnival rings and broken beads. Trinkets from gumball machines. Souvenir charms from summer travels. Each box, no matter how simple, featured a plastic ballerina who spun in front of a tiny mirror until I got dizzy. I discovered everything would stop once I closed the lid. When the repetitive tune got to be too much, I longed for silence. Maybe I was an introvert and needed alone time. Shut the lid: That’s a first step to taking control in a young life.
    - Roberta Beach Jacobson



My husband Mike had a rich voice and an ear for picking up local accents, but he couldn’t quite keep a tune. We sang in the Seattle Labor Chorus that accepted all singers eager for justice. It worked because of the skill of Janet, the director. Preparing for a folk festival, we sang Appalachian songs, where Mike and I had interviewed over 100 coal miners. Janet’s ears pricked up when she heard Mike singing “Dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew, where the dangers are double and the pleasures are few . . .” with that stressed West Virginia mountain twang. “Let’s have Mike sing the verses, and we’ll sing the chorus,” announced Janet. “But how will we know what note to come in on?” worried a musically savvy chorus member. “Just pick up the note Mike ends on,” announced Janet. It was powerful. We added freedom songs. Mike had joined the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, registering Black voters in the Delta and hearing Fannie Lou Hamer sing “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round.” Mike’s voice slowed down the whole chorus to a deep determined cadence. It brought tears to my eyes then – and now as I write.
    - Ruth Yarrow



When I was very young, my parents played stacks of long-playing records to keep me occupied and lull me to sleep. The wooden console sat just outside my bedroom door. I was weaned on Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker and Swan Lake, Chopin piano etudes and Saint-Saëns' The Swan. But the record I remember most vividly is A Child's Introduction to the Great Composers. My favorite selections were Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld which included music for the can-can, and Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances. I think that's why I was later drawn to various folk dances and studied everything from Hungarian czardas and flamenco to hula, the Balinese welcome dance, and everything in between. Someday, maybe I'll take down my castanets and practice again.
    - Theresa A. Cancro



When Peggy and I hitched south from Milwaukee in the spring of 1971, it seemed like every car or truck that picked us up had the radio on. We were heading for a wilderness area, the Land Between the Lakes in southern Kentucky. Me and Bobby McGee, sung by Janis Joplin, was hot at the time, and I could hear “Na na na na na na” in my head as we lay down in a pasture where curious Hereford cows came close to stare at us and Peggy fell fast asleep. The way personal playlists flow music into people’s ears these days, it’s hard to explain to a youngster just how Top Forty pop radio dominated back then. The same songs over and over, at that time Me and You and a Dog Named Blue (road songs big in the early seventies) and Put Your Hand in the Hand, a gospel pop song . . . . On the way home, a true hillbilly with an old pickup filled with cages of chickens stopped for us and it reeked, but I jumped in so Peggy had to follow, the only vehicle without a radio playing maybe for the whole trip.
    - Tina Wright



My father loved classical music and had a ritual Sunday afternoon time where he would lie on his back on the living room couch with his eyes closed while one of his favorite symphonies was playing at the loudest level our less-than-state-of-the-art phonograph could play it. There was an accepted family understanding that we all should steer clear of the living room and let him enjoy his music without interference. Years later when I became a teenager collecting 45s, and 33 LPs, I would play them on that same old record player and he often repeated instructions to “turn it down.” In some bizarre linkage his enjoying his music imprinted in me a love of “my music,” which was a whole different world apart, but what made it unite us was that it was music. Forty two years ago when I was 28 I sat in Sage Chapel with my family and others who had come to my father's Memorial Service. As part of this gathering my mother had chosen some of my father’s favorite music. As Finlandia was playing I felt my eyes well up and then my tears flowed freely.
    - Tom Clausen



When I was a girl I liked to sit at the low dressing table in my grandmother’s bedroom and rummage through all the bits and bobs that she kept there. Her brush and comb; a single tube of red lipstick; a powder puff tucked tightly into a pink plastic container of face powder. There were always two or three freshly-laundered handkerchiefs folded into small neat squares; a magnifying glass; a hand mirror; and at least one emery board. Scattered across the top of the table were a handful of grey bobby pins and slightly larger hair clips. I would choose one of the clips and hold it up to my mouth, pretending it was a microphone. Then I’d look straight ahead, smile at my reflection in the large mirror that hung on the wall just above the table, and start  singing. Most often I’d sing my favorite song from my favorite movie, The Parent Trap. Hayley Mills played twins. Not everyone could do that. She was very talented. Even my grandmother thought so. “Let’s get together, yeah yeah yeah, why don’t you and I combine?” But I would pronounce it togetha the way she did, and I’d sing ya ya ya. Hayley was English. That’s how English people spoke. I knew that when I became a grown up, and could be anything I wanted to be, I would be English, too.
    - Zee Zahava

Vegetable Stories: short-shorts on a theme

 

Of course, we travelled again to Erice in Western Sicilia to enjoy Maria Grammatico's most delicious almond paste candies, hand-painted with edible fruit and vegetable colors, to talk to the amazing rug weavers (my wife has been a weaver), and to revisit the hotel where we had stayed on our honeymoon twenty years before. And, since some things do not change quickly, modern or not, we found that our Hotel Moderno still serves excellent fare, including the freshest fish brought into Trapani harbor, just down the hill and to the southeast. Plus full plates of spinaci all’aglio e olio (spinach with garlic and oil— and plenty of salt, of course). The oldest city in Europe, Erice, always an odd, often silent, town, perhaps for the entire 10,000 years it has sat on its hill. On the clearest days from Eryx, Erice’s ancient name, one can see south all the way to Africa, to Tunisia, and to the east, all the way across the island, perhaps see smoke, amazingly, from the very tip-top of the Vulcano Aetna, the tallest active volcano in all of Europe.
    - Alan Bern



Tomato: fruit or vegetable? However hard my father argues, grandad won’t accept “fruit.” He doesn’t care a jot about the seeds. You wouldn’t pour cream on tomatoes — says grandad. You wouldn’t make a crumble with tomatoes — he continues. They’re not sweet — he concludes. Dad counters with cherry tomatoes. Grandad hesitates but both his crumble and cream arguments hold up so he sticks to his guns. Dad heads off to find the encyclopedia. Grandad scans the entry. He looks my dad in the eye. You shouldn’t believe everything you read — he says and walks off.
    - Alan Peat



The almost forty-year-old asparagus bed is tired. After years of giving me early spring offerings, the plants have simply run out of energy. This year there were maybe two suppers worth of delicate spears, a negligible output, and even those seemed exhausted. At the end of gardening season last year, acknowledging a finality, I dug up the roots in one section of the bed and left it to rest. This year, after adding copious amounts of compost and manure, I sowed kale and chard seeds in their place. The seeds sprouted, though slowly, and now the plants look confused, as if they’ve invaded another’s territory and are not sure how to act. They are not the robust specimens of years past — instead they seem vulnerable and susceptible. And this morning I see there is someone snacking on them. I perceive a lack of confidence and resilience, a disorientation as to place and time. Maybe in the next few weeks they’ll come around. I can’t help but think they’re in mourning, reticent about accepting an ending and embracing a beginning.
    - Ann Carter



I dug alongside the grownups with my little sandbox spade as they turned the square-shaped back lawn into a vegetable garden. I understood this call to Dig for Victory was not to find a person but I didn’t understand how growing vegetables could win the war. Pea and bean seeds were planted here, along with root vegetables. I helped to drop the seeds into the holes. Then we went to the sheltered side lawn where, again, the grass was dug up. I helped make the little holes in the earth where the starters of lettuce, spinach, Brussels sprouts and cabbage were planted. There was still the front of the house where there was no lawn, only rose beds. For a while everyone stood and looked over there, then the grownups, except for my uncle, went into the house, taking us children with them. Curious, I went to the front window and looked out. My uncle was slowly digging up the rose bushes and piling them on the driveway. My aunt came up beside me. “He’s going to be planting potatoes.” We stayed by the window and watched. When all the bushes were dug up my uncle put a match to them, and as they slowly burned, smoke drifting around him, he planted potatoes.
    - Antonia Matthew



I live in a small community north of Boston. The town common consists of a one-window post office, police station, historic town hall, a church, a doll museum, a teahouse, and on a side street, the senior center. Notice recently went out that fruit and vegetables from local farms would be available for weekly pickup at the senior center. There is a food pantry in town, but this offer was for all seniors, regardless of need. At first I was reluctant, as I can afford to buy groceries, but the invitation welcomed all seniors. I overcame my hesitation and surveyed the four tables of cartons filled with produce — onions, sweet potatoes, bright yellow summer squash, Granny Smiths, string beans — and other items contributed by local merchants: gingerbread cookies, small jugs of laundry detergent, Bartlett pears wrapped individually in thin paper. This generous bounty from my community brought to mind my husband, now gone, bringing in armfuls of veggies from the garden and spreading them out proudly on our kitchen counter, his love language to me and our family. Today, emptying the contents of my basket, I felt some of that love, again.
    - Barrie Levine



Mom’s garden was a section of our back yard the size of a tennis court. Every spring she drew up her plans, ordered seeds, and got all excited about growing the vegetables her four kids needed in order to be strong and healthy. She was raised on a farm in western Kansas, helping her older sisters tend big gardens full of good food. She felt this was in her blood. But, year after year, it was really only in her mind. She could imagine rows upon perfect rows of carrots, onions, potatoes, corn, beans, etc. But somehow the seeds never got planted correctly, or watered enough when it didn’t rain for weeks on end. Mom’s dream garden couldn’t exist without her sisters to help and guide her. And her disappointment was palpable every time she reached for a frozen bag of peas or corn. Sadly quiet, she did her best to feel this was still a healthy choice for her family.
    - Blue Waters



Zucchini, like fat baseball bats, grew profusely in my garden in 1972. I had no idea how to cook them. The rural Midwest provided excellent, black soil for growing prize vegetables and perfect tomatoes, but the population was not yet familiar with “exotic “ vegetables. I knew nothing about picking zucchini when it is tiny and tender. I knew a few people who boiled it in water, but that produced a thick greenish mess, like soggy paper. The baseball bat zucchini proved to be useful, however. At that time I had two German Shorthair Pointers who were too wild to stay confined to their kennel. When we made the fences taller, they dug holes under the fences. Every morning, I called them from lounging on our bed, fed them, and locked them up in the useless kennel. Every afternoon, loping free, they bolted down the driveway to meet my car, barking like maniacs. Since farmers are likely to shoot stray dogs, we needed new ideas immediately. Hey, what about ZUCCHINI, I thought! Those overgrown squash fit perfectly into the escape tunnels. On my knees, I stuffed one zucchini into one tunnel. Using a garden spade to modify each subsequent hole, I twisted in more zucchini, until every gap was filled. This brilliant solution worked. The unhappy dogs were thwarted. I eventually learned to cook the small, tender, delicious, thin-sliced, squash. I started with zucchini parmigiana: made from scratch with succulent garlic, onion, and thick chunks of homegrown tomato in the sauce. I added zucchini to stir-fried vegetables and savory ratatouille. Ahh, zucchini and sweet, red, peppers, sautéed in olive oil and garlic, served on a crisp bruschetta — a much superior use of squash than imprisoning dogs.
    - Carole Johnston



Cotter, Dalton, and Henderson shared a locker at Boston Latin Middle School, and a certain smell always emanated from there. The boys’ coats, gym clothes, books, even their lunch satchels took on a distinct, permeating aroma. Cotter loved his mother’s eggplant parm sandwiches, and she made sure her boy had his favorite at least three times a week. Dalton didn’t seem to mind much, but the smell turned Henderson’s stomach upside down every day, especially when wearing his gym uniform which stayed in the locker 24/7. Many years later I shared this story about my husband (he is the Henderson) with my older sister, Robin. For Christmas that year she wrapped up a gorgeous, shiny, purple eggplant and handed the present to my husband with a flourish. After opening the gift, he tilted his head to one side in confusion, wondering what he was holding. He started tossing the beauty back and forth like a football, rubbed the smooth surface, even sniffed at the green stem. Flummoxed, he finally asked, “Okay, I give up. What the hell is this?” Robin couldn’t resist laughing before revealing the answer, and when she did, he gently chucked the eggplant at her as she sat on the couch. My sister transitioned to spirit last June, but her sense of humor and mischievousness that Christmas morning will always bring a smile.
    - Deborah Burke Henderson



When I was growing up, my mother mainly served three vegetables: green beans, peas, and corn. Occasionally she might surprise us with broccoli or canned beets. That’s why, on my first day of summer camp in Georgia, at age seven, I was terrified to see on my dinner plate what looked to me like a pile of fat yellow slugs. When I asked a counselor what they were, she said, “They’re butter beans. Eat up!” I speared one of the ghastly things with my fork and brought it tentatively to my mouth. In it went. Yuck! Ugh! Blaah! I gagged, and spit the mushy bean into my napkin. “You have to eat at least one mouthful of everything on your plate,” a counselor reminded me. “That’s the rule. Eat just one and swallow it!” This time I gagged so hard that I vomited on the tablecloth. The girl next to me cried, “Ewww!” and scooted as far down the bench as she could. The counselor took pity on me, and after fetching a towel to clean the table, told me I could skip butter beans for the rest of the summer. Whew! Everything else was delicious — especially the crunchy, juicy Southern fried chicken!
    - Emily Rhoads Johnson



When I was little, sweets were a rare thing.Towards the end of autumn and then in the winter, when we felt like something good to eat, and if we hadn't made any mess of things, we begged my grandmother to bake butternut squash. My brother and I would first go to the barn, where they were stored in a pile, and pick out a nice one, wash it well, then cut it in half and gently eviscerate it. We were sorry to kill him this way, but hunger helped us get over it. Grandma then took it, but she didn't cut it into small pieces, only larger ones, sometimes even quarters, depending on how fat the squash was. We were always glad to have large portions to enjoy. She put them in the oven with some sugar on top, because we still didn't have access to honey. As soon as she took it out of the oven (half an hour was an eternity for us) she sprinkled on a little ground cinnamon. A delight! The best dessert in the world! We were as impatient as kittens and could not wait to receive our soft and tasty gold bar. When I close my eyes, my younger self still winks at me. It was all so yummy!!!
    - Florin C. Ciobica



What’s the first thing a young man from the city decides to do when he moves to a country house in upstate New York? You guessed it. Plant a bed of asparagus. And what does the gardening book he consults recommend for the rocky soil on the hillside behind his house? Right again. Plenty of fertilizer— preferably organic. I called the farm down the road that advertised fresh cow manure. “Just one load?” I said that was probably enough, not realizing that the farmer was talking pickup trucks not wheelbarrows. I told him he could drive over our side lawn to the back of the house. Unfortunately, it had rained that morning and, when I returned from work that afternoon, I saw the deep ruts in the lawn where the truck had bogged down. I also saw the small mountain of manure that the farmer had dumped on our neighbor’s driveway in order to free his truck. Dashing back and forth with my wheelbarrow, I had barely made a dent in the steaming heap before my neighbor and his wife came to a screeching halt at the entrance to what had been their driveway. Two years later, we shared the first crop of tender asparagus along with a bottle of wine and a wheelbarrow of laughs.
    - Jack Goldman



Our holiday rental is a two-story stone cottage nestled in a shadowed hillside above the Ligurian Sea. Built from rough gray-green boulders and dark slate, the small house sits behind a thirteenth-century church tower that holds three out-of-tune bells, devotedly rung before every mass. At the southeast corner of the house, a trickling rivulet runs through a culvert constructed as part of the original medieval walls. Silver-leafed olive trees frame the cottage and soften the midday sun. The setting is magical, made more so by a forest of five-foot-tall fennel plants filling the front yard. Fennel, known in Italian by the playful-sounding word, finocchio, is a favorite vegetable and herb. Growing from a white, spherical base, the upright fennel stems are covered with feathery, green fronds — evocative of dozens of Ziegfeld Follies costumes. I harvest a single plant for tonight’s dinner. With a sharp knife, I remove the sturdy stalks and chop the anise-flavored bulb and fronds. I mix the fennel with peppery arugula, blood-orange segments, torn pieces of radicchio, toasted pine nuts, and a splash of fruity olive oil. Later, sitting on the terrace, we watch a half-moon rise above the clouds like a fennel bulb emerging from soil.
    - Jim Mazza



I was planning to buy an eggplant yesterday for Saturday night, the basis of  an eggplant and lentil dish I had enjoyed in Turkey. But in store after store, produce managers said, “No eggplant today.” Sighing, I drove to one more place — a store where  produce is always at  prices far above those of its neighbors. Walking in, I  immediately spotted among the multi-colored rows of vegetables a splash of purple — eggplants. Reaching out to pick one, I discovered that the wide swath of purple was one single vegetable, the largest eggplant I’d ever seen. I asked the produce man, “Do you have others?” He shook his head. “That’s the only one, my shipment today was absent the eggplants. It’s the last eggplant in Calabash.” I looked at the vegetable shaped like a small blimp. I smiled, bought it, and took it home. Today I cooked it, using several slices for my Turkish lentil dinner, several for fried Neapolitan-style sandwiches later in the week, and boiled some for a Sicilian eggplant appetizer. Travel has been halted recently, but this week an eggplant will be the airship on which we’ll  tour the Mediterranean.
    - Joan Leotta



The garden at my grandpa’s ramshackle cabin — “the club” as we called it — grew wild and untamed. Located on the floodplain of the Meramec River, the soil supported abundant vegetation. Grandma managed to keep the deer out by cordoning the area off with a chain-linked fence, but even she couldn’t control the bunnies. My grandparents planted many tempting vegetables in their small garden, but I set my eyes on their pole beans. Lush and abundant, that corner of the plot contained what looked like neatly spaced miniature teepees, each about 5 feet tall. Thick green vines weighted with beans — and the occasional snake! — wound around the wooden poles, giving the effect of an enchanted fairy village. One year, my grandparents grew gorgeous purple podded pole beans, native to this part of the Ozarks. I felt so cheated when boiling our magical beans turned them as green as all the others!
    - Julie Bloss Kelsey



Oh the flower fairies' feast my invitation a well kept secret the vegetables are blooming ssshhh some see them all shiny and polished on shelves don't tell anybody about the flowers even gardeners forget after they pick the fruits of their labor the secret small blooms on the tomatoes the luscious squash flower omelet they could have had the exotic purple petals on aubergine the artichoke's exotic lavender thistle the okra blooms bluish glow secret scarlet of the emperor runner beans queen anne's crown on the overgrown carrot holding court in the night garden oh the vegetables' flower fairies' feast unseen to most humans squash cucumber watermelon muskmelon and me my love for carrot umbels' lovely, lacy lightly battered and deep fried rare delicacy oh not the wild hemlock ssshhh it never hurts to check
    - Kath Abela Wilson



Mother loved onions. From early spring, when the little green onions were among the first gifts from the garden, she had them by her plate. They were placed carefully, next to the silverware like a necessary part of the meal. They were there for all meals except breakfast. (Though, if she’d made eggs of some kind, the little onions were there, too.) As the onions grew bigger, she loved them in all stages of their development, right up to the time they were big as baseballs — softballs, even. Sometimes, she would hold one of these in her hand and eat it like an apple, one bite at a time. She loved them sliced with sharp cheddar cheese in a sandwich, placing the plate carefully on her lap when she watched “As the Word Turns” at 1:00 every weekday afternoon. Her breath was redolent of onion every day. It became her signature scent. When she eventually had to live at Ridgeview Eldercare, the cooks were trained to place a large slice of onion on Mother’s plate. It seems fitting that she loved onions. Like an onion, Mother could be sharp and biting. But her underlying and overriding love has lingered in memory, just as the fragrance of an onion lingers each time I slice one for a salad, remembering her.    
    - Kathleen Kramer



Hand-lettered signs in front of roadside stands and old country stores throughout the southern U.S. — “Boil P-Nuts.” A post on Facebook last week reminded me that it's the season for fresh peanuts. I miss them. Especially boiled. I’m not sure why but they don’t seem to grow in the Midwest and no stores carry fresh ones. They need to be fresh and "green" — not dried out. But I should explain — peanuts are a vegetable. A legume. And what better way to get another serving or two of veggies than with boiled peanuts. Ladled out of a big cooker of salted water into a small brown paper sack. Best while still wet and warm. The juice dripping from your hands as you pinch the shell and slurp out the briny liquid before giving the shell the final crack and letting the soft nuts slide into your mouth. They are a messy but oh-so-tasty snack food. Veggies don’t get much better — except okra.
    - Margaret Walker



How I long for a plateful of chopped okra, rolled in egg and cornmeal, then fried in a cast iron pan readied with sizzling hot oil. I’ve tried, but can’t replicate that exact flavor or texture my parents and my aunt could cook so flawlessly. Forget finding a restaurant that prepares it the same way, no matter how many claims they make about serving southern style meals. My husband was raised outside of the south, never had okra, and detests it. When I compromise and eat the frozen version of the whole pod he turns up his nose … how can you eat that stuff? I like it just fine, though it's not nearly as good as the garden-grown and southern hand-cooked version, but it is still a little reminder of the food heaven I once inhabited.
    - Pris Campbell



My early days as a dishwasher in a bowling alley eatery taught me a lot about veggies. I formed a deep appreciation for green beans. Green bean pots were the easiest to wash. So little scrubbing. Respect! Asparagus, too. We had no electric dishwasher at that little diner. Only me! I showed the hungry customers to their tables, then rushed to the little kitchen to dish up their pre-prepared meals, then hurried to wash up everything afterwards. Bean soup, ugh. Spinach was tricky, and messed up the sink drain. Fried zucchini, no fun. My glasses would get splattered. The gigantic spaghetti sauce pot was a killer, barely fit in the single sink. Methinks that’s why the secret of our sauce was a faint hint of dish soap.
    - Roberta Beach Jacobson



The first time I encountered an eggplant was probably as a little kid. I really don't recall, but I do remember eating many servings of Grandma's savory eggplant parmigiana — inimitable! Makes my mouth water just thinking about it. I've always been intrigued by the eggplant's brownish purple color. And recently I learned it comes in white, too. Who knew? Technically, it's not a vegetable; it's a fruit of the nightshade family, actually a berry since it has all those seeds. Its French name is a mouthful but seems to fit: “aubergine.” Or perhaps an even fancier moniker: "brinjal," of Indian and Middle Eastern origin via Portugal. Once, a co-worker was repulsed by the thought of eating it. I'd packed left-overs for lunch including a couple of slices of the beloved family dish and proffered a piece. “How can a ‘plant’ be an ‘egg’ too?” she asked, recoiling slightly. “But it's the shape . . .” “Sorry, I'm not touching that thing let alone eating it!” I know better — you'll find me enjoying eggplant in various ways, from baba ganoush, to moussaka, even in Chinese stir fry. I'll take the funky veggie any day!
    - Theresa A. Cancro



Potatoes with red skins are named for Native Americans and it’s not a compliment any more than sports teams called Braves, Seminoles, and the late not so great Washington Redskins themselves. The potatoes I planted last year were Pontiacs and this year my sister Lisa and I put Chieftain seed potatoes in the ground at her place. Last year I got 7 bales of straw mulch stuffed in a jeep, driving all the way to the boonies of Candor to get them and then I went back and got 7 more. They were the perfect mulch for the Pontiacs and the fingerlings I grew at Cornell Community Garden. It took forever to get almost all the straw bits swept and vacuumed from that jeep last year so I wonder if I should warn Lisa when we go get mulch this year in her Honda CR-V.
    - Tina Wright



In my mother’s kitchen there were no fresh vegetables. Only cans where peas or carrots or string beans swam around in murky water. The peas were pale green; the carrots were cut into tiny squares; the string beans were often slimy and definitely too stringy. There were also jars of beets in case Grandpa ever stopped by and needed something borscht-y, even though all of his borscht needs were already being met by my grandmother, in their own kitchen. But the jars were stored high up in the cabinet over the sink, because my mother wanted to be prepared — just in case. Eventually I left that kitchen and went off to college. At the start of my freshman year I made a friend who was a senior; a philosophy major with her own apartment off campus. She talked to me about Plato and Sartre while standing at the stove cooking up delicious meals. She never wanted me to help. That was smart of her because I wasn’t especially skilled with a knife (never having used one at home). In that cramped apartment that smelled strongly of patchouli I became introduced to vegetables that were fresh and alive. Asparagus — long thin stalks of them, drizzled with garlic butter. Broccoli, quickly steamed and slightly crispy, also drizzled with garlic butter. One night we sat across from each other at my friend’s tiny kitchen table and I met an artichoke for the first time. Yes, garlic and butter were also present. I have to wonder, right now, as I write this, did I like the vegetables so much or was it all about the garlic? And the butter? Or maybe I was just enamored of the cook.
    - Zee Zahava

Water Stories: short-shorts on a theme

 Auntie Ruth was thrilled about the raft, thrilled that I had built the raft. I didn’t build the raft by myself. Auntie Ruth’s daughters, Ellie and Kat, were there: they did so much. So did my sister Lara. We strapped big logs together on a cold pebbly beach: strapping was the main problem. Getting the logs was easy. They were heavy, but were right there on the shore. Auntie Ruth helped us figure out how to do the strapping. We worked all morning. Auntie Ruth brought us some great snacks. Then we began to drag it in. We wished Joe had been there. Joe was Ellie and Kat’s big brother. Joe was tall, and he would have been a lot of help. But he was hiding in the bushes. So we thought. We thought he was watching. We dragged the raft into the water. Pretty still that morning, and it was really exciting. We didn’t think it would float, it was so heavy. We jumped on it. Got our poles and pushed off. We weren’t sure where to go, but the main thing was that it floated. What a victory. We wanted to name it, too. We thought of naming it Joe. Auntie Ruth was thrilled.
    - Alan Bern



Today, if you look up Roker Beach you’ll see miles of golden sand; a promenade; a landscaped seafront; a laughing child with an ice cream cone. In every photograph the sky will be blue. It’s not how I remember it, paddling with my brother in the icy waters of the North Sea coast on a grey September afternoon in the ‘60s. I thought every sea would be just like it; that waves in every ocean would nip at numbing feet. So, that first summer, when Dad towed the caravan down to the south of France, I braced myself for cold water. I’ve forgotten so much of that time, but my first footstep into the Mediterranean, my first giant leap from chilling waters — that’s still as crystal clear as the day I jumped in.
    - Alan Peat



Awake just after dawn, I open my eyes to a most magical sight, a bit of paradise, usually just a setting in a dream. Gentle warmth rests on my exposed arms as I gaze out at a turquoise ocean, a color so radiant and fresh that my eyes fill with tears. Only a day before I was shoveling my way to the car, making my way through a blustery snowfall to get to the airport. Sitting up in bed I marvel at the glistening blue green water, an offering to me in my grief. The water, having absorbed all color except this color, fills me with a calm I haven’t felt in months. Deeply grateful for this gift from friends, I allow a sliver of hope. After coffee I head out for a run that ends in the most delightful sensation, diving into that turquoise water, my whole being released into its liquid embrace. 
    - Ann Carter



I watch my thirty-year-old daughter splashing in the surf with her nephews, on Long Beach, San
Francisco. But in memory I’m seeing her three-year-old self on a Cornish beach in England. It’s the first time for the five children to be by the sea and they stand looking down the beach at the distant waves rolling in, hesitant. But not the three-year-old. With a squeal she is off running towards the water on her stubby legs, waving her hands, squealing. I follow her. There’s no danger, the tide is going out, the waves small. She reaches the shallows where there’s a little foam and the water hardly moves. She runs in, her bare feet splashing the water, sits down with a plop and beats on the waves with her hands, chortling, as they flow around her. In a little while, I crouch down beside her and she turns to me, her face full of delight, “water, splash, splash,” she says, foam and sand running through her fingers, falling back into the water.
     - Antonia Matthew



When I was five, we moved from an old apartment into a brand new house, one of four small Capes on quarter acre lots. The best room in the house was the big bathroom upstairs where the basin, the tiles, even the bathtub, were all the same pretty shade of light green. When I was ten, my parents let me use the stall shower by myself. Besides the showerhead above, there were smaller ones in the wall, two on each side. Our house wasn’t fancy, but no one else I knew had this kind of shower where you could turn the spray on yourself from all different directions. The green bathtub was even better! I poured in bubble bath and let the foam fill to the top, even over the top. I had to clean up the wet floor with a towel but no matter. I hated swimming lessons at the Y because the water was so cold it made my teeth chatter, but at home I could safely sink up to my chin in warm sudsy water the color of a calm sea.
    - Barrie Levine



I remember when I was very little, trying to comprehend the phenomenon of sweat. My dad came home from working all day in our farm’s wheat fields and tending the cattle in our big herd of Black Angus. He was totally soaked to the bone so I asked him why he had taken a shower with his clothes on. He just lifted his shirt a couple of times and said “sweat.” “Okay,” I said, as I jumped onto the porch swing next to him. “Can I sweat like that?” He shrugged his shoulders. “What are the rules?” I really was curious. He grinned a sideways smile and I figured I wasn’t going to get much more of an explanation. We sat in silence. After about ten minutes he said “Hard work in the sun.” “Is it dangerous?” I jumped in with my questions when I could. “Nah,” he said. More silence. Then he ruffled my hair and chuckled. “It’s very stinky,” he added with a wink. Then we had to go inside and get ready for supper. I figured I would learn more about wet sweat sometime later.
    - Blue Waters



I am immersed in cold lake water, hot sun reflecting off my face, about twenty feet from the wooden dock. I stop there, kicking to keep my head above water and take a mental picture of my dog and John D. I want to remember this scene forever. Thirty years later, I can conjure up this picture and still see that black dog and that skinny man who loved her almost as much as I did. They sit on the dock, wet and glistening, smiling in the sun. This world has no divorce or sorrow; only a black dog who jumps in the water after I jump. She cannot tolerate watching me sink beneath the surface. When I disappear, she is compelled to save me. Half Labrador, retrieving is intense in her blood, so she plunges in, splashing after me. I emerge under her until she is sprawled over my shoulders in the water. Laughing, I climb the ladder to the dock and do it all again, as excited as a child. The dog and the water remain a delightful spot in time in my memory . . . a few happy moments from 1970.  
    - Carol Johnston



Water becomes a very special commodity to one living in the desert, and every drop gathered at the well and carried home is precious and welcome, even by a Peace Corps volunteer. Back stateside, running water and hot water spurting from the bath spout are never taken for granted. Monsoons and tsunamis, on the other hand, spark fear and concern. Spring rains invite earthworms and green growth and a cover for tears of grief while August rains refresh the spirit. Standing ankle-deep in Maine’s ocean water quickly turns one’s flesh blue while the turquoise splash of wavelets off Maui sends a different sensation — a calming warmth rippling throughout the body. Fog curling up from pre-dawn meadows can be mesmerizing and mysterious; steam rising from a tea kettle provides a sense of comfort on a cold winter evening. Waterfalls, free-flowing or frozen, are just plain awe-inspiring. Icicles clinging to New England rooflines might be reminders of Gram’s iced layer cakes or perhaps they are holiday light decorations. No matter, for those without clear, clean drinking water, I ask prayers, for there are far too many in need.
    - Deborah Burke Henderson



My father taught me how to swim in the ocean. How to wade forward — ankle-high, knee-high, waist-high — through the rush of water. How to turn sideways against the waves and lift my arms to balance against the undertow. As the water reached chest-high, how to face forward — never turn your back to the waves — then dive into the crash and churn. Breast stroke and kick, kick, kick. Through, then up, then out of the water to grab that imperfect breath. Dive, stroke, kick, surface one more time, maybe twice, maybe three, until — you’ve reached it! You’re beyond the breakers. Here the waves are friendly moving hillsides and we are free to bob and dunk (Under? Over!) as the swells, enchanted, roll in. Soaring uplift. Playful drop. Giddy exhilaration. It never occurred to me, eight years old, not to follow my father. I never considered that I might not be able to do it, to learn the rules and repeat his steps. Beyond the breakers was where I belonged.
    - Ellen Orleans



When I was a child, I used to go swimming in the summer in a pond on the edge of our village. I would go there sometimes with my cousins, sometimes with my classmates. At first I was just splashing around, because I didn't know how to swim. I think I was a little scared. The water wasn't very deep, but I was most afraid of leeches, which I considered a kind of aquatic vampire. I felt like it was possible that I could run out of blood. One day, some older boys, noticing that I was just tickling the water, rushed at me to catch me and “baptize” me. They grabbed my hands and feet and forced me deeper into the water. I swallowed a few mouthfuls, but after that, I don't know how, miraculously, I started to hit the water hard with my hands and feet and so I moved away from those boys who now looked at me in amazement. It was a useful lesson, because after that I was not afraid of water at all.
    - Florin C. Ciobica



This urban creek is the center of my universe. To be in its presence is to be aware of the changing seasons, to feel and to hear the passage of time: fish splashing among the rocks as they move upstream to spawn each spring, the annual return of the King Fisher and the Great Blue Heron, and the sighting of downy-feathered ducklings, a lumbering raccoon, or a water snake hidden among the muddy grasses. It is the near trickle of a rainless summer and the rush following a torrential cloudburst, the drift of red-yellow apples escaping from upstream orchards in the fall, the formation of gray ice in the winter, and the thundering ice flows as temperatures once again moderate toward spring. Here, the creek mimics the sound of rain when it is not raining, and waves, though we are far from the sea. It’s the place where children find joy throwing stones — kerplop! — and launching Poohsticks. It is here where friends and lovers and strangers gather to admire the beauty of the place. To linger. To cherish. This creek is my home. It flows through my heart more strongly than blood. It is part of me.
    - Jim Mazza



“It’s just around the corner, I’m sure. I hear it already.” With a sigh, my husband pushed his walking stick onto the path and propelled himself forward. The winding rocky uphill path proved more difficult than indicated by the park poster at the trailhead. I scampered ahead. Waterfalls have fascinated me since seeing my first picture of Niagara Falls. Power and peacefulness all in one attraction. “Here it is!” I saw it first as we rounded one more stand of mountain laurel. My husband rewarded me with a hug. We stood and watched water cascade over a ledge and fall freely down into a pool below, sending up a fine mist. Power unleashed, running free, then captured below, where after its first furious churnings, it flowed softly out into the woods. We descended along the other trail, where we could keep the water in sight. At bottom, just beyond the pool, on large rocks by that stream, we set up our picnic, looking back at the falls, and enjoyed the stream’s rainbows sparkling in the dappled sunlight that filtered down through the trees.
    - Joan Leotta



A song by REM reminds me of how much I love to go night swimming and how much I love the conflicting feelings it gives me. On the one hand, I feel such freedom . . . weightless and fluid, a ballet dancer like the one I imagine but can never be on land. On the other hand, though, I am terrified. What kind of dark evil could possibly reach up from the depths, drag me under and devour me alive as I gasp for the air that isn’t there? The fear enhances the pleasure . . . a little innocent, platonic S&M between my superwoman  and my scaredy-cat selves.
    - Judy Cogan



It was the sound of water we craved that winter in the frozen northeast coast of our lives. So we put our two little children into the back seat of a VW bug, with books, favorite toys, art pads, and colored pens between them, and we drove west — following the streams and rivers as they flowed, winding through new territory in search of a home where we could hear water sing the rapids through deep woods and open land. Lured by each waterfall, we stoped and gazed and listened, not knowing where we were going or how it would end — immersed in the rush and flow. Even the meandering soothed us. We were looking for home and we kept going, cheerfully, hoping we would know it when we heard it. One night we all fell asleep in a fog and woke in a cloud — ventured out to discover we had reached the other side — the great roar of the Pacific Ocean! We had camped on the edge . . . and we lived here happily ever after.
    - Kath Abela Wilson



A kitchen sink filled with warm water, a soft towel on the drainboard, and in the water, a round-tummied baby. It’s bath time and we give the babies, each in their turn, measuring cups for dipping and pouring, while we suds their hair with Johnson’s No Tears Baby Shampoo. Soon —too soon — the babies are bathing in the tub, where they learn to scrub those not-so-round tummies and shampoo themselves, sometimes fashioning their hair into soapy sculptures. (The unicorn is a favorite.) But as Mom, I still get to enfold them in a towel and hold them, pretending it’s only to help them dry. Many years later, they encounter water in a different way as Hurricane Sandy drives water from New York Bay up Van Brunt Street onto Pioneer Street and into the building where my sons, now grown, live. In moments, the water changes from a trickle to a torrent, rushing down into the basement apartment, bending the heavy door in half and smashing everything inside against the back wall — the new furniture, cherished record and photo collections, the bowls and mugs, the soft towels, folded neatly. Our sons escape, running through the dark streets of Brooklyn in surging, thigh-deep water, urging their two dogs onward to where the car is parked on higher ground. When they call to tell us they’re safe but also what has been lost, our hearts leap and break. And my eyes fill with tears.
    - Kathleen Kramer



I would have spoken suburb, growing up on Continental Drive, a little orchard in the back yard, Twelve Corners Middle School. But my parents were too restless for that, and one Sunday they took a three-hour drive north to look at a lake from a newspaper ad; then they quit their jobs and moved there. I was three months old. So I spoke water instead, and quartz sand, and boat. Each fall the lakeblue would deepen, and muskrats and minks foraged for clams in plain view, with the seasonal people gone. Winters, the cold hard freeze set into the bay. The islands had been vacated, and the ice pulled them closer to us; now they sat in walking distance. Meanwhile, fish still conducted their business near the mucky bottom. In the less-brutal air of spring, the ice became a huge drumskin playing its own funeral song, like a local bomb, like the deepest loud gong, letting go. Freed, the lake climbed stone steps to the underbellies of cabins that stood on stilts for this reason. The summer lake, of course, receded rippling or raging into its basin — the few warm months we had, before it spoke its winter tongue again.
    - Laurinda Lind

 

 

It was all about the minnows. I abandoned my sandwich on our blanket mid-picnic and followed the grass to a short wall rimming the lake. A fallen willow branch, thin like my father’s bamboo fly rod he liked to whip in the backyard, lay at my feet. I used to chase his small yellow training weights flickering in the grass after each cast. The lake that afternoon seemed full of those pale darting fish and I just knew my rod could catch them. By the third stroke of my imagination I’d lost my balance and tumbled into the water, losing the willow and a shoe. The next summer my father gave me a short fly rod for my eighth birthday and a few backyard casting lessons from his end of the line.
    - Lorraine A Padden



Standing on the hump, barely able to see over the seat back, I peer between Mama and Daddy’s heads, waiting, knowing I will see it soon. They told me I have seen it before but I was too little to remember. I see the top of a carousel. Exciting for a three-year old, but not it. Daddy says I will be able to see it over the next small rise in the road. Then, between the dunes, sparkling in the sunlight, there it is — turquoise trimmed in white. Sixty-seven years later and at every first glimpse of the ocean I am three again, seeing it for the first time. No matter its mood or how often I see it, still in love.
    - Margaret Walker


I’m in my mid-twenties, sad and unmoored, but less sad having left the east for California. My current boyfriend takes me to the Yosemite Valley. He, his brothers, and some friends, spend the days bouldering and talking about when they scaled El Capitan. I’m unathletic, and my body is disabled from a bout of swine flu — with surgery and long hospitalization — just a few years before. I don’t even really like camping, but am content to sit in the shade of a great rock and read. We go to admire the historic lodge, the Ahwahnee Hotel. A cool blue swimming pool sits in the middle of the outdoor dining room. “Let’s jump in,” someone suggests. That’s all I need, as I love water so much. I strip, leave my clothes in a pile, and leap in, as do all the guys. In a fast minute, security guards with walkie-talkies chase us off. I grab my clothes, and quickly get dressed. The refreshing water changes everything. I’m no longer a nerd, low-status, unable to climb. I’m bold and fearless, naked and fun. I’ll never see any of these guys again — and the boyfriend and I will part ways soon enough. However, I have impressed the group with my transformation into a water nymph. And there is one person who will remain impressed. Me.
    - Miriam Sagan



I didn’t start out planning to be a thief but it happened on my 1977 boat trip. A 22 foot sailboat allows only sponge baths using a pot of water heated on the kerosene stove. You can stay reasonably clean but not like in a cascading, warm shower. Overnights at a marina were only when the laundry piled up too high to easily row it in and the galley needed a major restocking. Over and over, on short stops for gas and water, I offered to pay for a shower. Every single marina owner lifted his or her nose in disdain and said no. I planned the next step carefully. Most marinas had their shower facilities in with the toilets, which they would let you use. I began to pack clean underpants, shampoo, soap, and a small towel in a tote bag on these stops and managed to take a shower within three or four minutes. A record, I’m sure. With my wet hair tucked into my sailing hat and clean underpants on my bottom, I nonchalantly strolled back to the dock. Once on board I changed my tee shirt and let the sun and fresh air in the cockpit dry my squeaky-clean hair. A sailing couple I traveled with from time to time laughingly dubbed me “the shower thief.” The name stuck.
    - Pris Campbell



Looking back at early childhood, my behavior bordered on juvenile delinquency. Mom insisted on tests to convince teachers advanced classes would challenge a bored and restless mind, and they did. But the supercharged body had a mind and wild spirit of its own. Enter swimming lessons, and competition. Butterfly the stroke of choice. A Mark Spitz poster in the closet. The races became a contest between water and muscles slapping and pulling and thrusting. But then a magical rhythm came together. A dissolution of duality, a melting of muscle and water in a tireless trance, like the harmony of a dolphin breaching the surface for a breath on a straight and purposeful path.     
    - Richard L. Matta



I grabbed a seasonal gig in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with up-close views of Lake Superior. This is how I repatriated from a far-flung Greek island to the land of my birth. The job ad mentioned bunkhouse accommodations for summer workers. We temp employees only had to show up with sheets and towels. I was adamant about my Greek exit plan. It seemed solid. I booked a one-way ticket (Karpathos-Athens-Istanbul-Chicago-Marquette) and filled my suitcase with hiking boots, active wear, and a set of sheets. My pair of oft-used beach towels would have to double as blankets, and I figured I could probably use a jacket as a pillow. Nothing more would fit in the suitcase. I shared a large, fully-furnished house with eight college interns. During that memorable summer of 2012, a few of them turned 21. I turned 60. There was cake. Our work pace was brisk. Ready to hike, swim, or camp, outdoor enthusiasts showed up in campers, buses, cars, and motorcycles. I loved it, even though Lake Superior felt icy compared to the Aegean Sea. To me, it was worth it not to be worried about jellyfish ever again.
    - Roberta Beach Jacobson



Above me was the silver sheen of the water’s surface. Trapping my ankle against the side of the large rubber raft was a heavy cooler. I struggled to free my leg. That silver sheen felt frighteningly far above me. I gave one more huge wrenching kick — up to air! Gasping, my head above the surface of eastern Oregon’s John Day River, the water rushed me downstream. Joy — Mike’s white head bobbing ahead of me in the white water! Very long moments later, four of us scrambled up the riverbank. Yesterday rafting had been prohibited because of flood water. Today Mike and I had waited until the other rafts with twenty of our friends and cousins were safely launched, then cockily took the oars. We had done this so many times but never in such fast water! Around the bend and not enough time to steer the raft through the arch of the bridge. It snagged a tree rammed up against the bridge and flipped. Safe in the sagebrush my lower leg was numb and multicolored, but I felt euphoric. We were all alive! And the silver sheen of the river — below us now — still beckoned.
    - Ruth Yarrow



Oh, how I hate plumbing. But I know that it's necessary, and I do appreciate the plumbers who have worked on the old fixtures, faucets and such in my apartment, then my house, to stop leaks, clear drains, undo mistakes . . . . Today, the bathroom sink backed up. Completely. No amount of plunging or poking around in the trap could unclog it. The test will come tomorrow when the plumber takes a long, hard look at the situation. I dread the scene but hope the pipes will be fully cleaned out so I can get on with my life. My plea: water flowing, but only where, when, and how we want it.
     - Theresa A. Cancro



When I was three I walked way down back to the creek by myself. Had Mom taken me there once . . . was that how I knew the wonders of water awaiting me? There are Sirens in the sea and Sprites in creeks that call a person beyond reason. What I remember most is my mother calling my name. I was faraway and her voice usually soft was loud with fear but I didn’t emerge from the woods right away. I was deliciously alone and hated to give it up but there was a beginning of a conscience in me which finally sent me up the hill in sight of the adults searching for me and the beginning of a secret life too when I pretended to have “wandered off” and set me off on a life full of wandering.  
    - Tina Wright



My sister and I are missing summer camp, but it is still only October. In the back of our bedroom closet is a cardboard box with the word CAMP written on the side in black magic marker. We are not supposed to open that box. We open that box. It’s Sunday morning, early, our parents are still sleeping in the next room. We don’t make a sound as we pull out our bathing suits and put them on over our pajamas. It’s not easy, but we do it. Then we sit down in the middle of our bedroom, on the hard cold wooden floor, and imagine we are in two row boats, in the middle of the lake, at our sleep-away camp in Bear Mountain. We sing, very softly: “Row Row Row Your Boat.” We sing “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore.” We sing “Deep Blue Sea, Willie, Deep Blue Sea.” “Try not to cry,” I tell Laura, because she always cries when we get to the part “it was Willie what got drownded in the deep blue sea.” Later, when we’re back in our beds, sitting cross-legged the way we sit in camp, my sister asks me to braid her hair and I do, even though it is pixie-short. She asks if we’ll roast marshmallows at the cookout that night. I assure her that we will. Because everything is possible — before our parents wake up.
    - Zee Zahava

COLORS: short-shorts on a theme

Her lips. And her neck. And she reached to kiss me, and I reached back up. With my lips and cupped her back. With my hand. And my other hand reached for her. And touched her long neck, slender. Gently. “No,” she said, we “better not,” and drew back. As I did. It was her tight weave sweater. I write this dream down. This memory with a short pen, red-colored, but the ink not. Still, her lips, her sweater, her painted nails, all red.
    - Alan Bern


I’m thinking of celandines, specifically lesser celandines; I’m thinking how they lit the whole wildflower meadow up with their February yellow; I’m thinking of my dad. He taught me to recognize them, how best to distinguish them from buttercups. I remember it like yesterday — the two of us crouching down in the long grass behind Muker church; the strains of a silver band floating across. He held a single leaf gently and asked me to look close and describe it. He taught me that the celandine has a heart-shaped leaf, then he marveled at the yellow of its petals, right there in that meadow, bright with a thousand fallen suns.
    - Alan Peat


Driving home the other day as the road rose just outside of Caroline, there appeared ahead of me a brilliantly luminescent rainbow. It seemed clearer and closer than any rainbow I have ever seen, both ends visible, only a reach away. I always believed it impossible to really see the end of a rainbow, and in my memory I never have. Predictably obscured, tucked behind trees or buildings on the horizon —the pot of gold an illusory reward. This rainbow’s arc dramatically contrasted against the heathery purple of the sky, each color distinct in its spectral order. Toward the ends the fragments of light began to break apart, the finality a gently filtered view into a small grove of trees near a dilapidated farmhouse. I slowed the car, letting my imagination take me over to stand beneath those trees, the scattered light bathing me in radiance.
    - Ann Carter


My husband died in December. When spring arrived, I realized I was responsible for the yard from now on. I opened the shed to find his garden tools arranged neatly against the wall. I developed expertise with spades, shovels, rakes, trowels, half-moon edgers, pruners, then hired a mason to install a bluestone walk from the driveway to the back door. He removed rocks and roots from the site, then smoothed it vigorously with the grading rake. The wood handle split, and the bent clamp couldn’t accommodate a replacement. At the garden store, I discovered that modern implements were made with synthetic materials. There was one rake with a shiny yellow handle, the color of bright lemon peels or honeybee stripes. It felt solid, about the same weight as my old one. I prepared the beds, sometimes leaving the new rake outside instead of storing it in the shed. Standing against a stockade fence, this rake broadcast loudly with its vivid appearance, “Here I am!” When the daffodils emerged in March, forsythia in April, daisies in June, sunflowers in July, I couldn’t have been happier to see my yellow rake join in the glorious community of colors surrounding me.
    - Barrie Levine


I taught high school creative writing to a bunch of incredibly creative teenage boys. You get the picture, right? We spent the entire semester scripting and shooting videos. Someone told me an orange screen was even better than blue or green for inventing background. I purchased several yards of glowing, flaming, fabric and Velcroed it to an entire wall, ceiling to floor. I had to super glue the Velcro to the ceiling. As far as I know, the glue is still there, after 20 years. So . . . I discovered, from experience, the power of color on human emotion. We shot several scenes — drama, singing, dancing, throwing a Cabbage Patch Doll around like a football. After a few weeks, melodrama slithered its way into the group of rowdy, cheerful friends. Arguments broke out. Jealousy prevailed. One sixteen-year-old extremely talented young man cried the biggest tears I’d ever seen. “Wade was my best friend and now he won’t even let me be in his film!!!” The kid wailed in front of the whole class. Camaraderie died that day. I’m sure a screen of calming colors would have produced more amicable results. I discovered that boys need to have girls around to curb the more violent male hormones, but they did produce some hilarious videos.
    - Carole Johnston


Days following the vernal equinox, a halo of fresh green crowns forsythia bushes; purple and yellow crocus pop up from a winter’s sleep; and the first brilliant yellow marsh marigold unfurls amidst verdant greens in the nearby wetlands. Each morning, mid-day, and late afternoon, our patio is a riot of color as smaller birds come to feed. The male goldfinch now sports brighter golds in his plumage; these will brighten further each passing day, while his mate is still attired in light olive garb. Dark green holly branches fail to hide the dazzle of a red cardinal nor the blue, white, and black markings of the smart-looking jay. The bravest is the diminutive chickadee, noted for its black cap and bib and blue-grey waistcoat. A pair of mourning doves, in their spotted garments of muted earthen hues, satisfy themselves pecking at fallen seed. Dark-eyed juncos, also ground feeders, are first to arrive in winter and linger into the depth of spring. Their slate-colored back is in stark contrast to a pure-white bill and underbelly. Frequent visitors also include the tufted titmouse in his soft grey feathering and pale peach-colored flank. Whenever the larger red-bellied woodpecker approaches to feed, all other colors scatter to the breeze.
    - Deborah Burke Henderson


The clear glass vase is six inches high and a shade of blue unlike the sky, unlike a robin’s egg, unlike forget-me-nots. Its blue is the color of water surrounding a tropical island — smooth, silky blue water that bathes the white sand underneath. Its slim, elegant neck rises to a scalloped rim that opens out like a flower. Embedded in the glass are tiny bubbles that catch the light, like fizz in champagne. I bought the vase in Beirut, Lebanon, when I was twenty years old and thought it a miracle that it made the trip home in my suitcase, unbroken. In summer I fill it with daisies, snapdragons, lavender, zinnias. In winter I set it in the window where it glows in the light like a splash from an exotic blue sea.
    - Emily  Johnson


When I was a child, communism was in full swing in my country. But for me, too young to understand how things were, everything seemed fine. In the second grade, I joined The Pioneer Organization. As a new member I could hardly wait to get my Pioneer's necktie, which the older boys had and wore with confidence. After I took an oath of allegiance, I was given a small, triangular, red scarf, with an outside border of red, gold, and blue. “Red symbolizes the blood of our ancestors who sacrificed themselves to defend our country over the centuries.” I remember those words, and how proud I felt of this achievement. I thought my life was just beginning. I dreamed of all sorts of great deeds I would accomplish in the future. But two years later, due to some infractions of the rules, and various small misdemeanors, I was punished by the school principal and my precious scarf was taken away. I ran home in tears, deeply ashamed. It took a while, but eventually I was allowed to return to the organization and I could resume my role as a “leading pioneer.” My red scarf, faded by so many washes, continues to hold vivid memories for me.
    - Florin C. Ciobica


I work my way gingerly down the narrow, twisting, serpentine gorge stream in the inky pre-dawn darkness that fills the forest. I choose each step carefully to avoid slipping on wet algae-coated stones. The stream is my trail. My destination is a place on the stream that opens into a vast space edged by tall forest-topped rock walls. I reach a 10-foot-high waterfall, the last obstacle before gaining entry into this hidden forest glen I call the cathedral. I’ve been here countless times before but never at such an early hour. Gazing beyond the waterfall into the darkness below I am struck by a strange sight. A brilliant piercing shaft of low morning sunlight has traveled from the sun almost horizontally through the entire forest, unfettered by branches or leaves, emerging from the foliage to cut across the darkness, landing in a small cave-like hollow on the rock wall to my right. The depression in the rock is glowing brilliant orange as if a pool of molten lava is resting within. My hope to discover something magical has been rewarded!
    - Frank Muller


It's not by chance that in so many places and for so, so long it has been said that someone who sees the color green deeply will become a bird. That is their reward. So, when you said that you want to see green deeply, I took it as a call. Just walk out and you will see green as the palette, green as the landscape. Every shade of green, buds a light white green and bushes a darker green and field stalks even darker. And grasses and shoots and trees, everything green:  evergreens and pine needles and leaves. And green does not assert its primacy dominantly. Green accepts its place. Green offers itself up as a backdrop for the bright splashes of other colors: yellow and purple, red and orange, mauve and taupe, all brighter by green. The backdrop for river and rock, also brighter by green, and foreground for the sky. The color of life is green. And wait, I hear a call, I see a lifting, I feel a lightening. Was it you who called?  Was it you, my love? Where will I find you? In the trees? Up above?
    - Ian M. Shapiro


My uncle Morty was classified 4F because he was colorblind. “I guess you could say I was mortified,” he wise-cracked. When I was nine he was my favorite uncle because he was a snappy dresser. Once I asked him how he could pick out such sporty ties if he was colorblind. “Trial and error,” he said. “It’s the smooch factor. You know what smooching is, don’t you?” “Sure.” “Well, when I go out on a date, if a girl isn’t willing to smooch I figure it’s because she doesn’t like my tie. So I give it away.” “Wow, that sounds expensive.” “It’s worth it,” he said. “Not only does it make me seem generous, but it practically guarantees one less competitor in the smooch department.” Something told me that he was joking so I decided to change the subject. “But, Uncle Morty, how can you drive if you can’t tell a red light?” “Simple. I just go with the flow. When the cars in front of me slow down and stop I know it’s a red light. And when they start moving, it’s green.” “Yeah, but what do you do if you’re the only one at the intersection?” “Then it doesn’t matter whether the light is red or green. If there are no other cars, I just keep going.” Unfortunately, Uncle Morty wasn’t joking about his driving. A few years later, a pickup truck smashed into him when he failed to stop at an intersection. After that, if anyone inquired how he came to be confined to a wheelchair, he would say that he was wounded in the war. And, even though he was colorblind, he bragged about his purple heart.
    - Jack Goldman


Strolling the stone-paved walkways of Venice, I am delighted by frequent flashes of orange. No, it’s not costumed Carnevale revelers lost on a back street, nor rogue gondoliers swapping out their traditional white, blue, or red stripes. It’s not an invasion of Princeton or Syracuse alumni on tour, nor fruit trees of a Grand Canal palazzo. It is, simply, the Aperol Spritz. One of Italy’s most popular cocktails, this modest “cooler” is made by combining Prosecco, soda, and ice with the herby, florescent-orange aperitivo. It is enjoyed, I can attest from years of over-indulgence, by tourists and locals alike.  Frequently served in stemmed goblets and garnished with a mammoth green olive or an orange slice, the Aperol Spritz is as pervasive as the bridges crisscrossing the city’s canals, and with good reason: ordering one at a street-side bacaro immediately gives you the feeling of being a true Venetian.  Sipping an Aperol Spritz, I become — if only momentarily — one of those beautiful, well-dressed people who seem to populate all Italian cities. A perspiring glass in hand, I lean against an Istrian-stone wall to watch friends and strangers gossip and laugh, as our globes of bright-orange liquid swirl in the late-morning sun.
    - Jim Mazza


When I saw it on the toddler swimsuit rack, a deep emerald accented with a fine white stripe, I quickly flipped to the size. 4T. My dear little 3T water sprite was, and still is, tiny. My hands found the price tag — a designer suit (Pierre Cardin) but only five dollars, a close-out special. It would only need a stitch at the back for this year, then it would be a perfect fit next year. I scooped it up. Jennie instinctively recognized the suit as stylish. She looked adorable in it — a pixie running through the sprinkler, prancing up and down the lawn. Then, at Rehoboth Beach that summer, she wore it happily, fearlessly, dancing in the waves. At the end of our second beach day I asked her to wait while I got her infant brother’s paraphernalia together. As I lifted Joey into his stroller I turned to Jenny, but she was gone! My husband stayed with Joey as I ran for the lifeguard and gave my daughter’s description. Then we both spotted a distant splash of green. Jennie was calmly waiting, on the top boardwalk step, for us to catch up. I always recall that emerald green suit fondly, not only for its beauty but also because it was the flag that helped us find Jennie, our jewel.
    - Joan Leotta


One of my first memories is of my grandfather, my father’s dad, who died of a stroke when I was six. We called him Pa. I must have been four, maybe three, when he and my grandmother visited us in Pittsburgh. The details of the occasion are fuzzy. I don’t remember why they came or much of what we did. But I do remember one thing perfectly: the shade of red that we used to paint the round picnic table on our patio. It had a burnt tone to it, a bit darker than a brick. It was the same shade that he had used to paint the fence around his yard in Niagara Falls. After he died, every time I thought of him, I thought of that color and of the long, smooth brush strokes he showed me to make to apply it evenly to the table. After we were done, I couldn’t touch it or the paint would come off, so I stood there next to him, admiring our work, watching the color dry into the early spring sun.
    - Julie Lind


When I ask what kind of vase it is it's a teardrop people say bottom heavy as if it was just shed a pale purple transparent body shaped as if a bubble was pressed flat without breaking a treble clef curve lips for an easy pour into another's heart or this shapely body like the bass viol he played in the Chicago Lyric Opera suddenly he disappeared after choosing it saying to his wife send this for their wedding it is perfect for them elegant subtle and then 9/11 happened right before the day and they could not fly until a few months later we were told it was while he looked at our web page photos so happy we had found each other was gone he was our favorite so funny and sweet Rick's younger brother Steve at 45 we had wanted to repeat our musical wedding for him now only this teardrop he gave us now caressing that shape we add iris lavender violets lilac watered with tears as his strong graceful bow leans into our song
    - Kath Abela Wilson


Gently, between forefinger and thumb, I hold just one. Soon, I will drop it with a soft plunk into my pail where it will join countless others. But for just this barest moment on a sunny morning in July, I allow myself the pleasure of pausing in my hurried gathering and look at it. Blueberry. If I were Pablo Neruda, I would write an ode to its color — deep blue, with a bloom like a slight frost or the finest sifting of last night’s moonlight. And look how the color shines forth when my finger and thumb disturb the fragile mist and reveal the deepness beneath. So blue, it’s almost black. Now, as I hold it poised above the pail, I hesitate. Maybe this one is for now, not later. Not for blueberry pancakes or blueberry muffins or even a handful scattered over my cereal. This one is to taste while it’s still full of sunshine. Still holding just a hint of the soil in which it grew. So I place it in my mouth. And I savor the tiny pop when my teeth break through the delicate skin, the littlest flood of juice, the brilliant flavor on my tongue. Indeed, if blue has a taste, this is it.
    - Kathleen Kramer


On a particularly long road trip, my brother introduced me to the game Slug Bug. Also known as Punch Buggy, the object is to hit one’s opponent after spotting a Volkswagen Bug. Saying the car’s color is optional but my brother insisted we include it. He’d always win, of course. Lucky for me, our games never lasted long. I’d complain of a sore arm and my parents would reprimand my brother. As much as I hated playing Slug Bug, I loved riding in my aunt’s VW Bug. Arabella was a warm, sunny yellow, a car as fun as its owner. I only got to ride in Arabella when my extended family would meet at my grandmother’s house in Northern Wisconsin for vacation. To escape the heat, we’d pile into Arabella and head to the lake. Slug Bug was the furthest thing from my mind as we put-putted down the backroads, laughing as each bump caused Arabella to catch air.
    Marcie Wessels


Daddy built it to last. Steel pipe sunk in gallons of concrete with an extra long board balanced perfectly at the center.  Built to blend with the foliage near the small “lake” — the pipe and plank the deep green of a summer forest, almost unnoticeable at the back of our yard. This was no ordinary see-saw. There were no “sissy” handles — just a carved-out space for your hands. It was high — my feet didn’t touch the ground when it was perfectly balanced. It lasted through hurricanes and flooding — always there for us to try some astonishing new feat. Sometimes a backyard rodeo — what would it take to buck someone off the other end? Sometimes an acrobatic apparatus — how far from the center could you walk and keep the deep green plank off the grass? Sometimes simply a means of keeping a younger sibling occupied while, a book in one hand, you pushed gently with your feet. When last I saw it, at least 45 years after Daddy made it, the color was only slightly faded, the plank just a bit warped. Almost hidden amidst the azaleas, camellias, live oak, pine and popcorn trees — the green see-saw still standing.     
    - Margaret Walker


A wee dot of purple on the road on my final stretch to work gradually becomes my friend and colleague, Barbara, riding her bike to work from her home five miles away. I drive an hour out from Boston, a far more daunting distance, but being a real fan of exercise, a trip she’s made on her bike to prove she could do it. I’m careful to pull far over on the two lane road and get past before I toot good morning. It’s freezing out but the roads have been cleared. Her purple coat is barely knee length, though. She arrives after me, face rosy, hair windblown. I tease her about being a purple blob on my horizon. When we talk about colors we like in clothes she always says, anything, as long as it’s purple. Judging from her work clothes she’s not kidding.
    - Pris Campbell


I was ten years old, shopping with my mother, when I found a violet umbrella in the rain gear rack among the black, polka-dot, and clear plastic selections. I kept going back to look at this rather large umbrella with a fancy gold-tone handle. Talked my mom into buying it for me. The next day, it rained! So I trotted off to the house of my best friend with my new find. “Where'd you get that? A purple umbrella?” quipped her sister, a notorious teaser. “Not purple, violet,” I corrected her, emphasizing the lighter color. “Okay, but it looks purple to me!” All summer and into fall, I was teased as the girl with the purple umbrella. I didn't care because I felt very special whenever I opened and walked under its violet expanse.
    - Theresa A. Cancro


Water in motion conjures a froth, the white, white with silver that gleams on the top of waves in the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Ontario, the ripples in creeks like Fall Creek and Cascadilla. I can blow up every stream to river size in my mind and I am canoeing down the Genesee River or I imagine a tiny me where I raft like Huck Finn on a good strong oak leaf. The color is the same, the color of motion as water sprays over rocks even though the music changes from quiet streams like now I lay me down to sleep to the roar of cataracts like an orchestra wearing earplugs. The water sprites are silver white dancing and singing, the colors in the fountain foot of waterfalls like cumulus clouds condensed and wildly bubbled through with carbonation. It’s alive.    
    - Tina Wright


I can remember being asked by friends, when I was young, what my favorite color was, and my first choice had been green. I had chosen it because of it being the color of so many plants that I thought it was the color of life itself. Sometime in my college years I realized that my preferred favorite color was shifting to blue and that I was not asked about my favorite color very often. Nevertheless, I offered, every now and then, that my favorites were blue and green and how happy it is for today to let you all know this obscure information!
    - Tom Clausen
 

I was not a particularly precocious child but there was one time, in the first grade, when I had my moment to shine. It happened on the day our teacher, Miss Eisman, called us up to her desk, one at a time, so we could choose a sheet of colored paper (called construction paper, but I didn’t know why) and we were supposed to say the color we wanted. So my classmates asked for blue, red, yellow, brown, pink, orange, purple. When my name was called I walked quickly up the aisle, pointed to a sheet of light green paper, and said “I’d like the chartreuse one, please.” Miss Eisman was surprised. She asked how I knew that word. “Because it sounds like Charlotte Russe,” I said, giving an answer that made absolute sense to me. Charlotte Russe was my favorite dessert — a creamy, custardy, fruity cake-like confection, with a cherry on top, served in a small paper cup. And if you couldn’t wait until you got home from the bakery you could eat it while you were walking, because the woman behind the counter would hand over a small wooden spoon if you asked for it politely. Miss Eisman had never taken much notice of me before that moment but, as I took my sheet of chartreuse paper from her hand and turned to go back to my desk, she said “You’re a clever little thing, aren’t you?” And since I was taught not to contradict an adult I said “Yes, I am.”  
    - Zee Zahava

Food Stories — the early years: short-shorts on a theme

My friend was spending the night. We both woke up in the dark and crept around. Quiet. Very, very early. My parents were still asleep, we could hear their light snoring. Peering around the corner from the dark hall to the kitchen. Dawn light. We wanted the sugar, some more. Bread box. I buttered four slices of spongy white bread. My friend watched. Then I sprinkled with a spoon from the blue pottery bowl pure streamed sugar, then stopped. It stuck pretty well, well enough. Whatever fell, fell to the plates. We put our slices on the drainboard, and then we each took a plate to lick up the extra. Sugar food. We knew we should hide our tracks, sugar tracks, but we weren’t careful. I bet my Mom figured out what we’d been up to, but she never spoke a word about it. Sugar. 
    - Alan Bern


Cloth puddings; oven-bottom bread; sponges; ham and mustard pickle sandwiches . . . my grandmother was a Victorian cook. Nothing fancy, just good old-fashioned home cooking. Dad took us walking, rain or shine, each weekend. I’d return home with pockets full of finds to offer to Grandma: sometimes an ammonite, sometimes a clam shell, or shale with a band of shining quartz. But my grandma’s gift was a constant one. She baked a table full of love each weekend and every Sunday we had cheese scones, currant buns, and cakes with neatly piped pink icing. At the end of these meals she took two small bowls of cake mix from the fridge for my brother and I. Half a century on I can still conjure the taste of it. And oh, what I’d give to say thank you to her one last time.
    - Alan Peat


During the months in spring when the sap was collected in buckets from the maple trees in our Catskill Mountains, my cousin, Teresa, and I would toast Freihofer’s brand white bread in our grandmother’s kitchen and then spread the most exquisite maple cream on the hot slices just popped from the toaster. The cream would soften as soon as it met with the toast and my mouth would water knowing the deliciousness about to be tasted. Grandma never stood over us and said “That’ll do,” or “Let’s put that away now.” She just let us eat the toast and the crunch and the sweet and the joy. She must have known what we didn’t — that the day would come soon enough when sugar and bread would bring enough restrictions and admonishments on their own to last the rest of our lifetimes. And for those few precious years, she must have thought, “Just let them eat toast!”
    - Anne Killian-Russo


During World War II food was on everyone's mind.  Because there wasn't enough of it.  Meat, eggs, milk, bread, cheese, almost any food you could think of, all rationed — 4 ounces of meat a person. No wonder people moved in together, pooled their ration cards, and got a small joint of meat for Sunday lunch, eaten after the slice of Yorkshire pudding which filled one up. At boarding school there was enough food but no one wanted to eat it. We ate in a long room with round tables. We were not allowed to talk or ask anything to be passed because we were expected to notice if anyone needed anything and pass it. Set out on the wide window sills were saucers with the week's ration of margarine and small tins with the week's ration of sugar. We were all sure that someone came in and stole some of these rations because before the end of the week they were all gone. Fried bread and powdered milk for breakfast. Rice puddings at lunch, crusty on the top — there was a rusty nail in the pudding, once. Stewed apple sometimes. Tinned meat, lots of watery cabbage, mashed potatoes covering a thin layer of mincemeat. I don't remember eggs or cheese. Salads, fresh fruit — what were they? No wonder we had colds all the time. A surprise that we didn't have scurvy. 
    - Antonia Matthew


When I was seven, my mother was hospitalized with a mysterious illness, probably referred to as “nerves” at the time. My father hired a housekeeper, a woman older than my mother, to cook and keep the house in order. My brother and I were to address her as “Mrs. K.” She was stern and humorless — but her greatest offense was that she stood in the place of our missing mother. Mrs. K’s cooking was basic and always included a canned vegetable. On the day she made spinach, I refused to eat it. After my father and brother left the table, I stared down at my plate in misery. The spinach mixed with margarine resembled green muck that washed up on the shore. The standoff lasted for what seemed forever, as did my mother’s absence. Dad returned to the kitchen, saw my plight, and said exactly what I had been praying for: “Barrie, you’re excused.” My hero! I could tell by the look on her face that Mrs. K was furious, but she couldn’t say anything because dad was the boss. Soon after, my mother returned home, Mrs. K departed, and everything in the world was right again.
    - Barrie Levine


I loved to watch my mom make fried chicken. She let me pull over a stool so I could stand on it and see everything on the counter as she worked her magic. First she took a giant knife and deftly whacked the chicken into legs, thighs, breasts, and wings. Then she dipped those pieces into a bowl of liquidy gunk before throwing them into her favorite breading mixture, patting each piece on both sides. The next step involved the hot, greasy bed of her electric frying pan. She felt very modern, having graduated from the big frying pan on the gas stove to this new-fangled piece of kitchen equipment that didn’t need a fire under it. As soon as Mom settled the breaded chicken parts into the bubbling hot oil they began their crackling journey toward crispiness. Then she was done for a while and began washing some dishes. I’d go off to play with my dog. Soon it was time to flip the chicken pieces over so I jumped back up on the stool to watch the show. Mom grabbed each piece with a pair of tongs and tossed them over with a special flare just for my amusement. We laughed as the back sides got their chance to sizzle. I got bored after a while and went off to play some basketball. Eventually Mom called me back inside to set the table for dinner. My dad, my two big brothers, and my big sister all sat down to enjoy an amazing dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and peas from a can. I felt that I had helped to make it all happen.
    - Blue Waters


Crimson, scarlet, kaleidoscope in a glass — bitter, sour on the tongue — my first taste of cranberry juice was a psychedelic experience. I was 16, vacationing with my parents on Cape Cod. Ocean Spray had not begun to market this magical elixir, so it seemed we had discovered a hidden treasure. I can still see the white linen table cloth, sparking goblets, sunshine glowing through the juice like rubies. Now, I am obsessed, stashing bags of cranberries in my freezer all year, making endless crocks of cranberry apple sauce. I eat tangy berries every morning with yogurt. Delicious, even without sugar, they explode with flavor, and I’m right back there, in that long-ago summer.
    - Carole Johnston


Continuity seemed the name of the game in our suburban home for nearly every meal when we four were young. Maybe because Mom grew up with a cook in the household, she'd never learned the fine art of cooking or the joy of cooking with spices. Mornings brought cold cereal with milk, lunch found us eating pb & j or possibly a bologna sandwich (yuck), an afternoon snack consisted of a buttered slice of Wonder bread sprinkled with sugar, and dinner fare centered around the day of the week. Starting with Monday, typical features included tuna casserole, frozen chicken croquettes, her version of American Chop Suey, hash, frozen fish sticks, hot dogs and beans, and a pot roast or possibly a roast on Sunday, if we could afford it. To her credit, over time Mom developed a few specialties. Topping the list were cheese dreams, fudge, deviled eggs, and a tasty breakfast of cornmeal mush which sounds distasteful but is really quite yummy — the cornmeal mixture is chilled then sliced, fried, and served smothered with butter and warm maple syrup. She also had a fondness for replicating the smooth oatmeal Nanny once made. The secret? A double boiler and soaking the oats for hours before cooking overnight. The gleaming two-tiered pot hovered over a pilot light for a long, slow cook time, with only an occasional stirring. Oatmeal could only be served the next morning with the cream that topped the bottled milk. Treasured memories for sure, and the reason why I took over cooking the meals at a young age!
    - Deborah Burke Henderson


To cook spaghetti, you boil the water, then add the spaghetti. For eggs, the opposite. Reverse it, I learned, and the eggs crack, the spaghetti clumps. My mother was a patient teacher. Standing beside her, burners glowing, the rules of cooking weren’t lessons or tests, but knowledge dispensed, wisdom offered. Here’s the difference between chopping and slicing. Here’s how to stir. Here’s when to cover. Meatballs shrink as you cook them; matzoh balls get bigger. Close my eyes, and I’m there again, among the sharp knives and friendly spoons, whispering incantations: Slow simmer. Rolling boil. Sauté.
    - Ellen Orleans


My OCD behavior began in1948 when I was twelve years old. My parents took me with them on a 2-month trip around the world, during which my physician father visited mission hospitals in the Philippines and throughout India. I was terrified of flying, and with over a dozen flights on our schedule, I was convinced that one of the planes was bound to crash. Having no other way to control my destiny, I used  counting, touching, and made-up gestures to protect us. I touched doorknobs and trees, twirled in circles, counted steps. My parents must have noticed my odd behavior, but said nothing. On our flight home, the plane had a middle-of-the-night layover in Greenland, and the airport was totally deserted. Half asleep, we sat at an empty table with nothing on it but a small pot of something yellow next to the saltshakers. Whatever it was, I told myself I had to eat a spoonful of it or our plane would end up in the ocean. It was horseradish! My mouth was on fire, but we made it home . . . safely.
    - Emily Johnson


As a child I was very fond of cozonac, a kind of sweet bread that is stuffed with cocoa, Turkish delight, and ground walnut kernels. My mother would make a small loaf for each of her children, as a special treat for Easter; we would eat it in portions, divided into days, to make it last as long as possible. But in our country, at that time, it was difficult to obtain delicacies like Turkish delight. My mother, prudent by nature, stocked up beforehand, in anticipation of the holiday. One day, when I was bored with our usual dessert — a little butter spread on bread, with sugar on top — I rummaged through the house until I found the hiding place where the small pieces of precious, fragrant, colorful Turkish delight were stored. I ate, like some insatiable ogre, leaving almost nothing behind. Because of that, Easter was much poorer for us children that year. As punishment, I was to be forbidden any cozonac. In order for me to have even a small amount I had to beg bits from each of my brothers, in an attempt to satisfy my appetite.
    - Florin C. Ciobica


Whenever Aunt Pearl gave me advice, her back was turned to me.  And since she moved and turned constantly in the kitchen, that could be often. “Always look beyond what you see, Mickele. And always look even beyond that,” she said, turning. “You want milk in your tea?”  Over time she sounded more and more like Bobbe. I know her back was turned right when she gave advice because I looked to see her expression but couldn't. “Like if you look and see a tired face, what's beyond that? And beyond that?” She turned to me. “One sugar or two?"  I said, “Milk, two sugars please Aunt Pearl.” I looked up but she had already turned again. “And if you see a promise, what's beyond that? And beyond that?” All I saw were her apron strings. And she turned to me and stopped, wiping her hands on her apron. “Mickele, we forgot the toast.” And I was sure for a moment, I was looking right at Bobbe, and beyond.
    - Ian M. Shapiro


When I was six, my grandfather decided I was old enough to sit at the Passover table. By the time the adults had demonstrated their courage by swallowing bits of matzos topped with my grandmother’s fiery homemade horseradish, I began to nod off. But I was revived by the aroma of chicken soup when the feasting finally began. One of my aunts placed a portion of gefilte fish on my plate. I took a nibble and began to choke on a bone that had eluded my grandmother’s radar. That was when my Uncle Eddie, who was on leave from the Army Medical Corps, saved my life. Fighting his way through the crowd of relatives who were poking their fingers down my throat, Eddie performed the Heimlich maneuver and the bone popped out onto the table to cries of “Gott sei dank!” Then, like a Torah procession, a group of men triumphantly carried me off to bed. I never got a chance to thank Uncle Eddie who was killed in action a few months later.
    - Jack Goldman


I threw my first dinner party in 1979. I was sixteen. I invited eleven friends — five boys and six girls. Of these, only one had a driver’s license and most had not heard of Julia Child or her famous Beef Bourguignon. I had never made this recipe, which with preparation time and cooking can take up to six hours — but I was undaunted. The entire affair would have been impossible if not for my father, who agreed to buy the needed bottle of Burgundy. For dessert, I prepared (also for the first time) twelve baked apples, served with French vanilla ice cream. I set a formal table with a white tablecloth and red candles. Guests arrived at 5:30 p.m. for cocktails, which consisted of ginger ale, orange juice, or milk. The music was from an album titled, “Life of the Party.” Clearly, I was vying to be the next Graham Kerr, The Galloping Gourmet. Years later, one of the friends who attended told me that it was not only the first formal dinner party of her life but also the most memorable. “Oh, you enjoyed it?” I asked, expectantly. “Well, all I can say is: what the heck were you thinking?”
    - Jim Mazza


In a city of hyphenated Americans, I attended grade school with Irish, Poles, and a plethora of friends from places not found on a 1958 world map — Croatia, Ukraine, and more. Delores was Polish and Croatian, blonde, blue-eyed, talented and kind. Sister Anne often said, “Delores is like an angel.” I was thrilled to be her best friend and frequent after-school invitee at the house where Delores lived with her Polish grandmother. One December afternoon, Delores asked if she could share Oplatek with me. Permission given, Delores pried open a decorated tin from Poland, and solemnly lifted out a thin white rectangular embossed likeness of Mary and baby Jesus. Delores broke off two corners saying, “They taste like communion wafers.” As I tried to swallow my piece without chewing, Delores explained these were for Christmas Eve — a sort of family communion. “Sharing makes you my sister.” I was in heaven. Cancer stole my sister/bestie long ago. “An angel taken back to heaven,” Sister Anne told me when I asked how to reach Delores. Yesterday I learned Oplatek is also called “angel bread.” I wish I could tell Delores, but likely she already knows.
    - Joan Leotta


my mother was always soft she had a certain sense of deliciousness imparted as if a secret could be kept between slices of the white bread she discovered in America after her Egyptian childhood of creamy barhi dates and ripe mango she served sprinkles of white sugar or a whole thin hershey chocolate with  buttered wonder then taught me to savor creamy ricotta sandwiches and her soft stuffing and chicken fricassee until I could taste the warmth of Mediterranean thyme sun stewed fresh 
    - Kath Abela Wilson


“…smooth bean and wrinkled pea.” When I first heard this phrase from Robert Frost’s “Putting in the Seed,” I knew he was talking to me. And to my dad, beside me in the sun, showing me how many seeds to put in the furrow and how far apart. How to cut seed potatoes so each piece had an eye from which the new plant would sprout, and how to hill up the dirt, as new potatoes like to be covered deeply to protect them from too much sun. This was in the days when organic hadn’t yet acquired a capital O. Everybody’s fertilizer came from grandpap’s cow or from their own chicken coop, though you had to be careful with chicken poop; it could burn the new plants. And pest control was a kid — sometimes me — picking potato bugs and tomato worms off the plants, one by one, grimacing all the while. After the gardening part, the teacher became my mother. All that provender had to be preserved. Canning season was heat and steam and color and sound. Scalding tomatoes to remove their skins. Pouring peas like pearls and corn like gems into gleaming Mason jars. Placing peach halves cut side down so their golden shoulders pressed against the inside of the jars. And finally, sitting with a glass of sweating iced tea and listening for the unique “pop” each lid made as the jar cooled and sealed. Then down cellar to place them on the ready shelves where, it seemed, they glowed, still bearing the summer’s sun and shining gently on their potato neighbors, plump and dusty in the nearby bin.
    - Kathleen Kramer


Growing up, “tea” was the beverage year-round —  lunch, dinner, sometimes breakfast, and anytime in-between. “Tea” came in one form — poured over a glass of ice cubes and sweet. The only choice was, sometimes, with or without a slice of lemon or a mint leaf. Tea that was served in a cup was called “hot tea” and was what you were given with a piece of dry toast for an upset tummy. Sometimes Mama served it for a chilly afternoon women’s group, using the silver tea service. There were girls’ tea parties where we wore white gloves and learned proper etiquette. When I first left the south and ordered tea the waitress asked if I wanted it “hot” or “cold.” When the “iced tea” arrived unsweetened I asked for “sweet tea.” She gave me little white packets of sugar to add to the tea. It doesn’t work. The sweetness is in the brewing process. Years later, on return trips to the south, I knew I had crossed some invisible geographical line and I was almost “home” when I ordered tea and, without being asked, it was served “just right.” “Tea” — iced, sweet, pronounced with not quite two syllables.
    - Margaret Walker


On those Sundays the preacher came to our house for lunch after church, Mother came home after Sunday School to prepare her usual meal of fried chicken, homemade biscuits and gravy, and a Southern vegetable casserole. The school custodian lived behind us, since my father was superintendent and we rented the house in front, owned by the school. Chickens were kept in a pen between our houses and it was Alma’s job, the custodian’s wife, to wring one’s neck, then chop off the head and pluck it. Mother then cut it into enough pieces to serve five people. One Sunday my cousin, a year younger, was staying with us for part of the summer. When she first saw a beheaded chicken circling the pen until its muscles collapsed, she shrieked. NOT GONNA EAT THAT, Dee announced, before running off in horror. Sure enough she made her meal out of biscuits and casserole and gave us nasty looks as we ate the poor chicken. For the rest of her visit, chickens were off the menu so we didn’t create a major rift in our previously contented family.
    - Pris Campbell


When I was a kid in the 1960s, I’d have ice cream on Saturdays, usually from the Dairy Queen on the corner. But the ice cream outings I remember best are the trips with Daddy to the University of Maryland's dairy farm and creamery. The first stop would be a large barn where cows were milked by machine. We'd walk among stalls where cows were hooked up to milkers that hummed and clicked. I was fascinated and a little frightened by the rows and rows of cows, tubes, and lights. Later, we'd make our way over to the creamery and order our favorites: mine was a black raspberry double-scoop cone. Daddy and I would sit on the terrace outside the creamery and savor our Saturday treat.
    - Theresa A. Cancro


After evening chores, we ate fried egg sandwiches on Sunday nights sometimes. It was the closest my mom came to a break from the endless three-a-day feedings of a farm family that eventually had 8 children. We could watch TV Sunday nights, too, while we ate, the only time we were allowed such a privilege. Douglas Edwards and the news and then maybe Lassie, I am trying to recall . . . Ed Sullivan for sure. The eggs from Izzy Clark’s farm (Izzy would yell “Car-ol!” as she came in the mudroom and my sister and I still imitate her yodel 60 years later) were hardshelled and the yolks solid with orange protein. On an episode of my favorite ’90s Brit TV series “Pie in the Sky,” chef Henry Krabbe rhapsodizes about the pleasures of the underestimated fried egg sandwich and I sure agree, even if we ate them on white bread with ketchup.
    - Tina Wright


On the mornings when Mom was in charge of breakfast she’d put boxes of cold cereal out on the kitchen table — Raisin Bran, Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies — and a container of skim milk. My sister and I hated Raisin Bran, except for the raisins, but we weren’t allowed to just pick those out and leave the rest. It was all or nothing. We chose nothing. Rice Krispies were fun because we could call out, very loudly, snap! crackle! pop! On really awful days Mom brought out the dreaded box of shredded wheat, but that didn’t happen too often. Mostly Dad was in charge of breakfast and that meant hard-boiled eggs (mashed up with too much salt and mayonnaise) or oatmeal. The oatmeal was lumpy but at least we were allowed to put brown sugar on it. The very best breakfasts were the ones Grandma made. My grandparents lived in the apartment next door and on those mornings when Grandma was in our kitchen by the time we woke up it meant one thing — guggle muggles for breakfast. Raw eggs, milk, and a great big squirt of Bosco chocolate syrup. Everything went into the Osterizer. Whir whir whir. And quick, before Mom could see what we were up to, Grandma let us dip Stella D’oro “S” cookies into the concoction to get them soft and soggy . . . and we snarfed them right up.
    Zee Zahava