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b5c81ab
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Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear. How I loved those flower moments, like when he pointed out the moon and Jupiter, but they were rare, and never to be expected.
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desert-blooms
joseph-edelstein
rare-mom
siblings
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Aimee Bender |
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c26f490
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On the kitchen counter, she'd set out the ingredients: Flour bag, sugar box, two brown eggs nestled in the grooves between tiles. A yellow block of butter blurring at the edges. A shallow glass bowl of lemon peel. I toured the row. This was the week of my ninth birthday, and it had been a long day at school of cursive lessons, which I hated, and playground yelling about point scoring, and the sunlit kitchen and my warm-eyed mother were welc..
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lane-edelstein
lemon-cake
rose-edelstein
ingredients
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Aimee Bender |
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262f6f9
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I bit into the oatmeal. Same levels- now the oats, well dried, but not so well watered, then the raisins, half tasteless, made from parched grapes, picked by thirsty workers, then the baker, rushed. The whole cookie was so rushed, like I had to eat it fast or it would, somehow, eat me.
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in-a-rush
oatmeal-cookies
ingredients
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Aimee Bender |
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3b1e319
|
By her estimation, the woman had probably been five years old during the height of the war. Listening to panicked voices in the next room. The majority of the living memories now owned by then-children.
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Aimee Bender |
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3cb11da
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She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk about himself. "Someone else should speak instead," he said. "If I don't speak, it means someone else will," which did not always turn out to be true."
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Aimee Bender |
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5a8e692
|
My birthday cake was her latest project because it was not from a mix but instead built from scratch- the flour, the baking soda, lemon-flavored because at eight that had been my request; I had developed a strong love for sour. We'd looked through several cookbooks together to find just the right one, and the smell in the kitchen was overpoweringly pleasant. To be clear: the bite I ate was delicious. Warm citrus-baked batter lightness enfol..
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lemon-flavor
rose-edelstein
mother-and-daughter
sour
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Aimee Bender |
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ee0c108
|
Well, the truth is, vacations are pointless anyway, because you always have to come back, so you might as well save time, skip the middle step, and stay put in the first place.
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Aimee Bender |
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8ddd31c
|
Now she and the widow had something in common, though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton. It just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horses's mane, it did not leave, once lodged, did it? It simply changed form, and asked repeatedly for attention and care as each year revealed a new knot to cry out and consider, smaller, sure, but never gone...Out of my body, ..
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grief
loss
the-devourings
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Aimee Bender |
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03f925f
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My favorite of all was still the place on Vermont, the French cafe, La Lyonnaise, that had given me the best onion soup on that night with George and my father. The two owners hailed from France, from Lyon, before the city had boomed into a culinary sibling of Paris. Inside, it had only a few tables, and the waiters served everything out of order, and it had a B rating in the window, and they usually sat me right by the swinging kitchen doo..
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food-sensor
la-lyonnaise
moods
rose-edelstein
enjoyment
ingredients
emotions
french
food
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Aimee Bender |
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2142dd7
|
She too looked like a regular lady, living in the world- didn't seem particularly with it or excitable or stellar. But that chicken, bathed in thyme and butter- I hadn't ever tasted a chicken that had such a savory warmth to it, a taste I could only suitably identify as the taste of chicken. Somehow, in her hands, food felt recognized. Spinach became spinach- with a good farm's care, salt, the heat and her attention, it seemed to relax into..
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madame-dupont
recognition
taste
ingredients
chicken
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Aimee Bender |
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73b49bb
|
I loved my dish towel. This one was two-toned, and had, on one side, stitchings of fat purple roses on a lavender background, and on the other side, fat lavender roses on a purple background. Which side to use? An optical-illusion namesake with which I could dry our dishes. It was soft and worn and smelled like no-nonsense laundry detergent.
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dish-towel
optical-illusion
rose-edelstein
two-toned
roses
lavender
purple
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Aimee Bender |
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9fa71f0
|
She looked over my shoulder once while I was texting, which was already annoying, and when I wrote lol she made a very clear point to me about how I was silent and not laughing out loud, not at all. I said it was just an expression, and that I was laughing out loud inside my own mind.
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texting
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Aimee Bender |
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fc44453
|
Food is all those substances which, submitted to the action of the stomach, can be assimilated or changed into life by digestion, and can thus repair the losses which the human body suffers through the act of living. --The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin
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Aimee Bender |
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7e704d2
|
She is walking around the living room naked and
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Aimee Bender |
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28f4205
|
We end up kissing her for an hour, and her lips are so soft they are almost like a joke.
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kissing
kiss
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Aimee Bender |
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b4c61e0
|
An old man with overalls walked by; I don't think old people should wear overalls; it makes them look like shrivelly toddlers.
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funny
fashion-humor
fashion
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Aimee Bender |
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f205284
|
Dad lost his job. Then he got a new job. Then he got his old job back and went back to it. They were all in the same building.
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losing-jobs
humor
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Aimee Bender |
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2578815
|
Does it work with sandwiches? he asked. I didn't move. He handed it over. George was watching with a kind of neutral curiosity, and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do, so I just unwrapped it and took a bite. It was a homemade ham-and-cheese-and-mustard sandwich, on white bread, with a thin piece of lettuce in the middle. Not bad, in the food part. Good ham, flat mustard from a functional factory. Ordinary bread. Tired lettuce-pickers. ..
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love-me
yelling
ingredients
sandwich
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Aimee Bender |
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69d20f2
|
I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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79c0e77
|
But rock, of course, is many colors. The distinction is subtle, but it is not just one plain grey, that I can promise...I spent five hours one afternoon just staring at a rock trying to see into its color scheme.
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the-color-master
perception
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Aimee Bender |
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d578ae3
|
It's tempting to think of red for sun," she said, "but it has to be just a dash, not much. More of a dark orange and a hint of brown. And then white on yellow on white. Not bright white,' she said. 'The kind of white that makes you squint, but in a softer way...' 'Go look at fire for a while. Go spend some time with fire.' Looking at fire was interesting, I have to admit. I sat with a candle for a couple hours. It has these stages of color:..
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seeing
sun
perception
fire
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Aimee Bender |
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b8f48a1
|
But the fact was, Sherrie Marla trusted him already. When he took the ice off, and showed to her his new symmetry, she didn't flinch. His face was him to her now. It was not a map or an indicator of some abstract idea. Turned out it was only the first impression he needed to alter.
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love
symmetry
first-impressions
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Aimee Bender |
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73c0b57
|
He said he hated talking and just wanted to look into my eyes and tell me things that way. I let him and it made my skin lift, the things in his look.
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Aimee Bender |