You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
We’ve tried growing them in barrels, but that’s a long story. Sometimes we’ve just harvested them from rows in the garden.
Either way is always an experience.
~*~
dig up the last of the potatoes
fill a large basket
roasted with garlic
the marble-sized ones quite tasty
along with the softest skin
another year
I empty two of our five potato barrels
amid spitting snow
poem copyright 2015 by Jnana Hodson
You don’t get to just take a nap.
You have to earn it.
Why let power go to waste? A small hydroelectric station captures a share of the Cocheco River. The Watson Dam itself is a V-shaped design stretched across the stream. I imagine it runs in front of a waterfall.
Having voiced my theory about adults-only food, let me now counter it with kids-only tastes. Things you loved to eat as a kid but would rather avoid now.
(Dirt doesn’t count. I’m serious.)
Velveeta would be on my list, now that I’ve discovered real cheese in all varieties.
Angel food cake would be another.
We were even given slices of raw potato sprinkled with salt as a treat while dinner was cooking.
You get the picture. Now it’s your turn to add to that list.
Big or little, it’s a city, after all, with daily encounters. Along the street. From the porches. In third-floor apartments. It’s broken glass on cracked pavement. Parking along the curb, maybe requiring a permit. It’s the bakery, Laundromat, or bar around the corner. It’s decay and repair over the years imbedded in the floors, walls, and ceilings. It’s a stale cigarette in the morning of love.
~*~
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Those suspicious of small-state influence in the early stages of the American presidential race should also be alarmed by the disproportionate clout of the biggest states in the final count. I’m talking about the Electoral College, which has – even in modern times – given the presidency to the second-place winner in the popular vote, possibly even played into fraudulent results. Think of the George W. Bush “victories,” for starters.
For a starker perspective, consider that it’s theoretically possible for a tad over 25 percent of the American voters to elect a president. All it takes is 50 percent of the ballots, plus one vote, in each of the 11 states that hold 50 percent of the Electoral Votes. Yes, that’s 11 states in total: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and New Jersey.
The only thing that’s spared us so far is that these states haven’t lined up together and seem unlikely to so in the near future. But I still find the possibility scary.
Another measure I apply in meeting White House hopefuls:
Does this candidate look presidential?
Or simply lightweight?
Time flies. And how!
Think of a food a child in your life refuses to eat. Or glance back to your own childhood. Something you, as an adult, now find heavenly as you anticipate that first bite.
I’ve long held a theory that there are certain items that should be made adults-only, you kiddies keep your hands away.
We could begin with asparagus, Brussels sprouts, clams and mussels. Coffee, beer, and wine are no-brainers. Maybe even lobster or lamb or Swiss cheese or spinach or salmon.
What would you add to that list?
After recently coming across some now-historic Playboy centerfold playmates online – models we adolescent boys worshiped – I was struck by how average they were in retrospect. Not surgically enhanced nor abnormally thin waists nor even fashionably tall, as we’ve come to expect. Even their hair looked like the girls we knew – or dreamed of knowing.
Looking back, let me say it was the smile, more than anything, that got us.
And then, in the midst of the sexual revolution of the hippie era came a feminist rejection of Hugh Hefner’s free-love philosophy, even as events pushed far beyond his now pathetically comic hedonism. Quite simply, he went one way and we went another.
Yes, the glossy periodical was a rich patron for short-story writers and novelists, interviewers, and cartoonists, no matter the reality they were window dressing all along. Still, in many ways, Playboy appeared as a hip rival to the more staid New Yorker. For a while, it was even Chicago versus Manhattan in the realm of publishing.
And then Penthouse and Hustler attacked Hefner’s little empire from the other side of the respectability divide.
Oh, how long ago that all seems!
These days I’m reflecting on the magazine’s admission it can no longer compete with the nudity that’s readily available online for free and its decision to go more respectable, as Esquire did decades earlier. No more centerfold? Wasn’t that the magazine’s identity? What else has been stripped away?
In light of today’s world of publishing, let me say, Best wishes!
Especially considering Tinder and the rest of the new social-media lifestyle.
