We*Meat*Again

Last week, I wrote from Montana a little about the merging of food history and personal nostalgia. While not a new topic on the blog, it opened up for me an old pathway of thinking about the relationships between food and memory and geography, something that’s particularly helpful for me in moving through revisions on my book.

Autumn is the only season during which I experience homesickness, and I experience it for so many homes. But I was born in New England, the temple of autumn, and nothing will ever compare to that, so somehow, whenever the leaves try to turn or don’t quite turn, in whatever time zone I currently live, I start to miss the great Northeast. And I often turn to food as a means to substitute memories — baking apple snacking cake or brewing cinnamon tea or carving pumpkins.

All this has been on my mind recently, and then yesterday, my friend Lisa (a fellow nonfiction environmental writer) and I were talking about how much we admire poetry and wish we had the capabilities to work in that genre. I love the acrobatics of language that poetry demonstrates, the ballet of nuance and brevity that leads to some of the most gut-punching lines I’ve ever read.

Somehow, in the spirit of all this, autumn and nostalgia and poetry and revision, I had an idea to dig out an old poem I wrote about food rituals in autumn, a poem that was a wild failure of sentimentality and prose, but that has in its core somewhere an idea close to my heart.

And I thought I’d let you all, my loyal readers, workshop it for me.

A strange blog experiment, to be sure. But why not share with you some of my writing in it’s earliest, most raw, most terrible stages? Many of you are writers, and even more of you are readers. So have at it. Let me know what you think — what’s working, what’s not, where to cut or pare down or make more poetic.

Or just enjoy the autumnal apple references. Whichever.

Finger Lakes

I stand inside my pantry in Iowa and
Pull the door shut, my eyes shut and
Smell deeply the wooden box of
Apple cinnamon teabags I bought
From a boy scout in California.

Waiting for the arrival of autumn in the Midwest.
My fingers search for the brown crumbs of
Dead leaves in my hair; red tips fiddle discontentedly with
Farmer’s market apple bushels something
Different about the season here and I miss

Childhood in New Hampshire
Eating the tendrils of apple peel my mother discarded before baking crisp
And serving it with tea and whipped cream after school. And
Pushing the wheelbarrow full of dead needles
Into the woods and making
Leaf angels on my back getting
Sap in my braids.

Next week I’ll go back to New York to see two
Of my friends get married and I will buy them
Kettle corn from the street vendors as a wedding gift and the
Sun will stay over the Finger Lakes for them.
Cayuga Lake is the index, long and pointed and
Golden with autumn.

I can’t think of a better time for a wedding than the same weekend as
Apple Fest, in late September, with
Sugar-sweet maple syrup smells and
Slanting rays of dusty yellow light over the lake and
Sweaters over our party dresses.

Eating apple brown betty with our mouths off paper plates.

Tags: apple, autumn, homemade, local food, maple, poetry