Over the last while, I was back-tracking around my past life on the West Coast.
I left on the last Saturday of June, just before New York got hit with its first all-the-way proper heat wave of the summer. By good fortune, I intercepted Jarth and Zo at coffee time on their way back from picking up the out-of-towner’s farm share.
JP did it up real-good. I didn’t touch a thing!
Egg fried over some crispy scapes, cider vinegar greens, roasted nibbles of fennel, turnip. The stuff!
Things got sort of ambitious after. We went out for the last USA World Cup match, but two drinks in at half time, I realized my plane-out was hours earlier than I had imagined, perhaps in my own defense. So I missed our (inevitable?) loss, in the end, and biked home quick to shower, pack, and find something, anything, to eat before planting myself in Jet Blue direct TV blissout for 5-6 hours.
At home, there wasn’t much for choices, and I focused my fuzzy beer tummy towards eliminating anything organic that wouldn’t last my absence.
Knocked out a chunk of cabbage, cauliflower end, and remaining kidney beans, in ribbons dashed with braggs. Then, a quarter Kobucha wedged and just a little too toasted, plus Kale in the oven, one string cheese melted over. At Terminal 5, sobering up, I contemplated lots of tempting crispy rice/nut/chocolate snacks but ended up with none.
One diet coke and many hours later, I woke up in Seattle, where the air was evergreen and river chilled. Late in to the night by my bodies clock, the journey to the remote location where I would eventually be granted a candy-lapiz Kia was plenty surreal, invigorating, culture shocked. I drove, for the first time since the holidays, to Tosh’s family home in Madrona. Tosh, my assigned freshman room mate from my first year at school, was away, to return from Canada the following morning, so I was thankful, relieved to effortlessly let myself in with a key hidden in a gardening glove, and to experience no shame while I took, quietly, a large bowl of cherries from the whale of a fridge. I savored each, these just one among millions of perfectly ripe Washington fruits, before joining completely with her cavern of a bed, convincingly one of the softest places on our earth.
When she arrived with Maya in the afternoon, we did the Goddwill, got Pedicures, drank coffee. The air of this place still shocking my lungs, the comfort of our union getting me so-juiced. To be with the ones you love!
Tosh’s block is surrounded by Ethiopian home cooking on all sides. Injera and its accessories, unthinkable to eat in heat or humidity, sat well between us three.
A typical veggie sampler, plus lamb, but it would be unfair not to acknowledge it as better than most.We drank three whole pitchers of water with three whole lemons, and then were just two on a night-drive south to Portland. In a sweater for this first time in months, and chilled as we stopped for rests, the idea of pants having been long inconceivable until here and now.
