Seattle 144, or Cider House

When I got the invitation, I almost squealed out loud. A cider pressing, in the next neighborhood over, at the brightly painted co-op. Bring your apples - your bruised, your half-eaten, your yearning to be crushed and poured and savored. E had a rickety old press, borrowed from yet another co-op, which featured a PVC pipe for a crank and so little glue we sometimes held it together with our knees.

When I arrived, groaning bag slung over my back, I found the beginnings of an assembly line. I slipped in to share a cutting board, grabbed a knife from the wall, followed the labeled cabinets to a towel and colander, washed my apples and joined the group. A child sat at the table, doing math problems. Her mother sat next to her, knife in hand, talking and tossing cores into a bowl. We chopped until we filled the stock pot - big enough to bathe in, it came nearly to my hip.

Dinner materialized when it got dark - the long kitchen table slowly moved from apples to potluck - beet salad and fresh bread, my sundried tomato-walnut pesto over pasta, ghost-shaped cookies, banana muffins. The house was full, and noisy, everything spilling over. I took a break from the press, prowled the common rooms of the house, let the surroundings tickle me: a bathroom sink, disconnected from its pipes so the water dropped straight into a bucket to be used for flushing the toilet. A labeled cabinet by the front door reading "extra blankets." Copies of letters written to company heads and political figures. The hall table with the blank name tags and jar full of markers, with specific instructions to include one's preferred pronoun. The hall telephone with the sticker "this phone has been tapped by order of the US Patriot Act." The jerryrigged feat of a kitchen.

It turned out that only E and I knew how to use the press - how to dump the chopped apples into the hopper, grind them down and then use the wooden paddle, the giant screw, and the apples' own weight to press until juice ran in sweet, thin rivulets into the bucket. Each cycle took about twenty minutes from start to finish. I remembered the cider party at Red Truck, the honey harvests from my childhood, Apple Days when visiting Marlboro. This party had the same harvest joy, the sticky hands of plenty.

After three nonstop hours of pressing, we had about five gallons - not counting the stuff we'd drunk in celebration or sent home with people. Most of it went into the basement - E wanted to experiment with fermenting it. I walked home with a mason jar of cider cradled in my sweater, sweet, grimy fingers, delight at seeing my breath. Autumn, indeed. Who needs foliage when there's cider and early sunsets?

Seattle 143, or poem-a-day #300

They ignore me, mostly.

Not impolitely -

they are obedient

as crocuses,

perfectly willing

to take the broom

or mop

or towel

and complete their chores

without my asking,

or to say "good!"

and flash me a thumbs-up

when I serve them food.

We color together;

today we carved a pumpkin.

They cracked roasted seeds

between their teeth, suckled

the salt.

Their conversations

bounce across the rooms,

missing me each time.

My workday

is not quite loneliness

or boredom,

but draws a card from each.

Sandra comes out of her room

with a plastic bag in her hand,

offers the contents around.

When she reaches me,

I look into her palms,

take a piece of dried fruit

covered in spices,

take a bite.

I smile, flash her a thumbs-up.

"Bueno!"

She chatters at me in Spanish

for a few seconds,

before both our faces fall

in that familiar way

of Babel.

Finally, she says

"Mannngooo"

and

"Mi Mamaaa,"

with a kind of patience.

I smile.

"Mango - tu mama."

And she smiles.

And we nod,

chewing,

this other woman's home

reaching my throat.

Seattle 142, or Tastes of my new home

Autumn in Seattle leaves me an odd mix of restless and sluggish. There's lots of news: I have a new job, working with homeless youth. It's different than my old job; they're older, more functional. No restraints. No side-hugs. No laundry. No monitoring every conversation between clients. Clients that can sustain a conversation, though - that's awesome.

Last week, I started craving chopped liver. It's not something I ate all the time as a kid - just often enough to remember how much I liked it - earthy, salty, with hints of egg and onion. In my grandmother's Queens apartment, they served it in a cut glass bowl. I pinched mouthfuls when no one was looking; the adults always spread a thin layer over crackers and rye bread. "Too rich," I was told when I asked for a spoonful.

Sometimes, when my other grandmother was roasting chicken, I'd catch her before she tossed the liver and beg her to fry it up for me. She always did, muttering about cholesterol as she flipped it in the pan.

At the store, they sell them frozen, six or seven in a package, for cheap. I looked up a few recipes online, found the basic ingredients and set to work. The livers went under the broiler, salted, their thick smell stampeding through the house. Masha came home, smiling. My once-Swiss landlord came by, leaned against the counter and took a long sniff. "We used to fry them in butter, as hot as we could," she said. I explained why I was using olive oil, mincing onions to throw in the pan after the livers.

She stayed while I mixed, boiled and chopped, eating slices of the rye bread I'd bought to go with it. No time to start a fresh sourdough.

The smell of onions is home. The smell of liver is comfort, the promise of luxury to come. The eggs, perfectly hardboiled and chopped, turn it creamy, as does the spoonful of unorthodox mustard. Landlord and I eat half-sandwiches, topped with little vinegar pickles in the late afternoon sun. She closes her eyes as she chews, saying "it's different, of course, but you can't beat that taste. It's so humble."

This is me making home: a collection of tastes and smells and sounds that didn't come from anywhere but my own heart. It's the most honest thing I know how to do. And you may not see where it came from, may call it pretense, fabrication, construction - there are so many names for the things we don't understand, the things we also call G!d.

I am telling you: this is where I come from, now. I come from my kitchen, wherever it is.

Seattle 141, or Poem-a-day #276

The Bravest Thing My Mother Ever Did

was not the years of shoulderpad armor,
of being the only woman to slip
and chew her way to the board rooms
and corner offices,
but what happened after:

the night she told us
she couldn't do it anymore,
she asked our permission

to put her compass
in her pocket
and ask the stars
for directions.

When I consider
how alike we are,
I don't know how she did it -
wandered restless
for so many months,
believing she could do anything.