Posts in Feast
Rising

On an early evening during our first pandemic winter, I closed my laptop and commuted from my home office upstairs to our kitchen below. Another day of quarantine, another at-home meal to prepare for my family. That afternoon I had kneaded pizza dough and left it to rise inside the corner cabinet, warmed by the heating duct that runs beneath it. Now, the plaid kitchen towel draped over the bowl puffed above the rim, like the fabric below the empire waist of a maternity dress.

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I Invite My Mother's Ghost to Lunch at Ikea

I grab a blue-and-yellow rip-stop plastic tote with IKEA repeated up its handles. A worker greets me. Other customers disappear on their way to the ballroom. No thank you. The bag is for show. I don’t need any help. What I came for does not appear in any catalogue. I take the escalator past a miniature farmhouse with its candles, books, and modular kitchen, the promise of all needs met. It recedes below me as a black and white mural of a smiling face invites me further, all the way in. It will be wonderful! The white teeth beckon.

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Not Your Mother's Meatloaf

Tucked between the food-stained pages of my old Betty Crocker cookbook is a handwritten recipe for meatloaf. It’s written on the back of a menu from Gustaf Anders, the Swedish restaurant in Southern California where my stepbrother, John, once waited tables. It was 1992, I think, and John and his Norwegian wife were in the middle of a divorce. Or maybe it had already happened. We were drinking a lot and smoking weed in those days. We had flown back from Norway together, drunk for the entire fourteen hour flight from Oslo to Los Angeles, with a stopover in New York for Customs. I think it was New York; I was in a brownout then. The valium and booze had performed their customary magic. What I remember: putrid green cinderblock walls and men in uniforms. Our bags were screened and some item was questioned and we almost missed the connecting flight. We reeked of Marlboros and sweat and Kahlua. We’d drunk the liquor cart dry.

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