I’m used to seeing adults at the fridge, grabbing food. But not kids. Not alone.

There is a teenage boy helping himself to a school-sized carton of chocolate milk. He opens it, downs and crushes it beforeI can even say hi.

“Why are you out here looking for food?” I ask.

He pitches the carton into a trash bag.

“My mom threw me out,” he says.

He looks me right in the eye.

“She doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

Lucy is deep into something dark.

Our 15-year-old daughter can barely get out of bed. When I open the door she snaps at me.

“Leave me alone!”

She curls up in blankets in her dark room.

I end up taking plates full of untouched food back to the kitchen. I push it into the bucket behind the faucet that holds leftover veg for the chickens, guinea hens, and turkeys.

By night: Sometimes I stand outside the door to her bedroom. I have my hand on the knob. But I can’t turn it.

I make myself turn it.

I wonder if when I open it, I will see something that will never leave me.

Will she be dead? Limp?

Hanging there.

I got a call from Ms. B today.

I probably havent talked about her much here but I have on IG. She and her chihuahua, Princess, often came for food at the pantry, during the pandemic. Ms. B is unhoused. She is a central figure in my book. Our lives intersected and intertwined in unexpected ways that have made us close, even if that closeness happens sporadically and with some eccentricity.

Last summer, she came by the house. This is not unusual, she pops in from time to time. But this time, flies swarmed her. And it was over 110. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Ms. B always took great care with her appearance, so I knew this wasn’t her. She had her spots to get food, showers, hair cuts.

I looked down at the bundle of blankets sitting on her stroller and I knew….

Princess had died. Ms. B didn’t want to let her go. She didn’t know what to do with her.

Whew, it was rough.

What my daughter Lucy wrote, 2014 (age 9);

Dark

By Lucy Foster

Wrapped in a quilt is where

I most like to be

It's as warm as a lit light

bulb. When I'm there, I curl up in a little

ball, like a sleeping

cat. Wrapped in a quilt is

night time.

______________________

Inspired, this is what I wrote after reading her poem in 2014:

I’m doing kitchen research + prep for #thanksgiving today for our usual non-traditional tradition: yakitori. (I’ve been saving chicken skin in the freezer since last December)

Thanksgiving will be like this: About 25 people, some kids + dogs. People pitching in to grill on the yakitori grills. Food on sticks. The smell of smoke, hot chicken fat + burning bichotan. It’ll get too chilly. Back doors wide open. Inside is outside. Outside is inside. We’ll put on sweaters. Start a bonfire in the pit. No silverware. We’ll eat with our fingers. People will have to lick them. No one will mind.

A turkey we didn’t kill this year will stomp and pop around the backyard, showing off his feathers. Tom is a proud boy.

I just got the Robata: Japanese Homecooking cookbook (@sushisilla) which is giving me new ideas. I make lists for tares, sauces, condiments and pickles. All the lists are made with a specific black flair tip pen, in a special hard cover book that makes notes on each dinner party, what worked, what didn’t, what we will try again + how it can be re-made. Lots of notes everywhere + things taped in. The books live in stacks categorized by their year. They are the closest thing I have to diaries.

I’m standing in front of the open door of the fridge, in an AirBNB in Edinburgh, Scotland. I’m barefoot, in panties and a big sweater, my hair piled up on my head in a banana clip. I’m pretty much alone, standing with my head inside the open lion’s mouth of the fridge. The kids are in bed, although probably not asleep, and playing Minecraft, thinking they are putting one over on me, but I don’t care. They are quiet and happy and it’s summer and we are in Europe, I won’t quibble the details. But I don’t feel like being in bed. I’m trolling now, looking for some action. I grab little fistfuls of spinach leaves from a half-bag of loose spinach. Nice. I eye the spinach like its a pin up queen. In the voice of Elvis, my brain says, I want you, baby. God, in my head I’m such a cornball. I take some spinach in my fingers, this could look piggish, but I’m actually pretty graceful, I’m pushing these little bundles of leaves into a mug of blue cheese dressing I made on the fly for Edie, because the AirBNB people left the tiniest, most insubstantial drop of ketchup in the bottle in the fridge, creating the illusion there was ketchup, when there really wasn’t, and this tail-spinned Edie into a place where she had to conjure up a world where small children are forced to eat their fish sticks without ketchup, which seems like some gray steampunk dystopian netherworld of doom.

We are back from Utah. We looked at peaks and mountains and climbed trails and edged around narrow cliffs. We rented an RV. We went with our friends, Lucy and Edie’s oldest friends, Nakamae and Nabrakissa and their mom, Jessica. Three adults, four kids, four dogs packed into an RV, careening through mountains, and valleys, it was marvelous and dirty, the air was cool and clean, the mountains, well, they were so beautiful and jagged and awe-some as to make you feel like a tiny, impossibly stupid little specks, a heap of infallible chromosomes and muscle.

I mean, are you strong enough to be the water that can carve out a rock canyon? No. No you are not. You are a speck. We all are. 

We got home and unpacked the camper, and I made a quick dinner for you and the kids. Mac and cheese for all the girls, something easy to thaw from our  freezer. Chris, the guy who is working on our house was in the backyard. He is tiling the bathroom of our casita, and I wish I had told him, and you to make a window, in the wall because a bathroom without a little The guy who is working on our house, Chris, was here working late, so I fed him too, a scallion omelet with cream cheese, and a heaping side of bacon. So simple.

Saturday night, around Midnight, I make my 15-year-old daughter, Lucy, a bowl of fried rice and tofu. I make it because she is hungry. I get out the cooked short-grain rice, the pillowy tofu, the oil. Then, soy sauce, scallions, cabbage, cilantro, lime, salt, and my smallest carbon steel wok. I go to work.

Technically, I don’t have to cook for Lucy at Midnight. And truly, I have every reason not to. I’m tired. I took an edible the hour before (we live in a legal state) and it’s just kicking in. I turned down the heat to 69 and I know my pillow will be cold, and I can already imagine my body releasing to the tundra of the cotton sheets, falling into doped up nothingness.

But I have to cook for her. She and I have barely spoken to each other all night. We are strangers in the family house. Lucy has barricaded herself in her bedroom. Her door is fortified and built with anti-mom bricks and stone and concrete and packed solid with don’t-even-friggin-try-it-mud and clay and anything that will keep me from scratching my way through to her.

Right now, I’m not wearing pants.

I’ve completely given up and now just wear pajamas. My day jammies, however, should not be confused with my night jammies. They are two totally different pieces of apparel. You see, my night pajamas have a little tomato sauce stain from when my husband, David, and I were binge-watching Tiger King, and there’s that moment when Joe Exotic takes his third, hot, completely straight, hillbilly husband, and I go to dip my mozzarella stick into the tomato sauce, but I’m screaming at the TV, and I hit the sauce dish with my foot, and it splatters all over my leg.

I only wear those pajamas at night now. But that could change if I wash them and adopt semi-normal cleanliness standards. But let’s be real: Probably not gonna happen.

My day pajamas are not stained. I wear them, with a cleanish, oversized gray sweater when I Zoom with my colleagues. My colleagues are probably naked from the waist down, anyway.

We get the pig from a farm.

I watch Luis kill it. He slams it over the head three times with a crow bar, and the pig slumps into the mud. Luis sticks the pig in the neck. Blood spurts out. The pig is dead by the time it hits the little truck that we ride out to the hog pens.It’s an awful, hard death, but a fast one. I feel a greater urgency that this pig comes out perfectly. It’s our third pig roast, this one for 100 people from the casts of Absinthe/Vegas and Absinthe/Australia. Each of our pig roasts is a testing ground for the next, where we try to make the skin crispier, the meat softer, the cooking time just right — not too long to dry out the meat, not too short to get limp skin.

Perhaps it is all the bludgeoning and whacking with a crow bar, and the bleeding out right before my eyes, but I want this pig to be the one to come out perfectly.

I decide to cook hard. Out of respect and obligation.