I come home sad so I slice potatoes thin and fry them with oil and onions, keeping watch to flip at the perfect time, right when they crisp up golden. I remember a day in winter when I couldn’t stop writing, everything was words. I remember a day in fall when my world tasted of apple.
Hot herbal tea is for anything that isn’t going right. It’s early spring, still cold, and thin clouds whoosh overhead. I’m almost out of tea. Daylight rolls by slow but my bread is fresh and homemade and I soak it in butter. I want to go live in my garden under a little hill of dirt like a starchy root, just sleep between the garlic bulbs until I feel warm again.
It snowed last night and I think about back in Montana, years ago, about those frozen weeks before my nineteenth birthday and the new year, when my new boyfriend went to visit family and left me behind in a bare apartment right after I’d moved across the country to be with him, when I decided not to notice he was an asshole. I kept the lights off, boiled water in the dark for noodles I stole from Safeway, walked down the icy hill to the gas station deli for little packets of free butter, salt, and honey, which is more like borrowing than stealing, I think. An acquaintance came over and showed me how to crochet a hat while I waited for my next temp job to start. We sat on the empty living
room floor wearing our cold-weather coats, drinking beer and trying to weave slowly to make the time pass easier.
This isn’t like that. I’m worried, but not deeply. I cry a little anyway because I’m tired of worrying at all and I feel empty on a skeletal level, deeper than my gut. I think of the undergrad students, some of them in my class, who are fasting for Ramadan far away from their families and I stop.
I run out of money at the same time as coffee. Half the bread loaf is left. My situation’s not dire – I’m cooking corn grits and cheddar, oatmeal with peanut butter – but I remember how hard it is to write when I am even a little bit hungry, how it becomes difficult to focus on anything in the present.
I wish I still had orchard-picked apples from late September. They were smaller than my fist and candy-sweet. The French word for potato is pomme de terre, earth’s apple, ground-apple, and I think about my grandma’s stories from during World War II. Like everyone else in Europe, her family gave up coffee, butter, fresh meat; she learned to drink her tea unsweetened. I’d always assumed she told this as proof of her sacrifice and I thought, “so what?” even as I nodded along. My grandma’s stories were sprinkled with French words, maybe I missed the point in translation. Maybe she wanted me to stay humble, to understand how scarcity could be worse, to cast a spell against complaint or overindulgence. Probably, she wanted me to know what she lost.
I stir honey into my tea, reusing the leaves over and over, recalling exactly how it felt to have so little. I’m thinking that food and money were the least of my worries in Montana, that I was starved for affection despite marrying the asshole. He was a deep well of hunger, desperately and perpetually unsatisfied; I believed love meant sacrificing myself and that great reward would follow, like feast after famine. I’d already quit school to support him and thought I was familiar with lack. I had no idea. Sadness can make a body accustomed to nearly anything and mine shriveled by degrees until I barely realized I had a body, let alone how to nourish it. All I felt was a little squeeze when I let the world swallow me whole.
I’m reaching deep into my pantry and it’s not totally empty; maybe I’ve become picky but I do not want to eat plain bulgur or a forgotten can of crushed tomatoes for lunch. What I want is bacon, fried rice, eggs, muffins, caffeine. I trim the brown exterior off a head of near-spoiled green cabbage and saute what remains with sesame oil. There’s more cabbage than I can eat all at once so I have it for dinner, too. The kitchen smells musky. Part of me wishes I could share, suspects this lean time might feel easier if it wasn’t weathered alone.
My bread loaf is almost gone but I stopped stealing food years ago, when a friend got a job as grocery store security. You’d think the opposite might have happened, that he could’ve helped me out by looking the other way, but then I wondered if anyone in his position had gotten in trouble for failing to catch me dropping packaged tortillas down my shirt, for not noticing the bulk dried fruit in my pockets or empty deli box stashed on a bottom shelf. Asking for that sort of favor felt fucked up.
I remember there’s cash in my glovebox for road trip emergencies. I won’t use it because this isn’t an emergency, not like when I locked my keys in my truck outside a desolate Wyoming oil town while running away, for good this time, from the asshole, a year after I married him. A mechanic drove down from Casper while I sat on a gas station curb for two hours under summer’s dry sun. I pulled a small handful of bills from my wallet, not enough, and the mechanic looked at me like I was kidding, like he regretted coming all that way on a weekend, but I held it out and stared at him until he sighed, took a long look at my tan legs in denim cutoffs, took the money, jimmied open the door with a wire or something. I had two hours to think about breaking my window with a rock, for free, and I still didn’t do it.
Last week I returned a shirt I shouldn’t have bought in the first place. I didn’t even like it but was craving things I couldn’t have. The refund just showed up so I go to the grocery store with twenty-eight dollars in my account. I’m doing math as I push a rusty cart around; it screeches and fights me on left turns and I have trouble deciding between the five-pound or ten-pound bag of rice because although the big bag is a better deal, it’s nine bucks. I plop it in the cart anyway and wheel around the store’s periphery, mostly turning right, trying to figure what makes one kind of food more important than other kinds. Last night some friends cooked meatballs and butternut squash and mashed potatoes with gravy and sent me home with leftovers in a big mason jar that warmed my hands and because my belly is full I can do mental math. I’m thinking that shared food has a higher value no matter what it is, meatballs and squash and gravy or cabbage, cornmeal, weak tea.
Have you ever found free money and mentally spent it in a thousand different ways? I picked up forty bucks on the sidewalk last fall, looked around, thought about asking some people nearby if they’d dropped it – but honestly, who is just walking around with loose twenties in their coat pocket? – and everyone I saw looked kind of well-off so I kept it. Assuming that people are well-off because they look well-off is totally inaccurate, as is the opposite. I immediately bought a fancy coffee with steamed milk and espresso, and also a muffin, and tipped the baristas ten which made it feel equitable somehow. Twenty-four dollars remained and I imaginary-spent it on hundreds of things that each cost twenty four dollars or less. In the end it all went to draft beer and carne asada tacos from a bus in a gravel parking lot. I ate with my hands.
I pay for most things these days, but prices seem high and I question if my body is worth organic produce and local free-range meat, if feeding myself hand-picked fruit improves my situation, if it’s just an appearance and nourishment is really a frame of mind, albeit a delicate one. The tricky part is, I know how to be worth forty dollars. Around six in the evening, four times a week, I would drive thirty-three miles west from the little Montana apartment to a low building next to a truck stop where two twenties could buy my naked body gyrating in a curtained booth for the duration of four songs. For three twenties, you could’ve touched my skin while the songs played. Five twenties would have purchased my skin, plus a bottle of champagne, for half an hour. All this to say: for the right fee, my body could be anyone’s for a moment.
Maybe the mechanic in Wyoming knew that, maybe he didn’t. What I gave him was crumpled, mostly ones and twenties. Finally back in my truck, I ate crackers and drank warm Gatorade and kept driving south.
I thought I was writing about food and hunger. I should have known it’s not that simple. Hunger isn’t very different from want and I want to be full to excess, to overflow. At the club next to the truck stop, to be wanted had seemed enough, worth any price tag. The hidden cost of turning flesh into minutes, and minutes to dollars, was laying in bed next to my asshole husband, wondering how much of me still belonged to myself.
I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my friends will keep cooking for me, every night, if I ask. I do not want to ask. I’m convinced there is some amount of poor decision making that has led me again to hunger – but is it really so bad to crave fullness? I remember a few restaurant meals last month, a weekend cabin trip on my birthday, candles at an art gallery shop that smelled so good I couldn’t resist – maybe this is the cost of living a satisfied life, or I’ve forgotten how to ration, or I want too much.
At the store, I keep pulling out my phone to triple check my banking app. I leave with twenty-seven dollars worth of oranges, spinach, sliced deli ham, sweet potatoes, rice, a single avocado, two pork sausages, and a cinnamon twist donut. I eat the donut while driving home. Everything feels manageable again with sugar smeared on my lips.
I’m thinking it’s easy to be worth forty dollars but I can also be priceless, consumed again and again without diminishing. I remember summer, picking gallons of sun-warmed wild berries; October afternoons spent slipping and sliding through forest-floor mud in search of mushrooms; filling my kitchen with happy people eating chanterelle soup and huckleberry pie around the table inherited from my grandmother and wanting them to scoop me in their spoons, swallow me along with the steam and broth. Fuck rationing.
My mouth still savors cinnamon while I put the groceries away and I find eight wrinkly red potatoes tucked in a paper bag. Their eyes are sprouting. I carefully quarter them into a bowl, walk out to my muddy yard, dig a shallow trench near the back fence, gently lay them inside. I smell humus and decomposing maple leaves. Snow lingers in wet patches. I tell the potatoes, “good luck. I’ll see you in summer,” and pat the soil firmly down.
Emily Holmes is an essayist, poet, and rangeland ecologist. Her recent writing can be found in Arkana and About Place Journal. She lives in Idaho with her very-good dog, Coty.