I’m telling you—these Instagrammers, the way they catch me up. First Economikat, and now Iléna. It must be the glasses.

All the puff pastry recipes, though, not just her puff hair, Iléna has me worried. A person can’t subsist on puff pastry. I did see a post where she was suffering from indigestion, so maybe she’ll wise up.

Also I don’t get her egg salad. There’s no reason to be using a blender! In effect, egg salad is just deviled eggs without the deviling—no having to scoop the yellows from the whites, mush with a fork, mix in the mayo, and fit the tedious tiny mounds back into the holes. If you want egg salad, all’s to do is chop the whole, boiled eggs and add the mayo.

Except you might want to say stuffed eggs, if devil isn’t a word you want coming out of your mouth and attracting the demons. I used to think along those lines, myself. So I can sympathize. The demons and devils, drifting in their netherworld, always shadowed us. We just couldn’t see them. We couldn’t read about them in the news. Evil somewhat hid its face.

 

I can’t think how to say it, quite, but this concern about the chopping seems irrelevant. I don’t mean irreverent, but that, too. Why be talking about egg salad when the world is blowing up?

I know it’s blowing up. I’m sure. Iléna is too, I bet. The immigrant warehouses they’re building for the herds, and the ballroom almost bigger than the Pentagon, and the hotels out in space (just you wait!)—good God. But the brutality, the fiendishness, is far and away, except for the little whiles it’s on our little screens in front of our little noses.

Things are so nice here. No kidnaps and snatchings. No rampant knocking down of homes, and history. No expulsions of massive fireballs at lift-off. No bloody brawling in cages—my word. Friends come for burgers, and out in the grass, on our chairs perched crookedly because the ground has bumps, we laugh and laugh over nothing until we nearly fall off. I ponder how the cake I made for everybody slid so fluffily into the oven from all the beating and came out just as airy, tinged to yolk gold. Life is good. True, we’ve got a snake that visits our henhouse. The swallowed egg makes a lump that passes along down the spine of the snake, digesting. But even that’s good. Were it to rob wholesale, it would perish from the swollenness. It holds itself in check.

Nice and easy, nice and easy. My husband does keep mentioning the funny rumble over yonder he’s been hearing. What are those machines? he keeps asking. Earth diggers maybe, but they’re beyond the dense woods on our property, practically a jungle, and he’s not gone looking. He says it’s probably just a shed. Someone’s putting up a shed. Of course, if they’re razing for one of those data centers popping up in this state that draw water from the creeks and rivers and oceans and then dump it back in polluted, and emanate such a super heat it pulses orange on the satellite monitors, and triple one and all’s electric bills, and exude the worst horrible thrumming ear-puncturing roaring, why, we haven’t heard. Now that would be news. Gosh. We would get right over there with our cardboard signs.

We made them because of ICE and waved them around, some, before we got tired. But now, risen from our crooked chairs, signs sticking up from our fists, we would get everybody to stuffing the county supervisors’ meetings and clogging the phone lines and sleeping in sleeping bags in every possible marble hall of power, or at least on the sidewalk in front of the yes-man politician’s deaf door, 70 N. Mason Street. Because this would be war, never mind Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, the other hells. Mustn’t allow the carnage to come home to roost.

As things stand, though, we might as well go on consuming ourselves with trivialities. I, for one, am enough distracted. Berries need picking. Corn’s thirsty for rain. Above the thick of treetops, in high blue sky, a vulture dives. More cake bakes. I’ll beat a better icing—last time, it hit wrong on my tongue. Too, there’s that snake, but it’s only a snake. It’s only a snake. We have eggs upon eggs upon eggs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Where do Trumpies go when they die? It’s a question. One I knew is in a box now, in crumbs, covered over with plain graveyard dirt. The stone doesn’t say Here Lies a Man Who Voted for Bully. But it’s true. He grinned—this was maybe 2016—when Bully’s name came up at the dinner table, and I snapped, “Don’t you ever laugh about him again.” Something like that—I forget what, exactly. It wiped the smile right off his face. But not for long. Then, that a proud pussy grabber could be running for president was what dominated the headlines. We weren’t talking pardons for insurrectionists, techie DOGE boys accessing government information (old news, yes yes), a police-run society . Obviously, nobody burned to a powder can ever again cast a ballot in favor of a lecherous narcissist, but voting as the man reduced to crumbs did, twice, is now his spiritual legacy. Tuesday, Heather Cox Richardson posted this: “While the Senate considered the [Big Beautiful Bill] today, President Donald J. Trum...
Read more
Image
Friday Afternoon     En route to cousin Ann’s house, relegated to the back seat, I keep clicking clicking, trying to catch perfectly son and mother. But what’s more telling is the visit. We’re met by Ann at her front door. I’m right behind Mom, ready to grab at her if she topples. “Now you’re a spring chicken!” I announce to Ann, because it’s Mom, not Ann, who’s 95. Spring chicken relatively speaking, I mean, because being around somebody ancient makes you suddenly young. I’m practically a chick today. But right away Ann, her round eyes a-sparkle, lets out that she’s 91. Oh my. Paulson and I didn’t realize. As we navigate past her, what else flies out of her mouth is a Bible verse, although for all I know it’s Ben Franklin. “They that compare themselves among themselves are not wise,” she chortles. Paulson loves it. I love it. We laugh and laugh. She’s always been a wit. Clearly she still has it in her. Circumlocution is such a bear at this age. An outing like this, aw...
Read more
Image
When the Song, Not Just the Groundhog, Got Cooked   Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken.” So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. (Stock photo. For illustration purposes only.)      On a tangible hillside in honest-to-goodness hilly Pittsburgh, actual man is robbed of his bush berries in broad unfiltered daylight. Culprit is furry, breathing. Actual man clobbers culprit and cooks culprit’s wet pink meat. Actual man makes quiche, perceptible steam puffing out. Man carries dish to party, yum yum. True story gets around. Man’s breathing sister in fields-and-cows Virginia tells some other breathing people. One says, her thoughts coming hot on the air, “That sounds like a country song: Kill a groundhog and put it in a quiche. Tell him to write a song.” Breathing sister does. Actual man does. Man jiggers words around in his pulpy brain and sends them to his machine, making it blink but no...
Read more
Image
Before this, I belabored our posters . Even using fat, chisel-type Sharpies, it took me forever. But a couple of days ago, lecturing myself on slobbiness’s advantages, I simply patched and pasted and Scotch-taped together enough pieces of paper with words on and put them in the car. An oldish fellow—one of the regulars, which I’m not—was already there when I turned into the parking lot next to Representative Cline’s office. You’d think Oldish has a degree in law or maybe political science. He’s precise about his knowledge, genteel, yet blunt. His posters are never spectacular. When I got out of my car with my poor excuse of a billboard, he was photographing a man in an orange T-shirt. Orange looked at me. “You can’t park here.” “Who are you?” I asked, in my best belligerent good-Christian voice. Between the two of them, something unpleasant was going on. In front of Cline’s office, all over the sidewalk, lay construction-worker equipment. “The owner. You have to move your car....
Read more