A Palate Cleanser for Our Gouty Hearts

A palate cleanser for last week’s heavy post because life is fatty with feeling but if you eat too much organ meat you’ll get gout.

A tiny, two-bite dollop of sorbet between courses will prevent one flavor from sullying the subsequent.

What is the sorbet for remembering more than we wish, or more than is wise?

If you eat a healthy diet full of fiber, the risk of having halitosis decreases because the fiber cleanses your tongue with each extra chew. Eat too much processed food, which is designed to dissolve quickly, and your tongue will smell of armpit. 

Megan and I walked the prairie the other day. One unseasonably warm fall day of almost 80 degrees will not be called unseasonable in the future. . . . but climate change is not a palate cleanser. 

I waded into the depths of the big bluestem; the Wind’s wildly blowing passenger for the morning.

Juan was amazed one day when I said “wind is silent until it is obstructed.”

“Aren’t we all?” I can hear him say.

Another one of my many untestable theories.

And so I stood in the sea of grass. Do people who grew up on the Coasts refer to the sea as prairie as often as people of the Plains refer to the prairie as sea? Probably not. Just another Midwestern imposter syndrome. This is heading again into non-sorbet territory. 

I used to think I wanted to escape the Grasslands for the Mountains until a week in Boulder, Colorado when I realized in the midst of rock, the sun rises later and sets earlier. The only way to have as much sun time is to be ON the mountains rather than IN the mountains; the appropriate preposition can make all the difference in your experience. Same with the appropriate position.

One who loves Cowgirl will be dismayed by the pillow-face-smash of Doggy.

So I know the mountains aren’t for me. But maybe now we will move to the sea. The woods are a different story altogether, and in the midst of Deciduous, the Sun is still kept at Bay.

The photo below is deceptive. It could appear some Scottish highland expanding beyond a little stone wall. But in reality, we were a few stories up at the top of the silo built by my great-great grandparents. 

I have essays in my head, knotted together like fucked up macrame. A mess of severed fingers waiting to be built into a hand. 

• I lay myself before you like a yawn waiting to be (ful)filled. A heath without the heather, and on the wrong continent. The sexiest way to talk about fucking is not to use the word fuck at all. Maybe the healthiest way to talk about aging is not to say our age. 

• In her 30s, my grandmother cut her hair short to spite her husband’s infidelities, or so the family story goes.

Which one will get my attention? Even I don’t know.