First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Strawberries

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I never thought I'd feel nostalgic about strawberries. I didn’t when we left that house in California where I grew them from the balcony. Not even in Ohio, the place I loved the most, where they grew wild in the courtyard beside more garlic bulbs than we ever knew what to do with. In fact, I had forgotten them until this moment.

I used to bring strawberries with me to Shabbos meals. With chocolates and whipped cream. I have never once purchased a box for myself and I never realized it. Not until the grocery store boasted its familiar sale, and I reached for them out of instinct. When I forgot, for a moment, that I had a mask on. That I was balancing the boxes on top of sale-brand toilet paper and three bags of frozen dinners, because if I carried everything at once I wouldn’t have to touch the carts. When I forgot that one person really has no need for boxes of strawberries.

By the time I remembered it I had already stacked them underneath the spinach. I had already committed to toasting the warmer weather and claiming that small celebration. I had already forgotten that the last time I bought strawberries was for a meal I never went to, because I did my shopping first and then they closed the world around us. I forgot I’d had to give one box away as a gift, forgotten that I let the other rot inside my fridge because I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.

Is this defiance? Compensation? Is there some battle to be fought in eating strawberries alone just because it’s sunny?

There might be.

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