Writing from the Senses by Laura Deutsch

Author:Laura Deutsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

EXERCISE

Use these writing prompts:

1. Add a spice or ingredient with a distinctive flavor to a dish and describe the resulting taste. You might try garlic, ginger, honey, cloves, parsley, or lemon. Whatever ingredient you choose, describe how it makes your mouth feel.

2. How does your cooking reflect who you are?

30

The Bounty of the Season

ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of my father’s death, I drove to the produce truck that parked on the frontage road of Highway 101 in Mill Valley, California. I thought I was just buying groceries. But when I came home, I prepared a bowl of fresh apples, oranges, pears, and grapes. On my grandmother’s oval white china serving plate I arranged fresh ripe vegetables: deep purple Japanese eggplant; fat, red beefsteak and striped Green Zebra tomatoes; a head of garlic; red onion; yellow, green, and orange peppers. I placed them on a table on either side of a vase of fragrant yellow roses.

I didn’t interrupt the experience by writing about it in the moment, but soon after I did a freewrite describing the fruits and vegetables so that I would remember the details. I went on to write about my father:

My father loved to plant things and watch them grow. He planted roses that twined on a split-rail fence, French strawberries tiny as gumdrops, and pears that ripened like big-bottomed ladies. He nurtured his garden, his children. There was no better way for me to connect with him than through this bounty of the season, an altar to his memory.

Throughout his Brooklyn boyhood, Dad had dreamed of creating a garden. He’d worked out a payment plan with NYU before the days of student loans, become a doctor, married his sweetheart, had three children, and made it to Long Island. On weekends he puttered in the backyard to warbles and waterfalls instead of the El train that had ricocheted past the second-floor window of his childhood bedroom like a wildcat dragging ten thousand tin cans.

In a corner of the garden, under a blue-green pine, Dad had planted a fiberglass tub, its rim camouflaged by deep green leaves of rhododendron and azaleas that blazed fuchsia and crimson in spring. Into the small hillside above the tub, he had sculpted terraces of flagstone, through which he’d threaded a black rubber hose, fashioning a loop that siphoned water up, thanks to a pump he had hidden under floating lily pads. With the flip of a switch, he heard the soothing sound of his handmade waterfall.

My reverie of flowing water was suddenly interrupted. I remembered the urgency I’d felt to get to my father when my mother called with the news. “Your father says it’s time to tell you.” Her voice was calm. “He has a fast-spreading form of liver cancer. There is no treatment or cure.”

I turned back to my writing.

I looked past the bowl of apples and pears on my altar. Through my window, I saw the garden Dad had planted for me two years before, when he and Mom had visited Sausalito.

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