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Seven-year old Enid in the back of her aunt's VW microbus in Oregon
Enid Brock is a long-term member of the Friday morning feedback group. She has been writing, most often about food, since 2008. She wrote this piece in response to the prompt, "Tell me about the small, everyday things you love," just a few weeks before her doctor ordered her onto a gluten-free diet. Now Enid spends most of her time googling searches like "xanthan gum chocolate cake" and "tequila gluten free." It has been 8 days since she ate cinnamon toast.
The gritty sharp sugar topping on cinnamon toast, the way it mixes with the hot melty butter into a slurry, and if you are eating it right away - as you should - the way the toast is still crisp and hot and dry. The dry toast and the wet sweet syrupy butter, all in one bite.
When Lulu is sleeping and we say her name, and she keeps lying there on the floor like a brown curly rug, like a dog corpse, like something that has never lived and never will, except for her tail starts wagging in a circle, like the rotors of a helicopter.
The twin black smears of tarnish that appear on the round, white foam sponge that comes in the jar of Wright's silver polish, the way that blackness rewards my labor, tells me I've rubbed hard enough, in the right place, and now that old fork will be shiny and new again. And then I take the sponge, smudged grey and scrunched down into a rag, and hold it under the stream of water from the faucet and suddenly it is new again; and the silverware takes a bath in hot, hot clear water and it looks like little sardines swimming in my kitchen sink. I think about all the other people who have polished that exact same fork, generations of labor and patience, and no one dropped it down the disposal, or bent the tines too crooked, or lost it at a picnic. I wonder about all the foods it has speared - not just chicken breasts and quinoa salad but I don't know roast pheasant or tomato aspic or steak and kidney pie, wedding cake at countless ceremonies, the dinner that burned, the first ripe tomato, the kipper, the egg.
When I get in the car and there is sand in the mats, and the windows have been up all day so the air is hot and smells a little bit like hot plastic, but a lot like the sea spray that got caught in there when we arrived at the beach, all those hours ago.
The way the blue stone on my ring peeks out from among the bright white bubbles of shampoo as I bring my soapy hands down from my hair and hold them towards the showerhead, ready to rinse. Like an indigo star in a misty sky, and I am the only one who sees it.
When I see a woman, or a girl, someone I know or someone I don't, who has spent time on her hair - pulling it up in a sleek ponytail or a fancy up-do - but behind one ear there is a little curl, and she can't see it but I can. I love that curl.
The flowered oil cloth that they put on the tables in little dive restaurants - Mexican or Greek or barbecue - and how it is always a bit sticky when you put your forearms on it while you wait for that really excellent smelling food to come out of the kitchen and be placed before you on a scalding hot plate.
A pat of butter melting in a cast iron frying pan. The smell, the sound, that hallucinogenic smear of yellow and gold and black.
The huge wooden bowl, full of white eggs, that you see as you walk through the kitchen on your way out to the courtyard bathroom at Café Jacqueline in San Francisco. I think about that bowl of eggs, and her generous bosom wreathed in a crisp snowy apron - white apron, white eggs, her uproarious white hair - all of it so clean and pure and necessary, no more no less. That simple abundance fortifies me in moments of dismay. Why can't I be like Jacqueline: one hundred eggs, one dozen tables, an epic journey of soufflés?
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