cooking

an affliction of the bourgeoisie

I said, 

Remind me of how squeamish you are 

She said, 

Just nothing bugs

I said, 

Okay well today one thing I had to do was ride in a circle and go back a ways and inspect what was indeed a hedgehog smashed all over Rue Continière 

She said,

Tell me why you had to

I said, 

I guess because I was like, Is that a hedgehog?

And everything I am ever doing can wait

She said, 

This is an affliction of the bourgeoisie 

I said, 

Well what the fuck was I riding to?

My actual intention in setting out this morning was to find a starfish 

And so I had time to circle back for maybe-a-hedgehog.

And look at it from various angles

And take some pictures

And try to identify some of the organs on the road beside it

Does that even make geographic sense, that it might be here?

Where are hedgehogs?

If someone had asked me yesterday, I would have guessed Texas

Actually maybe I have an idea from somewhere that they are très français

And now I know!

Also today I plucked a billion sea snails from sea rocks with the idea that I would cook them for dinner

But then I got back and Sylka didn’t want me to

So now there is an olive container full of dead or dying sea snails in my backpack

I feel bad on many levels

She said, 

I wish that you didn’t feel bad at all

I said, 

Thanks

I guess I just don’t like killing things for no reason

I thought about walking right out of the door and messaging one of my stupid Oléronaise Tinder matches to be like, Can we make escargots de la mer at your place tonight? 

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brought me to the upstairs kitchen

After I had been shown my room — so beautiful with those beams crossing the ceiling and an ensuite toilet-sink-shower room tiled tinily in cobalt, the only room on the ground floor — to let me be closest to guests’ dinner dishes and other needs, I guess — and called Ura, the Basque word for water — Alberta Clara brought me to the upstairs kitchen and gave me to prepare us all a lunchtime salad of tomato, cucumber, carrot and lettuce from the garden, tinned tuna, and a packaged beet that I watched her cut the mold from but later tasted had been deeply penetrated by the flavor of funk. She did other things in the kitchen and the surrounding rooms in which their family lives and kept up an instructive monologue in a mix of French and English on the difference between desayuno, almuerzo, cena, and comida, between cocina abajo or arriba. Very helpful, but amid the multitask she missed that I was leaving the peel on the cucumber until it was too late to correct to her preference, and we were both embarrassed. 

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and I said tagine

~ i wrote ~

Hi. I’m in the Sahara. Helping these Berber guys install toilets in the new toilets tent because the existing one got buried in sand. There is sand everywhere. It’s in my shoes and my socks and my bed and my hair and my teeth and building up behind my eyeballs. They don’t even fight it. Everyone just goes around barefoot except when the sand is too hot to touch, which is approximately between ten AM and six PM. Around midnight or one AM last night, when it had finally cooled off, we took a mattress up into one of the dunes to not bother the tourists who were sleeping outside and lay in the sand and smoked shisha and looked at the stars. Today for lunch we had a tagine because Aziz asked me if I wanted tagine or something I couldn’t understand and I said tagine. He says tomorrow I will be the one to make it, Inshallah. Everything is going pretty well given that these guys speak no English and I, no Arabic and no Berber; we’re getting by in French even though theirs is even worse than mine. Now I have to go because Souleymane has the hookah up and running. Sorry you’re not here. I love you,

Your sister

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a wonderful storyteller

I said,

What if one day again we have a life where we see each other outside of the computer-phone and its applications?

Tonight I made hummus by fork out of chick peas cooked over a wood fire.

She said,

Rachel you are such a wonderful storyteller.

I said,

So far my manuscript is eighteen pages and that’s just from transcribing about seven days of texting with you and four days of texting with Darwin.

It’s sort of a big mess, but I am trying to remember your words, or the broader implication of them.

The mess doesn’t matter now, even if it means I have to look at myself writing in the STUPID WRONG FONT.

The form is informed by the process.

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