Attached to my meals

Barely an eyebrow had lifted when I turned around to the woman and told her
that she should shave her legs more often. Mind you, she was not a stranger. We had become familiar enough that I could tell her these things. After all, my hand did graze her leg and I did lose a layer of skin. There was justification no chauvinistic malice involved in my statement. So, please forgive me if I have offended your sensibilities.

We forget at times that women and men are both just beasts, groomed and polished for a walk through the park and then down to the meatpacking district. We can pretend to slum it like the people who actually have money, but want to look like people who are barely getting by. We actually don't have money, and we wear no pretense.

I've never been one to even desire having lots of money or fame or any of those things that constitute some sort of American dream. I just want to know that the next meal will be coming and that I have somewhere to rest my head, even if it is someone's couch. I just want to be happy and maybe to be loved and held. These are simple desires.

I like dives. I like motels with missing letters and movie theaters that play only one movie about a week before it comes out on Video. I grew up mostly in Kansas and Oklahoma in small towns. These are the towns that have been forgotten by the rest of the world, in dire need of a new coat of paint, but barely getting by. These are towns where people "come to town" from their farms actually wearing cowboy boots crusted with cowshit, not a fashion statement.

We milk cows not because we're Paris Hilton doing the simple life, but because we need milk for our oatmeal. We slop hogs from a bucket of odds and ends leftovers kept under grandma's kitchen sink. We go into the dark creepy chicken coup and remove eggs from underneath angry hens as they peck our hands. We fry those eggs in a thick black cast-iron skillet with the grease from bacon that came from a pig we killed with our bare hands. We are closer to nature and family and life and poverty and God, than many will ever be.

The older I get, the more I miss this kind of simple existence. You lose respect for the planet and for life when you buy your food from a grocery store. The first time you eat the meat of an animal that you raised and loved and became attached to, is such a life changing experience. Maybe it's why I was a vegetarian for 4 years. I became too attached to my meals. I wish I were more attached now.



photo credit- Carrie Thomas