Whether it was the perfect autumn day, a measure of my surrender to weariness, or the simple meal of vegetables I ate for dinner, I feel so content. Green beans and local purple potatoes and peppers that a farmer and retired professor showered into my lap (with a gruff, 'don't want to take these home') and I carried around in my capacious purse all afternoon. . .onions, a little tomato, and a long simmer.
I never feel this happy when I eat meat, except perhaps turkey, and that's the sleepy drug kicking in, I suppose, and the fact that I always eat it with family on holidays. I feel vegetarianism at my heels again. I've become picky and paranoid about meat lately, even local, all-natural, no-hormone meat. And then, the other day, this happened: We were driving along, almost off the interstate, almost into the bosom of our little town, when a big semi passed by. It was one of those with slits in the walls, and through the slits we could see great big soft, dirty black cows.
"Where are they going?" the girls wanted to know, delighted that, Richard Scarry fashion, they'd seen a truck full of cows.
"I'm not sure exactly," I said, not untruthfully, since I didn't know WHICH slaughterhouse they were bound for.
"I think they're going to the fair," one daughter suggested, and then another said they might be going to a great big cow park, and then Elspeth concluded they were headed for a field of flowers.
That would be nice. Ug. It was like a knife had plunged itself into my liver. All I could see was the death-agony eyeroll that accompanies a cow being slaughtered.
The sticker on the back of the semi said I [heart] LOVE BEEF. I did not read it aloud.
I think I'm a vegetarian, I said to Martin. That clinches it.
In other happier news, for the first time I saw a semi with its bed full of apples--not crates of apples or bags of apples. Just the naked spheres tossed in. There must have been thousands and thousands, piled to the top. It brought to mind another Richard Scarry fantasy: the overturned truck with apples strewn everywhere and the truck driver, in happy resignation, setting up a stand with "Apple Cider" advertised on a jolly sign.
Here's a cup of tea and some dahlias for you, be they a bit out of focus:
Enjoy!
