"Transition"

Meredith Ashton

Memoir Piece

8 October 2016

“Transition”

The autumn wind whips through my thin running tights and my glove has a gaping tear on the thumb, exposing my pale-pink skin to the harsh Michigan gale. 

“Who the fuck decided we should walk here?” grumbles Emmy, my roommate and companion on one of our first college “adventures” together. I sigh, eyes glued to my phone screen, the little GPS straining under the weight of near-constant “recalculation” to our path. My cheeks are rosy, aided by the wind and a growing feeling of incompetence. I was failing as a navigator. Jesus, I was a freaking freshman in college and I couldn’t follow simple GPS instructions.

We had left our cozy little cubicle of a dorm and ventured out into the great unknown that was The City of Kalamazoo. After our first month at college, we were already thoroughly disappointed with the cafeteria’s “vegetarian options,” which mainly consisted of slabs of undercooked tofu slathered in different pungent sauces and given deceptively interesting names. And so, the vegan and the vegetarian, armed with my phone’s GPS and two terribly misguided senses of direction, embarked on our quest to find and conquer the Kalamazoo Farmer’s Market.

At least we were moving. I had spent my first month of college transitioning. Which is a nice way of saying I spent a lot of time in my dorm room wondering why the heck I’d chosen to come to a tiny school on Michigan’s west coast where I didn’t know a soul. It seemed like everyone else was figuring it out just fine. I missed my friend Emma who I’d known since first grade when we dueled with twigs on the playground. I missed getting slushies at Speedway with my sister every day on our drive home from high school and coming home to see my mom bent over our stovetop making dinner. Motion implied progression, and that could only be a positive thing, right?

Lost in my reverie, I didn’t notice we’d (finally) reached our destination until Emmy tapped my sleeve with her own mittened hand. It looked like a small city. The covered stalls created a large square, encircling a central area in which there were vendors selling beeswax candles, hand-knit scarves and hats, wheels of cheese aged to perfection, donuts fried in boiling oil, and a booth with a dazzling array of multicolored salsas. I bought dusty red sweet potatoes and a large onion from a man  missing quite a few teeth, and a wooden crate full of fresh apples from two twin brothers in matching flannels. There was a very nice woman who tried to sell me some ginger herbal tea, but I managed to politely refuse. I was in my element—plunging my numb hands into crates of produce to examine each carrot before purchase and then shaking hands with the farmer who’d pulled the leafy vegetable from the ground days before. I found comfort in the sense of control that accompanied choosing my own food, as well as in the childhood memories associated with the task.

I remember long car rides to the farm co-op with my mom, straining against the confining car seat to peek out the window. We drove down winding roads with windmills and cows. The cows, despite their perpetual lethargy, were always particularly exciting during the journey. The farm was mostly a place where I could “look but not touch.” My mom brought me along to help her carry the bags because “that’s why I had children,” she said. I didn’t mind too much. The best part about the brown paper bags that the grizzled old overall-wearing farmer handed us  was that the contents were a surprise. I loved peering into the sacks and seeing the stacks of red-ripened tomatoes, the kind I could snap off the green vine and eat like an apple, red juice dribbling down my chin. The only possible garnish was a sprinkle of sea salt. Anything else would ruin the light crunch of their crisp skin, and the gush of their juicy insides spilling seeds and juice into my mouth. One time our bags were full of radishes.

“What do you do with radishes?” I asked my mom. For the next two weeks, I discovered that you can, in fact, incorporate radishes into dinner every single night. A salad garnished with radishes, tortilla soup with radishes, steamed radishes and peas, radish crostini, radish slaw, braised radishes, radishes sneaked into sandwiches, and, when all else failed, a small pile of radishes served raw as a side. The sight of the offending crimson-red vegetable makes me queasy to this day.

The farm was a place of dirt and bugs and grime; an experience separate from the manicured grocery store aisles from which food “normally” came, and exceedingly different from anything else in my Midwestern suburban schema. The Kalamazoo Farmer’s Market presented something similar: an escape. But this time instead of moving from what I knew as a child to what was novel and exciting, I was transitioning (that pesky word again) from the foreign to the familiar. Here I didn’t have to worry about making friends and how to start “having the best four years of my life.” I could find comfort and belonging in what I knew—the process of journeying to my food and then preparing it with creativity and love.

I remember my favorite dish as a child (and still today if we’re being honest and totally un-health conscious) was my mom’s homemade mac and cheese. I remember slowly whisking together milk and flour as my mom tossed in at least ten different cheese into the pot, scavenged from whatever we had left in the fridge. I stole a nibble of the mozzarella when she turned her back. It was my job to whisk the cheese into the roux without letting it burn. The American cheese was my favorite to watch. It would slowly dissolve, turning from solid to liquid with a turn of my whisk, disappearing under the creamy folds of the sauce just like magic. I remember watching the layers of thick spiral pasta with the cheese flowing over them, encasing each noodle in a thick coating of orange sauce. And my mom hand-beating the saltines into fine crumbs and then, with a finger to her lips, pouring a small tablespoon of butter over the top. It was all a secret: hers and mine.

            So now I’m back in our tiny dorm kitchen, sautéing blood-orange Farmer’s Market carrots in thick olive oil. The flip of my rubber-tipped spatula reveals the lightly toasted underbellies of my vegetables. I toss in a handful of lightly chopped onions to the frying pan. Emmy stands next to me, so close her left hand nearly bumps my right as she tests the tiny redskin potatoes boiling next to me on the stovetop. Alt-J blares over the sizzling pops of the sautéing veggies and I sway lightly to the music, bouncing my knees and my elbows in my trademark “mom” dance. I grab a carrot from the pan, disregarding its internal temperature, and defiantly plop it into my mouth. There’s no one to police the taste-testing now. We eat our meal in the dark out of one bowl (less to wash later), carrots and potatoes mashed together with the onions, huddled around Emmy’s laptop, already on the fourth season of Game of Thrones. The sweetness of the carrots, despite being slightly charred, melds with the creamy mashed potatoes and I have to admit: it tastes pretty damn good.

            It’s different, this new cooking ritual. We trekked through the cold and burnt the carrots to a crisp and set off the smoke alarm twice, but we did it. It’s only now, cozy in my dorm with a full stomach, that I realize I haven’t thought about college or transitioning in awhile. In fact, I might even feel a little hopeful that this nebulous thing called “home” can move with me to college.