Still Life with Pomegranates by Alexandra Ages It started with the pomegranates. I’ve never actually seen rubies, but in my mind, they resemble pomegranate seeds; glistening crimson, full of promise. Sublime. Slowly, they seemed to take over my phone. Pomegranate was everything, was everywhere. Cut open pomegranates on finely manicured tables, lit [...]
Nourishing History by Chris Wardle In our fast-food-faster era, convenient, to the factory food industry we've become a sacrificial lamb dinner smouldering on the altar of cognitive dissonance. “I want it, now!” a catch cry for affluent entitlement branded (without that metaphor’s searing, smells-good pain), and sold the marketing sizzle. I burn [...]
The Tomato Juice Betrayal by Ellen Notbohm I didn’t set out to betray my mother. What a horrid way that would be to repay her years of selfless devotion. But betray her I did. The instrument of my treachery—a tiny glass of tomato juice. Sayler’s Old Country Kitchen, a legendary steak [...]
Stories of Corn and Kindness by Mariana Castro Azpíroz At the Octagon Art Festival in Ames, my friend Marisol is doing letterpress demonstrations in one of the stands. They have it set up with the phrase “The world needs more,” and people get to choose how to fill in the blank. [...]
Painting the Snow by Vivian Drescher The ExperienceI find myself in the cold winter wood, slightly off the path. Looking ahead, I discover a gap in the trees basking in the light of the moon. The area, foreign to me; is it a lake or is it just a field? Will [...]
Power of Coldby Ian Cotter The most beautiful and the most painful experiences I’ve ever had as a human being have taken place in the wilderness. Backpacking and hiking, I’ve found, have the remarkable capacity to crush your spirit and rebuild it again, in the same fatal blow. One such time [...]
Willkómmen to Cascadiaby Sean Stiny Cutting a trail through a light snow, mashing the leaves under our boots into a russet porridge, we made haste up the closed campground road and reached the trailhead in the lee of the mountain. On approach, a flash of gold lit up the hillside. Then another. [...]
After my first child died unexpectedly in Namibia when she was 17 days old, it took me over a year to be ready to try to conceive again. ...
Covered in dust, sweat, and bicycle chain grease, we finished the second day of our bike tour at an unexpected desert oasis somewhere in California along the Mexico border.
In 2018, I returned to India as a newly minted master’s student from the UK, and I confessed to my mother over our first meal together that I could no longer eat her Sunday chicken. ...
