Tasteless

Rubbery. Lot of chewing. Some hints of spice, but even that was flat.

Supper last night was a last minute what-can-we-make-from-what-we-have kind of arrangement, neither of us (read: I, April) having made plans for something better. The main course, ringed by leftovers, was bratwurst excavated from the freezer. Clearly, the bratwurst had resided there way too long.

Tasteless.

It was the first meal in the hotdog/sausage family that I'd had since the June road trip. An onslaught of general GI disorder had finished off that meal spectacularly and my enthusiasm for tubed meat has been in remission ever since. Now I was shoving pieces of it around my plate.

Tasteless.

This morning we ran to Home Depot early, before breakfast. At the head of the contractors' checkout was a soft drink cold case. These were not just any old soft drinks, but rather certain Coca-Cola products. The case signage read "Heche en Mexico. Un sabor de casa" (Made in Mexico. A taste of home"). Inside were glass bottles of Sprite and Fanta Orange (the Coke being sold out), presumably made with cane sugar and not high fructose corn syrup. Given the scant handful of bottles remaining in the case, clearly someone was buying, even though there was a larger cold case of American bottled, substantially less costly plastic liters of Coke products not more than ten feet away at the end of the checkout.

Homesick laborers from Central America, perhaps?  Clearly someone looking for a taste of home.

That phrase has stuck with me all morning. Even though I am home (figuratively as well as literally), I am wondering what home tastes like. Certainly not the bratwurst from last night. The zucchini bread I have been baking and stacking in the freezer? The tomatoes ripening in the garden?

I don't know.

It is a cool morning as I pen these words to type out shortly. A week of high temperatures was broken by a line of storms that moved through yesterday and wiped away the hot air. The cicadas are just starting to keen in the morning sun.

I mentioned to Warren yesterday that the summer insect triumvirate was here: cicadas, fireflies, katydids, the katydids having just took up their raspy night duty this week. They sketch in my summer, with sights and sounds, in ways that my palate is currently missing.

Looking for the taste of home, accompanied by the chatter of the cicadas.