This morning at 5:30 I turned on my oven then scrub-a-dubbed two enormous russet potatoes poked holes in them put them on two sheet trays opened the oven and promptly dropped the trays and the giant potatoes down the inside front of my oven i.e. the lava pit clackity crash my wild giggling as I held the oven door open with my knees so nothing would fall on my bare feet.
On Boxing Day 2022 I caught my oven on actual fire and it has been failing ever since burning things from the bottom up burning things from the top down I have to add more and more mattresses on top of the pea to get anything to bake without incinerating my safe space without bursting into flame like a 19th century vampire or an American witch.
I want to be quiet in my own kitchen. I want to be quiet in the morning with a cat under each arm and coffee and a book and a pastry and have perfect hair and wear a velvet dressing gown. My jaws ache like they still hold teeth.
It is spring today but yesterday it snowed I don’t know how to open a pineapple my hands are weak and the pineapple has spikes. I need a cleaver I need a machete. I need a sword and possibly a crown. I want to be the queen of my kitchen but I am the jester the court clown.
You may think you don’t have to poke holes in your potatoes but it only takes once to have a potato explode a bomb going off sending potato shrapnel every which way then you realize you have a self cleaning oven so you turn it on and a fire starts inside but the oven has locked itself so you can’t get in with the fire extinguisher and you panic and run around and pull your hair and grimace then you Google how to open your oven when it’s locked which you should’ve done when you moved in but you did not because who knew the damn thing was going to catch on fire certainly not you and now you think everything is going to catch on fire all the time and you walk around cautiously holding a pineapple in one hand a fire extinguisher in the other.
Can a pineapple explode? How do you even get in there? It seems precarious like opening a porcupine. I googled How To Tell If Your Pineapple Is Ripe and a woman in black trousers and a gold shimmer shirt told me to smell its bottom (I did) and squeeze it to see if it gave (it gave nothing and my fingers said stop.) The shimmery woman also told me to look for yellow and shiny but not too much yellow or too much shiny but maybe she was describing her own clothing.
There are daffodils blooming here on the island robins tweeting in the yard and snow geese flying in from Russia where they have winter villas.
Have you ever baked a huge russet potato and then wrapped it in a tea towel and put it in your bed as you slept to keep your body warm? I did this when I was Laura Ingalls in my old horrible rental when the slumlord refused to fix the furnace. Now I use potatoes to make gnocchi a fancypants pasta or to fry with an onion and a pepper and slather in ketchup.
I have never slept with a pineapple in my bed. Things never got that weird.
From Radish King
When I was Laura Ingalls
The best parts of me were sewn shut.
I shaved my sister’s head.
We set fire to a can of paint in the neighbors garage.
I rolled my skirt high above my knees and got frostbite.
We were ordered to close our holes but we called them portals.
I stole sugar from the infirmary.
Ice cured everything and if it didn’t we stayed sick.
We ate a barn owl for breakfast.
Lark drank poison and we just stood there.
Pa broke out the windows with his beak.
All our dogs were named Jacky-Lame-O.
The Horses bled from their hooves.
