(just because it is gray/cold does not mean it's not spring)

 In it

I have a joke with myself, it is a list of situations in which I imagine having a glass of wine would be relaxing. The list is very short, two things long: 

1) after a long flight plopped down in a bar in a new place 

2) while shucking beans with my friends (ideally around a picnic table in Bolsena).

The brevity is the joke because I’ve watched a lot of TV where wine is the catalyst for relaxation. I even know about TV I haven’t watched like Kerry Washington’s character on Scandal. And my favorite is Kirsten Cohen from The OC relying on the notion too much, struggling with alcoholism and a shitty dad yelling at him, “I may like my Chardonnay but I’m not gonna die alone and that’s more than I can say for you!” 

Anyway me and my friends have been sick lately. Friends that I haven’t even seen in months. And everyone agrees that it sucks. I was in bed a lot and taking little walks on the same paths as two years ago. It felt so familiar even though I rarely walk for leisure these days. At the end of the day Mac would offer me a glass of wine to have in bed. I felt relaxed. I watched Girlfriends, Lynn had just found work as a bartender without any skill. She offered white wine for free, I love to do that. And my little glass of Chasselas felt free (Mac bought it). Felt for a second like the Covid bed was where I wanted to be or at least I could accept that it’s where I was.

also had red wine

Out of it

So I’m better and my friends are better which is nice, a relief. But we’re not the same as we were, no one is “back to themselves”. We’re reunited at the Rainbow backyard party last week, everyone reports exhaustion. The party is warm and subdued, I hope they slept all weekend. I slog my way through my brain foggy weekend.

Until yesterday I hadn’t cooked a meal since April 11th, the process feels abstract I am reading about salt in order to summon a feeling for cooking. Salt is a feeling itself, tasting food that salt is added to feels like it heightens the emotion. It’s one of the ways our touch is expressed in a finished dish, to me it feels like it ties the touches together. I was reminded of this the first time reading The Passion According to GH (a gift from my friend Ari) the narrator confronts a cockroach managing disgust tries to imagine its humanity through salty excretion:

The roach is an ugly and sparkling being. The roach is the other way around. No, no, it doesn’t have a way around: it is that. Whatever is exposed in it is what I hide in me: from my outside being exposed I made my unheeded inside. It was looking at me. And it wasn’t a face. It was a mask. A diver’s mask. That precious gem of rusted iron. Its two eyes were alive like two ovaries. It was looking at me with the blind fertility of its gaze. It was fertilizing my dead fertility. Would its eyes be salty? If I touched them–since I was gradually getting more and more unclean–if I touched them with my mouth, would they taste salty?

I’d already tasted in my mouth a man’s eyes and, from the salt in my mouth, realized he was crying.

In Margaret Visser’s chapter on salt in Much Depends on Dinner she weaves hard science and folk science together to offer a dynamic image of salt in our lives/on our tables. She explains the salty eye this way: “It is usually thought that we are salty–our blood, our sweat, our tears, our urine, our saliva (the word derives from sal, Latin for “salt”), are salty–because life began in the sea. We are walking marine environments and the appeal of the taste of salt for us is in our natures.” I feel it’s important to add humans are not the only salty, salt loving creatures, my dad’s girlfriend’s Rottweiler Edgar loved his salt lick and the salt on your skin so much.

Visser also writes “Salt is weird, powerful, dangerous, and ‘extra’” which reminds me of wine as well as some of my favorite people. These meet for me in Anders Frederik Steen’s published journals, Poetry Is Growing in Our Garden, for him salt is a key. To balanced wine and to nailing a blind. Since salt is the only rock we eat it’s the best taste reference point for the rocky soils that give life to vineyards. He shares his approach to blind tasting: “First, I concentrate on the acidity and minerality. These two things can stand alone quite strongly. Relatedly, I can ask how salty it is and how characteristic it is of the region where it’s produced.” In the past I’ve thought of salt not as a quality from the earth itself, related to a rock but as a spray that settles on a grape. Salt is harvested from the sea but it’s also mined, so it’s of the land as well. He did quite nearly guess the wine (Gamay Beaujolais) from that passage. Not a sea wine obviously, but clearly a specific salt imprint in addition to the other qualities.

Yesterday I cooked, I wanted to put the salt meditation into practice cooking a recipe with very few ingredients. My friend Kim’s zucchini soup came to mind. I think she said she learned it in Spain. Another gift. You sweat chopped onions and zucchini in olive oil until soft and then blend them together adding a bit of water until it is your desired texture. I paid careful attention to the seasoning, I used a very salty salt and a delicate hand adding in stages knowing the flavor would deepen over time. It held my attention for the simple recipe, I didn’t really leave the stove, the perfect amount of demand for a tired body. We ate it for dinner with a tuna escarole salad and some goat’s cheese. Perfect with a springy wine, which is any wine.