I’m thinking about corn on the cob. Nuggets that crunch and then cream, butter on the chin and strings in the teeth. I’m sure it’s peak floss season in the S-D household. There are two types of corn people: those who make pearly typewriter lines, and the eaters who create vertical wrap-around columns. My style has less to do with typewriter and instead owes much to our occasional pet praying mantises (manti?), whose precise consumption of crickets has been an inspiration. Watching their unhurried feast, I always imagined those haughty insects wearing tiny red and white checkered napkins tied somewhere above their thorax. In the hot bath of the kitchen, the sacrificial stick of butter softens and warps as we race from ear to ear, greasing each fresh one before plunging in. The water boils on, green and vegetal, forgotten on the stove. Stray salt marks our plates and gnawed, empty cobs pile up in the trash. It’s our summer apératif, our country-down equivalent of toast rounds and tapenade.
August in Maryland is pleasurably ripe. The grass in our lawn has faded from the fertility weeds of Tess of D’Urbervilles to a more jaundiced yellow—to my great regret, as I am the family lawn-mower. Our lone peach tree has long since drooped heavy with beautiful but watery fruit, whose flushed skins have been quartered, peeled, and frozen for future pies. Right now I’ve got my eye on the duo of pear trees, both loaded with knobbly pears that refuse to soften. We have kept a few on our windowsill for the past few weeks under the concept that pears must be plucked from the tree while still hard, but they remain stubbornly unyielding to my inquisitive thumbs.
Whenever I mow the lawn, I try to get as close as possible to those trees. I stop the red tractor inches from the tree trunk, and with my head in its branches I search for the plumpest-looking pear. So far it has only been disappointment, and I continue on past the maples, leaving a trail of cut grass and sour pears in my wake.
