101 Words

Spuds. Spuds with butter and salt. No, with sour cream. The potato, a root vegetable native to the Americas, is a member of the nightshade family. Why are potatoes called spuds? After a dagger-shaped spade? No. Or maybe after the Society for the Prevention of an Unhealthy Diet. Nope. The Irish Potato Famine began in 1845. The meaning of SPUD is lost in the fog of history, but the ashes of the man who invented the Pringles can is buried in a Pringles can.

The Ritalin kicks in. The world slides into focus. I’ll have potatoes with butter and salt, please.

“I don’t want to,”  whined seven-year-old Nathan.

“We have to,” his mother said. “We have to keep up with your work. I don’t know when your school will be open again. You can’t fall behind.”

She was trying to normalize the situation. They stuck to the school’s schedule while working at their kitchen table. They were trying to complete a math assignment, Nathan’s least favorite subject.

Looking up from the papers, she saw Nathan staring at her.

“What?” she asked, exasperated.

“What time is it?” Nathan queried.

She checked her phone.

“11:30.”

Nathan smiled and stood up. “It’s time for recess.”

He always got heartburn when he ate biscuits late at night. She said it was his own fault, that he should have shown some self-restraint. But tonight, he ate them anyway. In fact, he gobbled them up as he sat on his own in their small little kitchen. The dishes and bowls from earlier were still dotted around the living room, and he hadn’t bothered to clean up that coffee spillage which his brother-in-law had been mortified about. Because she was dead, put to rest earlier today. And he wanted to eat his biscuits, just so he could hear her voice.

His journey to warriorhood began today. Like all Mawé boys, thirteen-year-old Opa had prepared. Dozens of bullet ants collected from the Brazilian rainforest were sedated and woven into gloves he’d wear for this rite of passage. With his body and face painted, he bravely watched as tribal elders slipped the ceremonial gloves full of twisting, incensed ants onto his waiting hands. Opa felt the venom’s paralyzing effects as ants pierced his flesh relentlessly. He danced, enduring intense, excruciating pain. Ten minutes later, it was over, his hands numb, swollen, and shaking. This ritual 20 times, and he’d be a man.

I poised on a bluff overlooking the great white waters of our home bay. I stood tall in my simple breechcloth and moccasins.

Into the inlet, three large canoes.

A strange group of men disembarked. They did not look like my Tribe. Pale as the undersurface of the slimy frog and with long facial hair.

My people attacked and the Tribe slaughtered most invaders. I longed to participate.

Only a few men escaped. One man yelled out something in a strange tongue. Our medicine man, Wise Owl, recognized what the words meant.

“We Vikings will never return to these savage lands.”

Grandpa sat smoking his pipe on the veranda. He hadn’t spoken in the two months since Grandma’s death. Every day, he would sit there staring out into the garden as if waiting for her to return.

One afternoon, I followed his gaze to the patch of raspberry bushes just beyond the olive trees. They looked ready for picking, so I decided to collect them and make jam—just the way Grandma had shown me.

Once finished, I placed it on a scone and gave it to him. As I walked away, he called, “Thank you, Josie, it tastes just like Grandma’s.”