street life
you are like a fresh cranberry
God, I am so in love right now. Partly because of food and partly because of language.
We decided I needed to really touch down in Germany, not to be always looking back over my shoulder at sunstruck Queensland. We went for a long walk, through the marshy parks where the back of every sign has stickers and the benches are scribbled over and the leaves already bearing along their spines the shadow of ice that feathered into them in the long night. We went out for breakfast, late enough that it could be called lunch. My partner had tagliatelle but I had a big plate of Deutschness: ragout of wild venison, which I had never tried before, and bread dumplings, which I adore. And dazu einen kleinen Schnapps. To get the heart started.
They pack down good German bread into a kind of loaf and slice it, and sop it in gravy. It’s so good. Venison it turns out tastes not unlike kangaroo. My second schnapps set everything on fire, the flavours, the light, the two men talking in English at another table, the awful U2 covers, the scenery almost sunlit outside. My plate was decorated with a fan of fresh sliced pear and a few bright red berries. I tasted these, liking their tartness. They have a tough, wrinkling red skin. I said, surprised, “I’ve never eaten a fresh cranberry before, in all my life.” My companion stroked the crook of his finger down the side of my face. “You are like a fresh cranberry,” he said.
Then, gazing out the big picture windows as I ran my finger round the edge of my white plate and licked off the last of the sauce, he said, musingly, “You know, I can see really why you have such a big culture shock. People here are kind of sloppy. They look poor. They look a bit desperate. Whereas in Brisbane, really everyone is so very well-broomed.” I smiled at my polished white plate. Then we came home across the tiled streets that have been swept clean of their autumbled leaves and when we reached our minute apartment I said, You build the rest of the bed. I’ll just write.
10 comments on “you are like a fresh cranberry”
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I was thinking of you and your adjusting back to Europe this morning…then I check in and see this! So heart warming (and starting). If you are having venison and bread dumplings for breakfast I think we can say you are getting your German groove back. Love ‘well-broomed’ – and why should it not be?
Wonderful, as usual. We would probably say that kangaroo tastes like venison: all a matter of perspective, of course.
Thank you, Cynthia.
When I was little we went to see a performance of Evita. I fell in love with everything and in the inevitably long queue to use the women’s rest rooms said excitedly to my mother, reading from the programme, “She was born on my birthday!!” A woman next in line corrected me indulgently: “No, you mean, *you* were born on *her* birthday.” I thanked her politely but inside I remember thinking, NO, *she* was born on *my* birthday. Not greater or lesser but equal and fierce.
Roonison… probably would be the blending of the two.
Cathoel, No, Evita was born on your birthday, and you are a much nicer person than she was… I know she was charismatic and all, but she was married to a terrible Fascist, who had actually gone to Italy to learn from Mussolini.
(I’ve been to her grave, at Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires…)
It’s weird, isn’t it, Cynthia, how charisma is so often suspect. The security expert and writer Gavin de Becker says: Charm is an ability.
E” the shoeless people(I mean the shirtless people.) I still do not understand, after much pondering, how there could be leftists who were attracted to Juan Pers (Peron.)vita was illegitimate from a poor family. She was popular among the “descamisados,
Interesting! i would never have expected Bris Vegas to be rated as well broomed, even in relative terms
Congratulations – beautiful poem. Some information about Eva Peron