There on the table before me there are bowls and spoons, and we are all here, all of us here, waiting for the pot. The pot will be boiling, heavy, and terrible in its otherworldly beauty, and we won’t take any time to make it all disappear, turning the heavy into light, and the hot to warm. We are capable of amazing transformations.
It’s a thing that separated us from anything else when we were children, the uncanny ability to make disappear, and food was out favorite way to change energy. I don’t know if we were aware of anything then, much less the basic principles of biology, but we were aware that there was magic in the universe.
My grandmother taught me magic first, her slight Polish accent speaking to me through lips held together by a cigarette she always smoked. I always imagined it was the same cigarette. She could take powder and turn it into dumplings, those magical tools that fill a pot of chicken broth, and make life worth living. The sense of wonder as your teeth worked over their soft and springy textures, as good as any day on the beach.
Returning to the town where the family is gone is a little strange. There are great hotels , and everything seems bigger again. Somehow that’s a transformation that happens when we age past a certain point. Things are large when we are young, and then they get incredibly small for a long time, and then suddenly they’re growing again.
I don’t know the best version of Alice in Poland , and if there is one, it’s probably gone to live in Prague by now, but this is a place I understand. This place here, where grandmothers still speak, speaking through the streets of the town where I learned how to eat magic and make magic with my eating, and nothing’s been the same since.
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