ANIMAL, VEGETABLE

1 • CALLED HOME

This story about good food begins in a quick- stop convenience market. It

was our family’s last day in Arizona, where I’d lived half my life and raised

two kids for the whole of theirs. Now we were moving away forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we would never see again: the

bush where the roadrunner built a nest and fed lizards to her weirdlooking babies; the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride a bike; the

exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake. Our driveway was just the

first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out.

One person’s picture postcard is someone else’s normal. This was the

landscape whose every face we knew: giant saguaro cacti, coyotes, mountains, the wicked sun reflecting off bare gravel. We were leaving it now in

one of its uglier moments, which made good- bye easier, but also seemed

like a cheap shot—like ending a romance right when your partner has

really bad bed hair. The desert that day looked like a nasty case of prickly

heat caught in a long, naked wince.

This was the end of May. Our rainfall since Thanksgiving had measured less than one inch. The cacti, denizens of deprivation, looked ready

to pull up roots and hitch a ride out if they could. The prickly pears waved

good-bye with puckered, grayish pads. The tall, dehydrated saguaros

stood around all teetery and sucked- in like very prickly supermodels.

Even in the best of times desert creatures live on the edge of survival, getting by mostly on vapor and their own life savings. Now, as the southern

2 animal, vegetable, miracle

tier of U.S. states came into a third consecutive year of drought, people

elsewhere debated how seriously they should take global warming. We

were staring it in the face.

Away went our little family, like rats leaping off the burning ship. It

hurt to think about everything at once: our friends, our desert, old home,

new home. We felt giddy and tragic as we pulled up at a little gas- and-go

market on the outside edge of Tucson. Before we set off to seek our fortunes we had to gas up, of course, and buy snacks for the road. We did

have a cooler in the back seat packed with respectable lunch fare. But we

had more than two thousand miles to go. Before we crossed a few state

lines we’d need to give our car a salt treatment and indulge in some things

that go crunch.

This was the trip of our lives. We were ending our existence outside

the city limits of Tucson, Arizona, to begin a rural one in southern Appalachia. We’d sold our house and stuffed the car with the most crucial things:

birth certifi cates, books- on-tape, and a dog on drugs. (Just for the trip, I

swear.) All other stuff would come in the moving van. For better or worse,

we For twenty years Steven had owned a piece of land in the southern Appalachians with a farmhouse, barn, orchards and fi elds, and a tax zoning

known as “farm use.” He was living there when I met him, teaching college and fixing up his old house one salvaged window at a time. I’d come

as a visiting writer, recently divorced, with something of a fi xer- upper life.

We proceeded to wreck our agendas in the predictable fashion by falling

in love. My young daughter and I were attached to our community in Tucson; Steven was just as attached to his own green pastures and the birdsong chorus of deciduous eastern woodlands. My father- in-law to be,

upon hearing the exciting news about us, asked Steven, “Couldn’t you

find one closer?” would soon be living on a farm.