Today I’m going to a house between 10am and 4pm to pick up a bottle of award-winning marinade. It was a kind gift from family.

The guy who makes it used to run a bar and grill. Now he makes sauce out of his home and probably has three other jobs like everyone I know. You text him 10 minutes before you pull up. Well, my partner will text him. I don’t have a phone. The guy will run it out to you, we’re told. I wonder if he’ll run. A bottle of sauce is breakable and it’s icy here. We’re new in town, so ice is new to us, but we lived here before so it’s also old to us. I expect he’ll know better than to run.

Marinading is new to us too. I’m vegetarian so that means meats aren’t on the table. It’s actually cheaper this way, especially these days. So my vegetables will get sauced while we wait out another pandemic season reading these micros that are steeped in olfactory concerns and navigate the proximity of divorce, the bluster of family, the passage of age, the liminal body in an ever-transforming place and all that’s lost though you hope it isn’t lost for all time. Perhaps prayers are made without trying. Perhaps everything is change. Perhaps food is never a metaphor.

Here’s what I know right now: I want to say thanks to everyone looking out for us and reading with us without spoiling your appetite.

Thank you, family.

JR Walsh
Online Editor
The Citron Review