Dinner is Cheaper Than Time Travel

I was driving down the road just now and passed a neighbor’s house with a new archery target out in the yard - a whitetail buck, standing in the grass with his head low, neck out, and I went, seamlessly, from here in my car, to crouching in the balsam brush last fall with a buck walking straight at me. I went, without even trying to go, because I’m already there, I’m always there. 

A little farther down the road and I pass a stump with the fleshy, white bulges of reishi mushrooms emerging, and I’m in the hemlock woods, hot, electric green, buzzing with birds and buggy, with my dog, which is where I was this time last year, and where I’ll be next week when they’re ready to be picked.

I cross the bridge over the Little Ossipee river and see that the black locust trees are blooming and I get a whiff of old regret from the years I didn’t hear the blossoms saying “now now now.”. I’ll pick them tomorrow, I swear. 

The thing about the past is, it’s not the past. We carry it, we take it out to look at it, we fondle it, we become it. Food is the most reliable form of time travel. Food is so french-braided with our memory because we spent millennia almost solely focused on finding, collecting, preparing, or preserving it. Vivid food memories meant survival. If you ever want to remember how to get to a place, pick some berries, hunt a deer.