pickles

Write for three minutes about anything, said my friend Dakota. So I did

Photo by Drew Geraets on Unsplash

If I could write about anything I might start with pickles because pickles make everything better, they cover a multitude of sins, they take over the taste of a lousy hamburger, I would write about sweet pickles which I eat by themselves, or pickle relish which I put in egg salad or mix up with something I can’t remember and put it on fish or maybe not fish, maybe just, oh, I know, a hot dog which otherwise is not nearly as delicious. I would write about trying and failing to make my own pickles and the big wooden barrels full of pickles which still looked like cucumbers in stores before I was born, and wanting to steal one and eat it like a banana. I used to love bananas but those days seem to have gone. And suddenly then I then would write about what might survive on this planet when it is no longer hospitable to much of anything. I would write about what I’d like to have survive when we are all dead and gone, I would write about what the earth will look like without us, and how beautiful it will be and how interesting also and how whatever crawls out of the rock pools next will be a friendlier and less greedy species than we have been ,but first I’m going to check in the icebox for pickles. I wish I could forget what my second husband said when we talked about earth and all its beauty without human beings and he said Yes but there would be no one to see it, which ruined my day. And this is fifty years later and why did I have to remember it now because I have no pickles left to see if what he said will go down more easily eating some right out of the jar and then drinking the juice.