Growing Avocados Like Asa

Cut carefully around your avocado, longways. Twist to separate and spoon out half the insides. Spread onto toast and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Over the next twelve hours, the other half will brown. You can't bring yourself to eat it so you peel away the gummy, dried exterior, pry loose the pit and toss the rest with regret. Clean the pit gently with warm water. 

Reach into the spice cabinet for the twenty year old box of toothpicks you stole from your grandparents' house and will never empty. (Your sister will, though, and store it, flattened, between photos of you at her first birthday party.) Pierce the pit with three toothpicks spread equidistantly, careful not to snap these tiny supports in half. During rainy months they'll bend on insertion and you will say to no one, "oh, crumb."

The author at her first birthday, with brother Asa, age 13.

Suspended in a half-full cup of water, the pit sprouts roots and stem if you shuttle it from sunbeam to sunbeam. 

Eat half an avocado on toast once a week. 

Leggy, an undeniable eyesore, their roots will circle the bottoms of jam jars and promotional glasses from The Spaghetti Factory. Change the water weekly but never plant a single one.

-Stefanie Le Jeunesse

How to Have Nice Things

To protect yourself, have Nice Things. With Nice Things you can build a wall of cobalt glass, pink carpet, tiny souvenir spoons. Raise this wall between yourself and Poverty, the Dust Bowl, the Capital-N-Nothing of your childhood.

When your daughter (who does not need Nice Things to protect her; you have protected her) comes for stories with her secondhand recorder, you need not speak of the Nothing. It is walled out.

You eat dust and Nothing, but someday you will have a pink carpet. Vacuum it each time you have visitors, in two-foot strokes against the grain and then across. Repeat this before and after your visitors come; the carpet is a Nice Thing.

illustration by the author

Nice Things must be displayed at all times. If a Nice Thing breaks it becomes Nothing. You must never patch up a broken Nice Thing; always replace it with a new Nice Thing.

When you are angry you must not damage your Nice Things. When you need a weapon, use your hands, your fingernails, the family dachshund but not the cobalt glass. Go mad in the uncarpeted bathroom with the white glass case that holds your dusting-powder. The scent is called Chantilly Lace.

Take your grandchildren antiquing. Try to explain the difference between things and Nice Things; their mother will not. Her carpet is brown and threadbare. She fears nothing- not Nothing.

Your youngest granddaughter is fearless. She breaks Nice Things without caring that the Nothing comes in. Her elder sister tries to repair broken Nice Things. You need not explain that it is too late. She will discover this on her own. The last time you see her, tell her you are proud of her. That her life, her accomplishments, are a Nice Thing. It will be the only time you understand each other.

Before you die, make sure your granddaughters have tiny spoons.

- Rowan Beckett Grigsby is outnumbered in Oregon by a menagerie and spouse. She tells truths at crossknit.wordpress.com and lies at textwall.wordpress.com and has been known to have opinions on the internet.