I’m continuing with a writing exercise prompted by Bite by Bite and Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
Prompt 2:
Taste the rainbow: write a poem or lyric essay in seven segments, with each segment of the piece representing a food color of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
What is the food rainbow of my childhood?
Red: Christmas. My aunt would always buy my grandfather (her father) a box of chocolate covered cherries. It’s odd that she did that because she would buy him sugar free candy on all other occasions. We (the grandkids) always knew what was in that box.
Orange: Ribbon candy, peanuts in the shell, and oranges. All of this goodness packaged up in a small brown paper sack and handed out at Christmas Eve service by a bespectacled bald man who also led the singing. My grandfather and grandmother’s small more-than-rural church.
Yellow: Harvest gold—the decorating color of most 70’s kitchens (if it wasn’t avocado).
Green: Frankoma wagon wheel pottery. My grandmother had a set of dishes and I have one piece from her set.
Blue: There is no blue food. I think my grandmother told me that once. She hated the color blue. Therefore, it was not lost on us that her daughter, the eccentric in the family, decided to make blue noodles for the chicken soup.
Indigo: I’m not sure but I think indigo is darker than violet. For this exercise, it is. The only memory comes from a grape themed ceramic dish that my other grandmother made. It was divided and we would put pickles and relishes on it for Sunday and holiday dinners. She painted the grapes a dark, dark purple. (I have that dish, too.)
Violet: Violet Beauregarde, one of five that entered an enchanted land of sweets (that perhaps held a little lasciviousness, too—I always thought Willy was a bit leering). Little Violet. Did she ever think she would become movie famous for blowing up like a giant blueberry?
“Red” almost became strawberries. I have whole essay on those somewhere. Instead this morphed into a hodgepodge of memories.
I’m really not happy with my responses but at least I got it down.
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