The Garden State Kimberly McClintock
I jog the roads, rainswept and cool, that frame the farmland where I grew up: not even Tuscany is lovelier than October in New Jersey with its filament of fog and startled doe. But, October’s what I see, not what I remember. Not gladiola swathes and crimson bogs, but a sky so elaborate a blanket even an insomniac can sleep. Diagonals of peach trees, each a dark hand cupping a crust of snow. February, bitter cold, men stomping toward us, rabbit, quail, emptied, slung in their kidney pouches. They swung us up into the smell of gunpowder, bluing, linseed oil; scratch of wool, walnut stocks propped at the garden door. Children astride shoulders, we ducked doorframes, bobbed inside for chili lately frozen as their beards, chopped into chunks, heated, picked through so no one swallowed the snapped tip of my mother’s knife.
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