Like a surgeon wielding a scalpel, she excised potato eyes like tumors, snaked long peels from the mealy flesh— her eyes scarcely glancing at her hands.
Potatoes proved her passport to community. She grew and sold them to the grocers, provided them cheesy or dumplinged for all the functions her church ladies catered, and hosted for holidays family and friends. She spoke as she peeled each meal’s staple, her hands voicing a language all their own: who'd moved in or away, wed, taken ill, died or recovered, all the while stripping away lineages like potato skins, down to second cousins once removed. Generations of minutest details she'd exhume from a potato, pausing for effect at sundry misdeeds of the parties involved. She spoke with the alacrity of a Homeric bard, her hands’ hocus pocus weaving a trance— the potato pan seeming to fill by itself.
Life. Death. Please pass the potatoes. For decades, we sat pleasurably as her hands deftly bared dormant facts and foibles seasoned with her characteristic pinch of glee.
Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His work appears in Verse-Virtual, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, San Antonio Review, Amethyst Review, and widely elsewhere. Father of five and grandfather of seven, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin with his wife of more than 50 years.
