A Decision About Crunch And Squish

I needed some crunch in my life.  You just do every so often.  Too much is mush, too many sounds are very close to squish, and not enough has the defined snap of this being different from that.

Decisiveness can be very refreshing.  You know what you're dealing with when a decision has been made.

So, thinking of carrots and decisions, I decided to go ahead and make a good salad for dinner.  At the end of the day you can relate decisiveness and salads and come out okay.  Except for the olives I bounced into the bowls, the ingredients were all from farms close by.  I sliced open a large Russian radish.  It looked like a little slice of watermelon.  I thought of summertime heat and spitting watermelon seeds with my friends when we were kids.  The lettuce was crisp and tender, which seems like an impossibility as I write it now, but it was.  I had thought that crispness was more a close cousin to efficiency, but it seems more likely now the sister of delicacy and tenderness.  How unexpected.  Celery had the merest saltiness.  I thought of girls eating "ants on a log" - peanut butter and raisins on celery - and telling lies to each other to see who would believe them.  No one believed anyone else, but everyone wanted to.  No one was disappointed, but instead planned bigger lies for next time.  It's like that when you're seven.  Your friends' audacity and willingness to travel down the rabbit hole into a dimension of ridiculously funny falsehoods always won your admiration.  It proved you were not anything close to adult.  And you could luxuriate in the further untruth that you were not planning to grow up.  Ever.  

Olive oil slicked the lettuce leaves in my bowl, coating them and readying them for herbs and sea salt.  The nectar of olives has no equal for me when we're talking about food.  Garlic and olive oil with nearly anything elevates it, and somehow mysteriously gives you access to dreams and subtleties you might have overlooked before.  Handsome men and crisp linens laid upon aged wooden tables set at twilight.  The snap and hiss of a wooden match struck into flame and the pungent odor of sulphur and smoke.  The gleam on a pearl at the throat of an olive-skinned woman with dark eyes and rich tumbling hair, who sips some Chianti from a small coarse glass.  The pale green olive oil on my salad, its very light fragrance and delicate flavor brought me back to earth, and I stood in the kitchen thinking I should make risotto, too.  I wonder...