a pile of all the food you've ever eaten

Raise your hand if you don't have this thematic fantasy: seeing a pile of all the food you've eaten in your lifetime. It's in a giant room, right? Or maybe there's just a place floating in the space of your mind, and in that place there is a pile of all the butter that you've ever eaten. A pile of all the apples -- from the perfect sliced Cortland to all the dimpled ones you've found in the grass near an apple tree.

A pile of all the noodles. All the berries. For a moment, memories flash by as I add to the pile: our old raspberry patch, wild strawberries in the woods, or blackberries along a trail.

A pile of all the bacon. For a horrible millisecond: a pile of all the pigs.

A pile of all the licorice, maybe a sub-pile for Good & Plenty alone. Remember when some of them didn't have any licorice -- just a blob of pink or white sugar? Those pieces wouldn't count.

All the black beans. I might break that down into a pile for when I was in Guatemala, and a pile for the rest of my life. I think fondly of Guatemala for a second or two.

There's a very tiny pile of eel. One bite of octopus. One oyster.

Certain items don't lend themselves as easily to piling. When I picture a pile of all the eggs I've eaten, it ends up such a mess. Milk requires a giant imaginary container, maybe like the size of the pond we used to have. Or would it be more like the size of our neighbors' pool? I think for a minute about the pond, with that great birch tree. I think about dips in the pool.

I've had a lot of milk.

All the insects! I would love to see a pile of all the insects I've eaten. All the worms that were blithely steamed into broccoli, flies that took a little road trip from farm to store to belly -- stowaways pressed against a piece of kale. I imagine it wouldn't be a gigantic pile, but there'd be enough to stare at for awhile with your eyebrows raised.

All the lettuce: this could even be sorted into piles by decade. There is a pile of iceberg from the 1960's, for example, towering over the pile of 1960s romaine. Then, beginning with maybe the piles for the 90s, the iceberg lettuce starts to fits into a couple of wheelbarrows, then into a small flower pot. It came on sandwiches, or soggy and flattened under some sushi.

A pile of all of it, all you've ever eaten.

This morning I apply my usual pile-of-food fantasy while eating some nut bread I'd just made. "This recipe would be good with dates," I say aloud, because that's what I do now. And then I wonder about the pile of all the dates I've ever eaten. (Sometimes I create a continuum and wonder where my [say, date] ingestion is in comparison to "other people in the US," which is different from "other people in the world" -- if I want to play with sliding up and down the continuum. For dates: well higher than the average person in the US; then still higher than average -- but less so, I think -- worldwide. Because you have to include in your calculations not only everyone in the middle east, but also all the people in other places who have never had the sticky pleasure.)

I think of how my parents always bought that date nut bread around Christmastime. They ordered loaves and loaves from the Koinonia Farm, a little community of people who decided to live together, practice peace, and try to make a simple living out of selling pecans and date nut bread. That was some good bread.

If you piled all the slices of Koinonia date nut bread I've eaten, I wonder what that would look like.

I wonder how big it would be compared to mom's pile of date nut bread.

Hm. Her pile of date nut bread would be bigger. She loved that bread.

I go back to eating my bread that should have dates in it, and I miss my mom for awhile. In fact, I could start with almost any of those imagined piles except maybe the pigs, and that's where I end up: thinking of meals around a table, thinking of my life, my family -- the good, good stuff.

As I take another bite of bread, then wet a finger to pick up a sunflower seed that is left on the plate, I consider my huge life-pile of sunflower seeds. Most are shelled, but there's a smaller pile that's impressive, too -- sunflower seeds we used to shell with our teeth, sitting together around the big, round table. There was jasmine tea, too.

Man, my dad loved those seeds.