{Originally Featured on Noble Pig}

There’s always that fleeting moment in a restaurant when your wine server brings over the bottle of wine you ordered, drops the cork in front of you and pours you a little splash to taste. At this point everyone at your table, including the server are all waiting for your seal of approval.

Do you always say it’s good? What if you don’t like it? What if you think something is wrong with it? Do you send it back? Would you rather avoid the confrontation and drink the wine you think is flawed because you don’t really know if there is something wrong or not?

Many people have expressed to me their hatred of this moment.

They don’t know what to do with the cork and they don’t know why they are tasting the wine.

Let’s start with the cork. It’s plopped down right in front of you, what should you do with it? Nothing. Just leave it alone, I know it feels like you should fondle it, but you don’t need to.

What’s really important is tasting the wine. It has been given to you to see if the wine is spoiled or “corked.”

So here’s what you do…keep the base of the glass on the table while holding the stem. Gently swirl the glass a couple of times, shooting the wine up the sides of the glass. As the wine drips down the sides it evaporates and gives you more to smell. Really stick your nose in it, giving it a big whiff and then give it a taste.

Do you smell a lovely perfume of fruit and spices? If you don’t and what you do smell is a musty aroma reminiscent of damp newspapers and a mildew stench, you can almost guarantee your bottle is “corked”, the world’s most prevalent wine flaw.

When a wine is officially “corked” technically it means a chemical known as TCA (2,4,6-trichloranisole) has gotten into the bottle as a byproduct of mold in the cork or the winery. It kind of smells like a wet dog that has rolled itself up in a mildew blanket. Yummy, right? However, sometimes the mildew smell isn’t prevalent and the wine aromas and flavors are just dead, completely masked by the TCA. This is when a corked wine is harder to spot.

{Originally Published on Food Loves Writing}

Morning, and the kitchen is quiet, with sunlight streaming across the sink and onto the wood floors, and I pour coffee, grab my lunch, take my keys from the little basket by the door. There will be 20 minutes at least, between me and the office, along expressways of commuters, and I will look at them, talking on their phones, singing with their radios, glancing at their watches, before I park and walk inside, up stairs to my desk, to begin the work day, to talk with my coworkers and double-check spellings at Merriam-Webster and watch the geese fly past my window and onto the roof.

5:30, and I’m getting in my car, like I’ve done so many times, and I’m stopping by the train station, like I do every day, and I’m walking in my front door, and I’m eating dinner, again. It’s spring here—when did spring come? Weren’t we just talking about fall and winter and how I hated the snow? The light lasts longer now, and the days are warmer, rainy. I take it all, eagerly, greedily, like it will never end.

You know, I’m only 26—I find myself throwing the only in there more and more, the way it’s inserted into excuses from guilty children like, I only skipped one homework assignment or I only said that because the other kids did. But as much as I know we are guaranteed nothing, in terms of time, in terms of living, I also know 26 is, usually, not a lot of life to have lived and, usually, it’s not enough time to warrant strong opinions or heavy reminiscing. But I do: I look at the moments around me—the way the grass looks when it’s wet, shiny with dew and fragrant with summer; how my mom makes me laugh when she does, when her mouth closes and her nose widens and her eyes slant, just slightly, as her body shakes, like her mother’s did; the kindness someone shows you when he carries in your bags, so you don’t have to—and I think, I am living this.

This, right here—the morning coffee and the conversation and the drive home in daylight to a cozy evening with a book and blankets—this is life, and it’s a gift, and I am living this.

{Originally Published on Ali’s African Adventures}

To “The Poor” : An apology, for I have been blind.

I have always come to you with my heart full of your suffering. I came with my guilt, all so carefully amassed over the years as I sat at my table and despised the abundance in front of me, knowing that you were going hungry. The eyes of your children, liquid black windows to souls I thought were haunted, haunted my dreams when I saw them from my sleep.

I thought it was right to come with my arms full of things, shirts and stickers and little plastic cups with handles. When I saw your need from across the ocean, my soul was stirred to bring you something to fill the void in your lives. I brought shoes to cover feet accustomed to feeling the warmth of the earth beneath their soles, cartoon character band-aids to cover wounds as deep as time.

I have always seen myself through what I thought were your eyes. I was a ministering angel, there to bless the masses, and your faces and stories swirled and mixed in my mind as I moved among you, touching and greeting and unseeing. If you asked me now to share your stories, I wouldn’t meet your eyes as I searched to call out your names.

What must you have thought? Each of you with your history, your life as real to you as the breath catching in my own throat. I came with my whiteness and I held your hands as you spent your time with me, and then you walked away and I couldn’t remember your mother’s name. I worked beside you to hand out medicines in villages filled with your own people, stood shoulder to shoulder with you as we prayed against the passing of your sisters and brothers. But you have never seen the inside of my house and I have never asked to see yours. We have shared life and death but not our tables.

I have been so blind. I saw you as one. You were “the poor” to me, a myriad of people neatly packaged between a set of quotation marks, bundled together and taken as a whole. Instead of Kukenga and Gift and Greg and Isaac and Nyakamwengo, I saw you all as a shifting crowd of humanity, as one vast story of heartbreak and pain. I have been so blind.