Avocado and melon salad

116 Perfume spheres of light green and orange, butterfly-cut creamy lobes of avocado made me want to cry for California mountains, fruit trucks laden with fresh melons along twisting highways cutting through rich farmland valleys, patches of dry grass and gnarled trees. Blue mountains hazy with mist and smog over the ranch where my grandfather lived where we cracked clay pigeons with rifles, a sound like terra cotta pots shattering. God, some things are beautiful and worth protecting. I can almost understand why he mistrusted liberals to his grave— when I hit the target, his eyes sparkled, it kept him alive all those years. How could I love him and mistrust him? both at once like a Schrodinger’s cat— a thought experiment I never understood, like America. I can love it, hate it, remain baffled by it— but when winds picked up through California mountains to spread my grandfather’s ashes over his land, I understood for a moment America sang like Whitman to me.

Carson Thomas