I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
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Patricia Brieschke’s writing has been included in the anthologies Best American Essays 2008 (Houghton Mifflin) and Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 2 (W.W. Norton & Co.). It used to be that when she grew restless or dissatisfied, she moved to a new apartment and made a major life change. Now she rearranges the furniture in a house fifty miles north of New York City.
No matter where I turned, there was food, leering, taunting: M&Ms wedged at the bottoms of pockets, cookies in the zippered compartment of my book bag, a pound of Twizzlers jammed into the medicine cabinet. I consumed it all fitfully, bulking up, belching, squirming, farting. My children joked that I carried spoons in my pocket in case soup rained from the sky.