4 Quotes by Christa Parrish

He halves fresh Brussels sprouts and tosses them in a pan of butter and garlic, squeezes the juice of a lemon over them. He thinly slices two sweet potatoes, setting them to boil. When they're soft, he mashes and seasons them. Another pan heating on the gas burner, this one for rounds of filet mignon, seared and drizzled with a red wine reduction.

Jude smiles and explains things much more personably than I, slicing and toasting thick pillows of cinnamon-coated raisin and offering that to people, topped with a pool of melted cultured butter, fresh from the farm down the way. The day tourists find this quaint; the green eaters, sustainable and local; and the rest happy to have something sweet now that the sticky buns are gone. Everyone is smiling, and I wonder if Jude can also turn water into some sort of fermented beverage.

But then Oma tells me of bread, of the six hundred kinds made throughout her homeland, white and gray and black in color. Loaves heavy with pumpkin seeds. Pumpernickel. Rye. All with long, dense names like 'Sonnenblumenkernbrot' and 'Roggenmischbrot'. Each word is music to her. She has never eaten a tinned bread bagged in plastic with a little twist tie, a pride she wears all over. 'It matters,' she tells me. 'Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing.'Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.

Tee gives her the milk so dark it looks like the Mississippi flooded into the cup. I can't imagine Tee using any sort of bottled Hershey's or Nesquik, and I'm right. She makes her own syrup, whisking Dutch-process cocoa and home-brewed vanilla extract with sugar and salt and water.