When I was living in New Mexico with Mom & Stephen, I was in the kitchen of our Ojo Sarco home, making an apricot cobbler with my girlfriend of the time, Ana. The apricots were ripe & soft & saccharine. Delicious to eat raw, but we had to resist, so we could make the cobbler — or was it a crisp? I didn’t know the difference then, and to be honest, as I write this 5-and-some-change years later, I still don’t. It didn’t matter anyway, cause the fruit was so delicous. The caterpillars thought so too, we found out. As we were pitting the apricots, we saw so many of them had one or two or sometimes three of them living in there, living off the sweet fruit, growing up into hearty New Mexico butterflies…​ or weavils or whatever; I don’t know what species of bug they were. As we worked through the apricots, we had to compost about half of everythin, there were so many with the little critters, but it was okay, cause we had a lot of apricots, about 3 or 4 gallons in all.

Ana & I were just in our honeymoon phase, and we spent a lot of time together like this, hanging out, working on something together & talking. I regret that now, I can remember so much about the apricots, the seasons, the sunsets, the winding mountain paths, and steep cliffs, with the many ofrendas dotting the shoulders, where unfortunate souls died on the road — often drunk driving, or high, too fast. We talked about that, too. She liked to drive fast, too. That had worried me.

She had been going to school to become a massage therapist, and besides anatomy, her studies included Eastern sprirituality — chakras, yoga, taiji, and nutrition. Sometimes, I’d help her with her anatomy homework. — No, really, I mean — We had a lot of "lab work," hands-on, you know, but I would help her to study the parts and properties of the human body: dorsal, superior, inferior, thoracic, pulmonary, cranial, etc…​ I’ve forgotten most of it now, but my brain is good at that sort of thing. — decomposing amorphic living things into distinct systems with functions and names, and I genuinely wanted her to succeed in school. The harsh New Mexico desert was unkind to those without an education, and she was smart and kind and I wanted to help her.

But today, we were making an apricot crisp. We were talking & shucking apricots. I think we had prepared enough of them and were now readying a baking dish and heating the oven. Mom walked in and started talking about…​ something. I don’t remember because she was chatty, so it must’ve been frivolous, and well, I was distracted…​ She was…​ eating the apricots — the unchecked ones, full of grubs. Just popping them into her mouth whole, and spitting the pits back into the bag, and gabbing at us the whole time. Ana and I looked at each other with the same look of horror and disgust, that Mom must have missed.

I looked back at Mom, "You know you…​" I looked down at the bag, and the apricot in her hands.

"What?"

"There are bugs in all of those," Ana and I said together.

"Ehh, so what?" She spat a pit into the bag, as she popped another fruit into her mouth, "It’s protein!"