You'll Slip Away

When you listen, you'll hear the world creaking its way back to spring. I know. I was there. The ice was breaking up at the shoreline this weekend, and all the pieces were stacked in piles of thin, sharp triangles that looked like shards of glass from a huge broken window. You could hold a piece up to the light and you'd see intricate swirls of white, like thin, careful loops of glue. Each piece was the exact same thickness of about a quarter of an inch, and could hold its shape if you held it vertically, but would fall apart if you held its weight horizontally. I tested dozens of pieces, and they all fell to the same fate when I held them like this. As the water rolled in, heavy with broken sheets of shifting ice, the shoreline would groan and sigh, making such human-like sounds. You couldn't hear water sounds, only ice sounds, creaking, creaking, sighing.

The walls of ice, those cliffs built of frozen waves, were melting and dripping in the background, carving out their own undersides to that they became tiny caves, perfect for a fox or a small bear, were the latter to lose his mind and decide to spend some time in the city. There were fewer dangerous spots now that things were melting. Fewer spots to wonder, am I standing on the sand or the water? and, more importantly, am I standing on land that will support my body? Ah, to spring from ice cliff to ice cliff, just like Bear Grylls, that rugged, brave creature from Man Vs. Wild (but I might be a little less equipped in both mind and body -- just a little). Something tells me, though, that he doesn't stop every three inches to pick up beach glass and smooth stones, eventually becoming so weighted down from pocketed treasures that he can't even leap between glaciers anymore.

You may be wondering by this point what all this has to do with food. I, frankly, am sort of wondering the same thing myself. Perhaps it was that those clean-edged triangles of ice reminded me of toffee -- you know, the kind you make in a jelly roll pan, then stab at until it breaks into sharp, unpredictable pieces (that are, consequently, quite dangerous to eat). This, and I was reminded of onions, too. Something about the translucence, I suppose, or the infrastructure. The crispness, maybe? The layers?

When I got home from this adventure, I thought about making toffee for about two seconds, and then came to my senses. I decided instead to make some iced tea and then slice an onion to confirm its similarity to an icy shoreline. The onion soon became caramelized, and ended up in a meatloaf. And that was that. Although, the best part was certainly the dream I had that night, in which my brother was sitting at a kitchen table, carefully making a meatloaf, but it was (this is the nightmare part) made out of only onions, finely diced and shaped together. When it came out of the oven, it was cold, like the triangles of ice at the beach, and it looked completely white and very elegant. He announced then that he had gone into the wedding cake business, and this was his first creation. I sank into a chair, so relieved that I wouldn't have to eat the onion loaf and, more importantly, wondering if the happy couple really knew what they had gotten themselves into with this one.