When my weekend reading shapes how I see the world around me.
It had been drizzling for days; the kind of rain that coated you in tiny little droplets when you scurried home and made every car announce itself from afar with a muffled swoosh. Pink magnolia petals, washed to the ground by the rain, covered the pavements and clung to you with their sweet rotting smell. They were the only sign that spring had sprung and then somehow given up. At least the weather kept people off the streets, making it easier to reach her house.
What it didn’t keep off the street was that stench. A poodle had made it his habit to relieve himself right by her fence. She would never comprehend this stud-ish compulsion to piss everywhere. Pressing against the wood to avoid getting the smell on her fur she squeezed through the opening. Her cubs had been around. Brightly coloured plastic toys were strewn across the lawn. She could still smell the smear of peanut-buttered fingers on some of them. Dusk was falling, making the shapes inside the house stand out. She settled graciously on the porch. It wouldn’t be long now.
It still astonished her how the whiff of a smell, the rustling of a wrapping paper could transport her back to those days in Mallorca filled with sunshine and the inability to imagine how she could ever return to London now that it would be without him. The thing with Enrique had started back then. Shy smiles had turned into a first exchange of almonds after the early August harvest. One day, she heard ominous cracking coming from the garage next to her house and when she went to investigate, she’d discovered broad shoulders and a by-then-familiar face hunched over a bench vice to liberate the most delicate kernels from their tough shells. He proudly offered her the first taste of months of labour. His brother was the one cultivating and harvesting the almonds, but he always had a box of the first crop to spare for Enrique. If she liked the taste of these though, she should wait for Christmas, when thousands of almonds would be transformed into turrón, a seasonal sweet famous in Spain.
And that winter, back in London, the first box arrived. She still remembered opening it and breaking off a piece. How years later Izzy closed her eyes in delight as the sweetness coated her tongue and the almond pieces produced a satisfying crunch under her teeth. Andrea had put an end to that quickly enough. Admonishing her for getting the teenage granddaughter hooked on sugar. Izzy had stormed off, muttering that Andrea was being ‘such an almond mom’. Confusing at first, turrón being made of almonds after all, Izzy had tried to explain later sending a TikTok video. It was something to do with eating nuts but without the bits that made turrón, turrón. Where was the fun in that?
That’s when it started with the foxes. Turrón had to be shared. At first, she’d only wanted to give her one piece, out of the spur of the moment, driven by spite following the altercation. But after that, the vixen had looked at her so reproachfully, so scornfully, when she attempted to put out the usual food scraps, that she hadn’t dared to offer her anything less since.
There she was sitting on the porch. Soon the crunching sounds of chewing filled the evening air. She couldn’t help but think that the vixen gave her a complicit smile once she had cleaned the last crumbs off her snout before disappearing into the shadows with an elegant, sugar-rushed leap.
Sometimes she worried about ruining the vixen’s teeth, surely a crucial weapon in the urban jungle of North London parks. Looking back across her garden and the years spent to get here, she found it puzzling how at the heart of so many of our individual and collective afflictions lay the question of how much was enough.
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