“makes you cry but still sweet”

The Poem
Pink and White - Deborah Garrison

Peonies are the only flower I care for
and when I saw them from the window
yesterday, tumbled and heavy along
a fence, fully exploded, nodding
at the ground, hanging their heads but not
yet spoiled, I remembered
a summer (maybe seven years
ago, or was it ten?) I wasn't sure
our love would come again,
and here I am, almost
kissing the grass like that,
bursting and rich, cracked
all over like broken cake—
makes you cry but still sweet.

The Beverage

Fausse Piste Wines - Fish Sauce

Yesterday, a friend and I took a bus from a natural wine bar to a natural wine festival up in Maryland. We tried oodles and oodles of delightful natural wines from around the world, but the one we agree we loved the most was Fausse Piste Wines’ Fish Sauce, a Muscat Pet Nat (a bubbly in which the bubbles arise from a bottle fermentation process). We never quite figured out how to pronounce Fausse Piste… foss peeeeste? But the three wines they had at the festival were all delightful. Oyster Sauce (a crisp rosé) and Pizza Sauce (a bold and spicy red) were both lovely, but the salinity and brightness and minerality of Fish Sauce cut through my palate in a manner very few other wines did yesterday. Long time readers may recall that two years ago, I was really into super mineral and high salinity white wines from Mount Etna, and while I haven’t gotten back into those lately, this bottle appealed to me in a very similar way. Fish Sauce didn’t take itself too seriously, and I love it more for that. I could have sat with a bottle of it and a pot of mussels and fresh bread all afternoon. Instead I drank approximately 85 other wines. I took today easy, except for the part where I wrote a bunch of curriculum and worked on my budget, because summer school starts tomorrow. The brief flash of summer that I had yesterday will get me through at least a few days of teenagers.