Anne Caston

Madison, Wisconsin, 1996 Here is a genial congregation, well fed and rosy with health and appetite, robust children in tow. They have come and all the generations of them, to be fed, their old ones too who are eligible now for a small discount, having lived to a ripe age. Over the heaped and steaming plates, one by one, heads bow, eyes close; the blessings are said. Here there is good will; here peace on earth, among the leafy greens, among the fruits of the gardens of America's heartland. Here is abundance, here is the promised land of milk and honey, out of which a flank of the fatted calf, thick still on its socket and bone, rises like a benediction over the loaves of bread and the little fishes, belly-up in butter.