“Little Starts” by Rose Skelton (Fiction ’17)

Fiction alum Rose Skelton was recently featured in Alocasia. Read an excerpt of Skelton’s essay below:

 

Little Starts

When my wife and I marry in autumn, the seasons are all wrong. On our Philadelphia rooftop, spinach sprouts in the heat of late September and in early October, basil flourishes in pots. Summer flowers—petunias, fuchsias, geraniums—gush from other people’s window ledges. Tomatoes, fat and misshapen, line the counter of the vegetable shop across the street.

On the island in Scotland, where I am from, at this time of year I sleep under one, two, thick quilts, and rain slants sideways across the windows. The shops are void of all summer fruit. There, it is the season I gather mushrooms from the woods, when the cool wet weather pulses black trumpets from the loam. Horn of plenty, birch bolete, chicken of the woods, cep.

But in Philadelphia, the days are a humid stench that won’t let up. The woods, though I scour them, give up nothing to me.

 

Continue reading “Little Starts” here: https://alocasia.org/2022/06/21/rose-skelton-little-starts/

 

Rose Skelton on the web: https://rose-skelton.squarespace.com/

Rose Skelton on Twitter: Rose Skelton (@rosieskelton) / Twitter