The Short-Lived Joys Of Youth

When I married at eighteen,a friend gave us The Joy of Cooking.My husband, nineteen, turned every page,looked at every recipe, writing, “Yes!” “Try!”or (for his mother’s recipes) “No!”Never thinking of actually cooking something himself.I wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed or flattered,but the marriage lasted about a year.

When I married at fifty-one,we compared copies of The Joy of Cooking.My husband’s was in better repair,so we gave mine to Goodwill.He likes cooking, so he does it. I wash the dishes.It’s been nine years now. We are still married.

From Guest Contributor Cheryl L. Caesar

Cheryl lived in Paris, Tuscany and Sligo for 25 years; she earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne and taught literature and phonetics. She now teaches writing at Michigan State University. Last year she published over a hundred poems in the U.S., Germany, India, Bangladesh, Yemen and Zimbabwe, and won third prize in the Singapore Poetry Contest for her poem on global warming. Her chapbook Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era is now available from Amazon and Goodreads.