voices – Kelly Yandell

(Or not)

By Kelly Yandell

Homemade yogurt is the epitome of simplicity in the kitchen. All you need is milk, and a culture.

(This is certainly true compared to, say, performing a triple bypass surgery. After hours of research online and several failed attempts with different varieties of culture I settled on a “traditional” type of yogurt starter. Here you will also like to know the difference between thermophilic and mesophilic. You will also want to consider whether to purchase an heirloom culture which can allegedly be used forever, provided you keep making yogurt with regularity, or a non-heirloom which is a one or two use affair. I opted for the non-heirloom after several attempts with heirlooms which seemed to have a personal grudge against me, my family and my kitchen, and refused to become anything but grainy milk. I admit that this was a personal failing and had nothing to do with the product or the culture of culturing. Not every being will thrive in my home. Now that I’m an addict, I will be a customer of the freeze dried culture company forever. Regardless, at this point you will need one All-Clad saucepan, one Le Creuset small Dutch oven filled with ice for cooling the milk, a digital thermometer, a stainless steel All-Clad stirring spoon.)

All those goddamned songs. All of them. Brandy was a fine girl. Do you remember that son of a bitch who went to Boston for the springtime and kept on going? Yeah, I was gentle on your mind. Sitting here watching the dust settle after you had imprinted me on your brain like a well worn postcard, something to look at now and again. To remind you of the kind of woman who made no demands on you, while you lay next to the ones who did. Do you think I’m supposed to feel bad for Bessie or Big Momma? I can’t decide which. Maybe neither of them wanted him around all that much.

Him

I was no good for you. I let you go. Set you free. Set us both free. Set us all free of who I would become if I stayed. You didn’t try to stop me. You just stood out on that porch and watched me drive off. I remember the dead expression, and the white dress with yellow flowers. Bare feet and wayward brown hair. But your eyes. Good Lord, you could put a chill on a hundred degree day.

The Crows

If we were crows they’d call us a murder
And you can be sure that’s what there’ll be.
As soon as we find that man Thomas Gentry.
And we meet up with him in West Tennessee.

Beth was our sister.
It was her, plus us three.
She was the prettiest and the youngest amongst us,
And Gentry took her off to West Tennessee.

Directions to Where I’m From

(This is a piece I wrote for a class a few years ago. It is probably the moment I started thinking about the idea of Fromness, which I explored in some length in A Texan Theory of Fromness.)

I am of the red dirt.

The basketball post set with a bag of concrete into a flat spot of grass and gravel. Rusted. There must have been a net at some point.

The fillin’ station on the right that hasn’t been anything but a hollow shell for fifty years, when they used big chunks of green glass right along with the hewn stones.

I’m from the evangelical church where no one shows up anymore.

I’m of the railroad tracks.

I’m from where the bluebonnets start and the hawks swoop and the buzzards sit in the road, hard working janitors.

How to Make Homemade Yogurt

(Or not)

Homemade yogurt is the epitome of simplicity in the kitchen. All you need is milk, and a culture.

An Imagined Conversation

The Crows

Directions to Where I’m From