The best meal I ever ate was after I jumped out of a plane over South Padre Island right behind my friend and right before my husband. I screamed a scream that came from the carnal parts of my body as we did a free fall toward the ocean. I was barefooted and strapped to a young man with wild hair and a bandana and when the chute finally opened and we floated down to the shore, he told me to take in the tranquility and beauty of it all while I fought the urge to revisit my morning breakfast. When my bare feet hit the sand, the nausea subsided and the relief kicked in—I survived a jump out of a questionable airplane, look at me, I’m young and wild and free…and starving!  When my husband made it down to earth, looking about as calm as he does when he wakes up in the morning, we all grabbed a margarita and a fish taco at a little shoreside shack and no fish taco or margarita will ever compare, because I was ALIVE!

Except once I had a margarita on a camping trip with friends and one of them brought dozens and dozens of limes and loads of ice and good tequila and he didn’t hold back on those and the salty rim served in a red solo cup while we all sat in camp chairs and watched the people with money drive jet skis back and forth across the big lake with nothing at all to do but sit together.

The best meal I ever ate was my grandma’s cold tuna noodle salad that she would make my grandpa and me the summer I lived with them at their lake in Minnesota. I was there to work for a theater program, a year out of college and two months away from my wedding, I watched my grandparents move in and out of their days together after over fifty years of marriage. I would put the coffee on for them in the morning before I left for work, a little convenience I could offer that they praised overtly. My grandma was known for her brownies and fun-loving nature, but she wasn’t known for her cooking. She made this noodle salad one pretty evening and we ate it on the porch beside the lake with short glasses of vodka tonics with a maraschino cherry and both grandpa and I agreed we loved it, and so we told her, and for the rest of the summer, that salad was always in the fridge.

The best meal I ever ate featured a big, ripe tomato and a perfect cucumber from my garden, and my little sister’s homemade bread and a recipe from Val for the dressing and I ate it at the messy counter in our home with the windows open to catch a cool, late summer breeze. I made one for myself and then another when my husband came in from work and we said, “There’s nothing better, nothing better,” while the juice of that tomato dripped out from between the bread and onto our plates.

The best meal I ever ate was wild elk from his grill after a long bow hunting season. The best meal I ever ate was his mom’s fried porkchops with a side of mashed potatoes and creamed peas when I was sixteen and over for supper for the first time. I didn’t know about creamed peas and without them, what is life?

The best meal I ever at is at my mom’s every Christmas.

The best meal I ever ate was the hot dog I roasted on a stick over the impromptu backyard campfire last night with my husband and the cousins and my parents and my kids and too many dogs running around barking at the coyotes howling as the red moon came up. And it was 10 pm and too late for supper but it was his idea because the kids asked and so we stirred up a side of mac and cheese and corn on the cob and s’mores for dessert, but it was that hotdog that was my meal after a long day where maybe I didn’t feel like a campfire but was so glad there was one waiting for me because it was a little burnt and the bun was too small but look at us out here, we’ve survived another day and we’re young enough and wild and free and hungry and we have people we love and we’re ALIVE, eating hotdogs together.