Summer Cakes

I'm going to make a cake today. Eventually. It's going to be a cornmeal cake. I imagine it'll be a lot like cornbread but sweeter.

I don't have a writing desk. I want to shatter that illusion right now. I write on my bed. When you read anything I write, know it was written under the covers and I was only wearing underwear and maybe not even that.

I've started having dreams about specific writers. When I start dreaming about something, it means I'm getting comfortable with it. I had a dream Roxane Gay came to visit me. I made veggie burgers. Roxane asked for a bun and I didn't have any buns. It was so embarrassing.

I made hamburger buns once. They turned out more like biscuits. I like biscuits, so it was fine.

The other writer dream I had involved naked lounging. If you send me money, I'll tell you who the writer was and what their bathroom looked like in the dream. This is the second dream I've had where I lounged naked with this writer. I'm not a nudist, I swear.

I'm not going home this summer. I usually go home. There's a family reunion at a lake. All the cousins drive in and eat and drink and tell stories and trade pictures. There are boat rides and fireworks and bottles of wine. There's a midnight swim across the lake. There's at least one venomous snake. One year, my father and my uncle teamed up to kill a copperhead. They chopped its head off with a shovel. I got to be smart and warn everyone that snakes can still bite for an hour after they've been beheaded. We ate lunch. After lunch, someone threw the dead snake in the water.

I once saw a headless snake swimming in the lake, but no one believed me. My father, my uncle, and my grandmother once saw a bald eagle on the Fourth of July. No one believed them either.

The Fourth of July is Josh's birthday. He'll be a certain age this year. That age rhymes with "dirty." The big DEE-OH.

I'm going to make this cake now, and if it's good, I'll pretend it's an old family recipe. I'll say my mother made it for me every summer. I'll say how my grandmother made it for my mother. And so on down the line.