Four days before my birthday, Rachel asks me if I want to do anything special. I’ve always found this question difficult to answer. I don’t have particular elegancies and hope-laden lists of requests adding up from the months where it was not my birthday. Most of the time when people ask me what I want from them I don’t know if they’d even be able to give it to me, like nondairy pumpkin pie and chocolate croissants. To Rachel I respond with the usual ‘I don’t know’. After this nonanswer she asks me if I have preferences for dinner. I ask for angel hair pasta and dairy free ice cream, two easy and delicious things. July 10th has always been a typical evening.
In another afternoon, we go to the library. It is my second visit to the Ames library and my world is throttled. I watch a video called ‘The Californians’. It is an SNL skit of Fred Armisen and some other people speaking in the most throttling accent known to a Bostonian. Or anyone. Please look this up before reading further. The next day while the sun was shining on Rachel Eber and Alice Foster in the outdoor kitchen, I am reminded of that time my world was throttled just 24 hours ago. I ask Rachel and Alice if, for my birthday dinner, I could have everyone on the farm speak like the Californians from ‘The Californians’ for one hour. They agree, giggling.
It is a perfect storm. Rachel’s visitor friend Seth was bound to arrive, for the first time in his life, to Mustardseed, at 3pm on the date of my birth. Seth has no earthly connection to anyone but Rachel. Seth will meet us- Alice F, Allyson, I, Nalice McMan, Derrrek- for the first time. Seth will eat dinner with us. I want it to be entirely up to me what his first impression is. I can’t explain why, but it is like a conditioned reflex for me to make his visit weird.
For the next 4 days I fervently concoct strange and extraneous shenanigans. My birthday now mandates that milk never existed. Everyone- Rachel, Alice F, Allyson, I, Nalice McMan, Derrrrek- will omit the word milk, circumventing milk-related words such as yogurt with the ‘almond jello’ and ice cream with ‘frozen confection. Each person will adapt individual accents: Nate would embody his neighbor Larry (starting sentences with “like my brother said” and frequently using farming metaphors), Allyson a Southern backwoods daisy-dukes-sporting girl (“like mah daddy said, ‘don’t shit where ya eat’ ”) Alice McGary a Scottish person, Alice Foster a British person trying to be an American, Derek a Russian KGB officer and/or ‘??’, Rachel Kyle from Lady Bird, and me a homogenized Californian (hook a looey, hauled ass down the 405, numerous references to Sonoma County, asking if the other person has Waze and pressuring them to download Waze, Broski/brohennessy, etc). In the middle of the dinner I will stop the smalltalk by tapping my dirty pasta fork on the salt jar, make everyone shut up, pour salt onto a plate and organize it into lines, blow the salt away, cut the smallest potato into eight pieces, give everyone a small potato slice, and watch them chew it. Then I will full-arm gesture to Nate and say ‘Brother Nate’ and he’d start talking about Time for the rest of the hour.
This event was the closest I have come to creating a world that is my own, if only for an hour. For 4 days I designed something close to perfect. It was a story that had no place yet in the world, but in me, and only in me, it came alive. I remember on a hot afternoon I was alone weeding the carrot bed while the rest of the farm crew floated far away, and between those tiny carrot leaves, I had a sudden feeling. It occurred to me that I was traversing my imagination, the hem of possible human creation; I was giving fire to ideas that in all other known areas served no purpose. Surreal bits of my mind- little, fumbling larvae of nonsense- now had potential to light a spark in physical, human reality and be stitched along space-time’s fabrics. It was a unique and rare feeling that was kind of like my child self playing.

Later I would wonder how I had actually come up with this dinner party idea, which I’ll refer to as ‘The Ceremony’. I think that the first few weeks I was here was was so new and different and so dripping with all the pleasures of summer that I actually lived in a state of mellow euphoria. Many things, living alongside the growing plant beds, will celebrate, adding up to an accumulation of rapturous liveliness. It seemed only likely that I’d done something with all the summer energy. (Plus, with a summer birthday, I didn’t have the chance to throw a party with my friends, so it was a rare opportunity that I needed to take.)
I believe The Ceremony was a phenomenon, an idea that drank the wine of pure summer and then lived. The fresh air and the farm work, the prairie walls and cloud ceiling, the long sobremesas and outdoor meals, the late sunsets and fairyish fireflies, all awakened it.

I felt I was living in a dream, and in a literal sense- time flowed carefreely, I’d forgotten the bad, would jump from one moment to the next, never mired in the embarrassment or stress that filled previous moments, and the atmosphere was light and prodigious, quite like an exceptionally good dream, the dream of summer, summer without end.

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The actual dinner was, to say the least, bananas.
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As the weeks went by, there were a lot of moments I’d remember.
The Ames Library announced there was a tornado warning in East Story City. We drove home with fluffy big clouds in the sky, colored degrees of purple, orange, blue, pink. The tornado blew away the previous week’s uncomfortable heat and the bugs. I think this was the night we went to another farm and looked at their sheep and home in a forested area. We went home late and Alice washed dishes in turbulent wind. Rachel and I went on a walk on an indigo road. I listened to Shark Smile by Big Thief and lied down on a bridge over a creek. The sky, wide open, deepened in color and in size; gradually we could see further into the universe.
Every night we ate outside. It seemed to me a summer miracle that we were here together, eating food we grew each night in the gloaming, surrounded by sunflowers and important people, and that tornadoes could blow away sweaty sleep and mosquitoes.
There was one night we ate inside the red shed and talked about Iowan soil and geology. Alice F and Alice McG were passionate about these subjects.
Another morning Alice McGary dropped us off at the Iowa Memorial Union so that we could watch the World Cup in a gallery space. We sat in the front row of a grid of black chairs, eating bagels with cups of coffee and cream offered by three solitary folding tables in the back. The room filled up with viewers. France won.
One night Allyson’s friend John came, and we played music with instruments like a small keyboard, a bucket of chickpeas, and some guitars.
In all these moments in time there was an element of phenomenality. Alice doing dishes in the wind, late night Bob Dylan, dreaminess, time extending, watching the world cup in a faraway room in the city, and forgetting about problems big and small. Perhaps they are all miracles, or maybe joys from being in a new place. I liked all of them greatly.
But after time passed, the days seemed quicker, and somewhat less memorable.
By now I’ve gotten used to some of the phenomenons. People do. It’s not unfortunate, although I used to think it was.

-Xueyan