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cleaned it up already.”
    He got in his truck and drove off.
    I went to see. What had made Melvyn ill? Off in a corner was a small, decaying squirrel corpse. It was true I had not seen it before. It was very old and there was almost nothing left to it. It had dried completely and was bald except for a small strip of fur on the tail. It looked like a young squirrel that had died maybe a few years before. It was not a fresh roadkill or covered with flies or maggots.
    The dogs gathered around me, but the little cadaver was so old it was of no interest to them. I grabbed a plastic bag, wrapped the squirrel in it, and threw it in the garbage. I checked briefly but I did not see any vomit.
    You wouldn’t say Melvyn was charming or quirky. He was just a big, fat, vomiting, gray-bearded guy. He was not an Ithaca guy.
    Ithaca is an academic, university town. It has a cooperative health food store and vegetarian and vegan options. It has jazz concerts and fiber arts festivals. Ithaca is in Tompkins County. Melvyn came from another county.

a bit about schuyler county
    M elvyn came from Schuyler County, where all the men drive trucks and have facial hair, tattoos, and hunt deer. Schuyler County does not have a health food store. Schuyler County has a Cheez Doodle supply center—Walmart. Schuyler County is where, if you have an old bathtub you do not want, you throw it in the woods.
    I did not know then that in less than two years I would move to Schuyler County and buy a run-down Greek Revival farmhouse that had graffiti on the wall that said KILL MOM , and I did not know that I would get a boyfriend like Melvyn, only a lot cuter, and I would drive around in this tattooed construction worker’s truck while he showed me spots where he hunted deer up in the woods.
    But I did know—even then, in Ithaca—that living in upstate New York wasn’t any year in Provence with charming quirky local characters eating great French cuisine. It was barfing fat guys and bizarre supermarket managers who put insecticide in the beverage aisle.
    Okay, could I have organized a supermarket? Probably not. I would never even have gotten a job in a supermarket. I’m just saying.
    In Ithaca, there are vegetarian academics who teach morons at the prestigious university.
    In Schuyler County, there are locals with guns and tractors who are mostly unemployed. The women work; they have menial positions in supermarkets and in nursing homes at minimum wage and they have unemployed husbands. A lot of the unemployed husbands have lawn tractors. You can tell they are unemployed because on any day of the week they are out there mowing a dead lawn, around and around. Sometimes I drive up the same road for a week and the same guy is out there every day.
    They had some of the shortest lawns on the planet in upstate New York.
    Forget Provence, this wasn’t even the mountains of West Virginia, where they had local traditions like bluegrass music with men playing the fiddle and moonshine and a charming accent. Here it was Top 20 country-western radio only: in the barns, in the trucks, and at home. Country-WESTern. This was not the West.
    Schuyler County imported everything. There was no local indigenous music. There were no shaved truffles or hearty cassoulets. The local diet is on view in the shopping carts: twenty-pound bags of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, sodas (and also “root beer”), hot dogs, and maybe some ice cream or boxed cake, all of which might be as old as the bird’s nests used in that Chinese soup, what is it, thousand-year-old soup or something? “Preservative” is the county’s number-one food ingredient.
    In Schuyler County, when a cupcake shop opened—a concept already at least ten years old in New York City—they baked the cupcakes using Betty Crocker cake mix. It was considered upscale.
    Little did I know this would soon be the cuisine I was going to have to learn to cook. I like a