To Wisconsin

Wonderful paradox:  Wisconsin is both the seventh "fattest" state and the seventh healthiest. No one seems to be willing to figure that out or take it as a possible signal that fat people are often quite healthy.. When I was in Madison and sometimes fortunate enough to be taken on car rides to other parts of Wisconsin, I saw lots of wonderfully strong, hefty men and women, farmers and city people. I also saw many happy cows, none of them skinny. It somehow delighted me that the cream from these cows that were running around in the field on the UW/Madison campus would go into some of the best ice cream in the USA. (Yogurt and sour cream, too.)

And cheese. Don't get me started on the cheese. Brick cheese. Wisconsin cheddar. Farmer cheese (not the same thing as Farmer Cheese in New York).

Farmers' markets every Saturday in spring and summer and early autumn near the Capitol Building, with veggies and fruit and bread and cider and cakes and cheese and fish and meat and eggs and flowers and plants and lots of other stuff. Squirrels getting angry if you didn't offer them anything and trying to bite your toes..

One of the managers at the branch Rocky's Pizza in which I worked was tall and blond and hefty and strong with lovely shoulders. He seemed to me to personify Wisconsinites. He often teased me about my semi-vegetarian state, stating that potatoes screamed when they were picked. I also remember his smile, often sardonic. His eyes were blue, and he used to love to annoy the regional corporate head by talking to me during her visits when she had informed all the workers at this Rocky's that no one was to talk when she was visiting.

Consider this a poem in the making..to Wisconsin, a state that did not hate its fat people.