leavings

The title of the ledger-size Walt Whitman volume, deeply embossed in gold on green leather, includes decorative roots and moss, and some long-ago owner used a pencil to mark out significant passages like “And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths,/ No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.”

Basically, the California of multiple thousands and millions of years ago was a-slosh with glacial leavings, lakes and rivers.

Looking back on the experience, Adler sees her final recipes as the product of a laborious process but one that elevates what she poetically calls “the leavings of one’s earlier hungers.”

So many peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, bowls of cereal, and plates of spaghetti were consumed while Bobby was replaying and analyzing games that the crumbs and leavings of his food became encrusted in the crenellated battlements of his rooks, the crosses of his kings, the crowns of his queens, and the creases in the miters of his bishops.

During a painstaking, two-year-long process, she laminated thin layers of wood, drawn from what she calls the “leavings” from the furniture workshop floor, into a floral motif that sits on the floor, 20 feet across.