The potatoes on the stove reminded me of a poem by Philip Levine that I won’t bore you with in its entirety, but that I will tell you the first two sentences of, because I love them and because they are good. They go:

I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes, took them home, boiled them in their jackets and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. Then I walked through the dried fields on the edge of town.