My Ántonia

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You could do worse than reading something by Willa Cather this summer, AKA poet of the plains. She'll help lower your blood pressure, release whatever you're clenching, and probably balance your checkbook.*

* All product claims are conjecture and/or potential hyperbole, unless they come true, in which case send $.

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft grey rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence—the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper. 

— Willa Cather, My Ántonia

delicious sandwich.

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I can only vouch for the deliciousness of this sandwich if you take five minutes to toast your own bread with some olive oil in a cast-iron pan. I say this from my personal experience of being the laziest person I know and the most resentful when it comes to letting any old-timey, Ma Ingalls-type cookery technique get between me and the food, not to mention my disgust at the passive-aggressive swindle that is cast-iron pan custodianship: this step is what makes the sandwich delicious. If you skip it you might as well just eat your fingers. THE END.