Remember when great aunts and uncles
and distant, stranger cousins
traveled down from Michigan or Canada
or some other unearthly frigid place
and camped in your home for a month?

They brought all sorts of strange food
that was stored in your fridge,
and it looked quite foreign.
Lactose-free milk,
almond milk,
coconut milk,
and four types of organic yogurt
straggled along with those distant relatives.

Your household family ignored these objects
like they were screaming children
seeking attention.

Aunt Martha brought cottage cheese.
Cottage cheese.
Seriously, who eats that?

All of those foods felt as out of place in your fridge
as those people felt in your home.
After a month, Great Aunt Martha and Uncle Timmy
and cousin “what’s-his-name”
slipped out of your home
as briskly as the winter wind they fled from.

But one thing was left behind:
of course,
that thing was
the cottage cheese.

So for a month after they fled,
and then some more after that,
that cottage cheese remains in your fridge.

Food for each season fills up around it:
the Thanksgiving turkey,
the green bean casserole,
the egg nog-
but that cheese remained in its place,
not even looking any different.

Vaguely, in the back of your mind,
you knew it was still there,
but you didn’t really register it-
like the way you stopped hearing
the air conditioner kick on at ten o’clock each morning,
or like the way you got so used
to your brother’s lisp
that you didn’t notice it anymore.

So that cheese remained,
for who knows how long,
pushed around
and long abandoned
in a foreign fridge.