milk and bananas

I wrote this last June. Its still pretty completely valid. As a student I often forget to eat all together. If it wasn't for running regularly I would be terrible about remembering to eat. Cooking with myself in mind has been a huge change in my life. I've become self aware of things I never would have noticed otherwise. Everything from exactly how distasteful meat is to me to the wonders of how to make the perfect tofu smoothie.

Food can be the most basic information about ourselves and we all have incredibly different relationships with it. Sometimes we make someone else's priorities in life our own. That's love. You sincerely can't blame anyone for the fact that you love them, you can only be responsible for the fact that you have neglected yourself. I'd like to find the grace and maturity it takes to be authentic when madly in love.

I used to spend hours in a suburban grocery store in Upstate NY. I would wander the isles looking for every ingredient for a perfect dinner. The right barbeque sauce for the ribs, the cream for the homemade macaronni and cheese, the strawberries for the ultimate dessert. I would fill a cart and cook all day, polish the silver, sometimes set out the china.

The fridge was always full and every night I'd cook. Plates and plates of food, tupperware of left-overs and cookbooks with bookmarked pages.

I used to wander around the store with a big coffee and cart stocking up on cans of soup and boxes of cereal and tea, just in case. I'd lug out to my hatch back then into the house or up five flights of stairs to the apartment. Even when he'd dissapear I made dinner, even when I couldn't eat I cooked, cause no matter where he was when he came in he asked what was for dinner. Even when we sat down to eat he'd ask what was for dinner tomorrow. I was always worrying what I was going to make for dinner. I constantly knew what food I had at home.

Now I pick up milk and bananas on my walk home from work. I wonder how many books I could have read, how many languages I could have learned, how many conversations with actual content I could have had in four years of cooking, shopping and worrying.

I can't remember the last time I worried about dinner.

tell me what I want to hear

I pulled the rocking chair into the sun and set a heavy book on my lap.

I could hear finches, robins, song birds, and I swore even an owl.

There is a quartz wind chime slightly clinking from where I hung it up at the corner of the porch.

The chime sounds like fine bone china making odd, inconsistent and tiny toasts to something grand.

In the distance some dogs bark here and there and someone is cutting a lawn.

I rock back and forth and fall asleep.

It is a high spring day and not all of the orchestra has arrived yet.

There is no sound of the wind rustling oak leaves or the mad dash of tiny winged beasts among the azaleas. There is no sound of ice resettling in a sweating glass of water. There is no razor sharp hum of beetles and cicadas. No chance of heat breaking thunder or lightening in March.

In the distance from the other end of the dead end street the traffic of the world passes.

But form the rocking chair it only sounds like waves attacking a beach and in my dream on the porch I never have to leave home.