up for air

Saturday morning.  I slip into my other uniform.  A handful of peanuts, half a cup of yesterday's coffee, my hat and bag and I'm down the road -- rolling down a dark highway wrapped in a soft blanket of piano and the lullaby of tires vibrating over smooth asphalt.  The dark fades to deep charcoal and silhouettes appear in the fields.  Somewhere behind the clouds the sun climbs unseen over the horizon and by the time the sky has paled to a smoky lavender I am away.  My shoulders drop and I remember that I am breathing.  

transition song

holy monday

...Batman!

The three part antidote:

#1  Mud Runnin' -- yeah I know, not exactly what you had in mind.

#2  Requires no explanation.

 

#3  Again, need I explain? (I've been singing this song in my head -- and occasionally out loud, since about 11:30)

Application:  #1 --Once is plenty, #2 -- Repeat with caution, it is only Monday, #3 --LOOP.

january reverie

wind

solace

sunrise

advice

Some thoughtful and well-reasoned advice that came free of charge with our cheese yesterday...

On Turducken:  I made one of those for a customer one time and all I got was a thanks.  Anyway I'm not sure what the hype is all about, I mean the mushy duck in the center with all that fat...  I'm not trying to be gross but if you think about, it anything with the first four letters T-U-R...  well it can't be all that good.

Other observations:  Robiola and a paso robles syrah/petit verdot/malbec blend is like matches and gasoline...

and in spite of any ill-will I may have implied to have for duck fat, potatoes roasted in it are BOSS.

so go ahead and sing

The universe is artless.

The sky is a listener...

--Stanley Moss, from "Nightingale"

maple bay 1/13

A few small steps beyond the shore wall

shivering over an emerging field,

I feel, more than hear,

the hum of ice becoming--

vibrantly expanding, 

pushing against and yielding to

the addition of its own mass.

street light

keep you right

the grammar of ornament

Jones, 1910

More at Retronaut.

light

These days that don't agree with the calendar are seductive -- warm and bright, with the charm of Spring, but not the promise.  I've been soaking up all the light and falling in love with them anyway.

hunger

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.
The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it ... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied ... and it is all one.

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity.

There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?

--M.F.K. Fisher, from the forward to The Gastronomical Me

full

marmalade

I wish that I could post a smell...

I love saying the word marmalade at least as much as I love eating it.  On a baguette. With butter.  It is what the sound of its name promises it will be.  

Marmalade music.  Well, it just is...

frostlight

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars

--Walt Whitman

Frost has a way of highlighting things that otherwise escape attention.  Small things like tiny leaves and blades of grass.  Not the sort of stuff that will set a person on fire -- Uncle Walt and present company, presumably, excluded.  And -- The morning light was exceptional; an elusive wash of soft aquagold that I would have gladly offered to the devil, both my iphone, and my soul, if he would only give me some way to capture it.  An aspiring rocket-scientist, (among other things) I was working on a theory to account for it ... something about micro-ice crystals in the air, the angle of the morning light, bending and filtering...

... and finally, another video to test the limits of the definition of "video."

the poem...

Is seen from all sides

Everywhere

At once

--Gary Snyder, from "As for Poets"*

I woke up this morning with an urge to get my breakfast from a gas station -- to head out for somewhere remote, quiet.  A place where all I could hear was flowing water, the faint conversation between wind and trees and my own soft footfalls over the gorge floor.

*Read the entire poem here at The Hammock Papers.

switching it over to am

Searching for a truer sound

Can't recall the call letters

Steel guitar and settle down...

streaming

handmade

I am the most fortunate and grateful recipient of these beautiful mittens.  They are made of the softest, dyed in my favorite color (note the unintentionally matching shirt) wool, by the hands of my sweet friend.  I love them, everything about them.  They are warm and soft and smell like lambs from heaven.  I look at each stitch and think about the hands that held the yarn, the fingers around which it was wrapped, the thoughts and bits of conversation, secrets and daydreams that have been knitted within -- and especially, I love that there is little girl out there with beautiful red curls who wears a skirt that matches them.  Thanks so much Amy!