On, In, and Around Mondays: If Only the Table

"Can we make the table round?" asks my older daughter, on one of the nights we are alone.

I begin to say no, but cannot think of any good reason to persist in refusal.

"Sure."

We pull the dark oval apart, lift out two sections, hide them behind a brown living room chair. Then, body facing body, we rejoin the table to itself, into a circle so small we can easily hold hands around it.

I am reading about medieval spirituality, how it was more embodied than our own. Accordingly, cathedral design focused on the embodied God-in-Christ, rather than the Trinity. The table, or altar, was a focal point for where the Bread of Heaven met people.

I'm also reading the two final essays in The Spirit of Food. Both have the language of bodies and tables. Both have the language of finding and losing. One woman loses her early confidence in love, after reading a letter from her father, who cautioned, "Everything changes... You will bind yourself to someone who will change, and in the very dark moments, you will not know who he is."

The other essay writer lost the illusion that her table could provide a secure seat for a girl who seemed to heal but eventually took her life. This revelation especially arrested me, as I learned this week that a friend's husband just took his life on the first day of March, a day which has always reminded me of spring.

Both writers likewise found ways to join to others and be, at least for a time, fed.

I think about my own daughter's desire for a little round table, and I wonder if she's hoping that the trinity of her and me and my littlest daughter will somehow create an unbreakable circle— where no one is lost forever, and there is always room for another hand to share the bread of earth, or heaven.



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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

On, In, and Around Mondays: Kitchen Table Optional

I usually write on Saturdays, but this past weekend I found myself in the car for a total of seven hours. Four up (we missed our turn and accidentally pointed towards Canada) and three back.



As the miles passed, I watched snow. Snow, snow and more snow. Snow on orchard trees and baby pines, on Douglas Firs and golden swamp weeds, on russet-colored bushes and mountains in the distance.



For all the daylight hours I watched, and never tired of the snow.





Later, returning in the dark, I watched the sliver moon diffused behind clouds. Now the snow was blues and grays, barely glowing, and the mountains were a suggestion against the night. If I could have walked the 150 miles home, I would have. The moonlit snow was an endless invitation to awe.

Somewhere along the way I got to thinking about Capon's (and Ann Kroeker's) Heavenly Onion. I know our lives do not permit this kind of attention for every task. But there are moments when we have an hour (or seven), and then we have a chance to be in awe over snow, or an onion, or the soft face of a person we love. I thought about this too, and wrote a poem (probably just along where we missed the turn— and now you see how awe can derail a day, so you must be prepared for that eventuality).

Anyway. I was thinking of Capon's instructions, but I was without an actual onion or a kitchen table. So, as I said, I wrote a poem instead.

Says Capon...

Now take one of the onions (preferably the best looking), a paring knife, and a cutting board and sit down at the kitchen table... You will note, to begin with, that the onion is a thing, a being, just as you are. Savor that...

Assignment (Kitchen Table Optional)

Spend an hour with an onion—
Spanish if you like—
feel it round in your hand
before you uncover it
against itself...
knife slicing, piercing
towards the heart
through paper, water, paper, water,
releasing heat
that could make a grown man
cry.




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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

We're reading The Spirit of Food together at TheHighCalling.org. Join us? Also, we're accepting poems (random is fine if you don't want to write for the prompt); mine today is random. :)

On, In, and Around Mondays: Edge of the New Year's Orchard

She wrote of challah dotted with raisins. In The Spirit of Food, Hathaway spoke of the moments making this heavenly braided bread for the Sabbath.

I thought about all the times I have tried to make bread—her idyllic description compared to my reality. There was no comparison.

This has been a year of admitting things like, "I can't make bread very well" and "I will probably never have a garden that results in actual vegetables." This year, I have left behind more than a few Wendell Berry/Laura Ingalls dreams.

So that, reading The Spirit of Food, I felt a sense of disconnection and slight sorrow. My realities are far from the visions of sweet homesteading and tomato vines overrun with fruit, of jams bubbling on the stove and land calling my name (as if I could do it justice with the turn of my unskilled shovel).

I came to the end of my assigned reading. Challah was baking, raisins plumping. And she, the successful baker, failed to keep her bees. Bees? It had been a new, hopeful endeavor that year, but the hives emptied, and the honey dreams disintegrated.

Wild bees came, in time, took up residence, redeemed the emptiness and her efforts. I think I was supposed to be comforted by this. But it was something else that caught my attention.

Little girl in the orchard, reaching.

Charlotte runs ahead, scampering through the bramble at the edge of the orchard to pick low-hanging fruit. When we catch up, Bea, her baby fingers grasping at everything, pulls at leaves, twigs, finally an apple.

This vision promised to turn my whole year around. Year past, and maybe year forward too.

I want to be the little girl who reaches for low-hanging fruit. I can make bread if I will let myself do it with a bread machine and a mix. I can grow rosemary and sage (but not thyme) in my garden, and gather tomatoes from the farmer's market. The whole orchard may never be mine, but an apple is waiting. Now I must simply reach. At the edge of the orchard. Reach.





Photos by L.L. Barkat.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

We're reading The Spirit of Food together at TheHighCalling.org. Join us?