A perfect morning should almost always begin with oatmeal.
Not the one minute kind.
And it should have dried cranberries one day, and raisens another, and always either walnuts or almonds.
Pecans are too expensive to even dream, and I live in Georgia: pecans are backyard trees, here!
Sometimes, perhaps, apricot or dates. And blueberries! Must not forget blueberries, and deliciously dried to
preserved forever, all of them, then plumped again as I stew them in the oatmeal...
Why do I write of food so often? Not so much because I am hungry, although, to be sure, I might be.
A parishioner once confided in me that she, too, often went home to a bowl of cereal (the packaged processed kind) and considered it a meal.
For supper.
Or 'dinner,' although, here in the South, we move dinner to another hour...
I knew then that creating a place where single women can enjoy taking care of themselves as lovingly as they would a family might be important.
And therein as much a thing of beauty as other places more traditionally thought
of loveliness.
But I note here also a memory of a woman—several years ago now—who wrote of her shock when, going through her mother's things after she died, she discovered a drawer full of cut-out recipes...
Her mother never cooked.
Didn't like to. A single woman, too, as I remember it, and she had worked for a living. Those children to take care of, and all the weight of it on your shoulders.
Mine were hard enough to tend without being (at that time) a single woman. I can only imagine what it might have been like alone.
But that has always been a most precious thing to me, that daughter finding the drawer full of recipes her mother dreamed, after her mother was gone from her.
Some dreaming in all women, I am thinking, however (perhaps more secret in some than others; perhaps hidden even from herself), of being there in the kitchen, and marking a hearth determined always by the alluring smell of good food while her children go about the things that kids do, secure in the knowledge of the ordered life...
Not the chaotic one we lived.
For me, when I moved to this apartment (my favourite so far, in spite of its shortcomings (and my own—), I thrilled to see the telephone jack built into the kitchen wall.
One time in my life I had had a telephone in the kitchen, and for some unknown reason, a telephone in the kitchen had always been my dream (just like having my very own washer and dryer: odd, because, while dishwashers are
sooooo necessary, having one never made it into that place of perfect dream)...
Adulthood attained.
Being there.
I bought a green princess phone online (cheap!) and set it into the wall...
Waited with my dream of cooking in my kitchen while I talked to the man of my dreams...
Still waiting.
[Editor's note. And what the story does not tell remains that the concentration necessary to talk on the phone AND cook is not mine.
But that detail really didn't need to work its way into the story told. We'll leave it as our
girls n silly laughter secret...
And cooking was never my own mama's thrill, either. No memory of that ordered hour while Mama cooked for me, either.
Stepmother, yes.
So I have the contrast. But stories as well I will tell along the way of my precious Mama...
Stories that are that thing of beauty and of joy and of laughter...]
