Today was a love letter in motion – a love letter in the form of many hours spent creating and consuming. The best way to your own heart is through your own stomach, so they say. (Or so they would, I’m sure.)
Today’s love letter reached down to deep roots – you have always loved the kitchen and the kitchenwitchy magic of food.
There are stories here. Cherished, treasured stories.
Drafting menus and serving dinner restaurant-style to your parents. So many memories of time spent designing menus and coming up with outifts and making plans with Domini.
Junior high, and a five-course meal prepared with two friends – menu design and shopping and prepping and cooking and probably not really cleaning up (sorry, Sue Maxwell).
Learning how to make bagels.
Broccoli cheddar soup for friends on lunch breaks in high school.
Getting up early to make pancakes for breakfast, so your boyfriend could stop by before work. (Sour cream pancakes with berry syrup.)
That ridiculous birthday dinner, planned and prepped and served candlelit in the middle of a half-painted room, drywall dust on the floor.
The dinner-and-movie club, with theme meals (remember all those pies when we watched Waitress, Sarah-Jane?)
All the jam made with Jay. So much jam! Jars and jars and jars and jars of jam. Peach vanilla bourbon jam, strawberry lime, sweet pepper jelly, blueberry basil jam, cinnamon apple jelly.
And the first jam ever, crabapple jelly with Laurie.
That ridiculous(ly delicious) peanut butter banana cream pie for Scott.
These roots are deep.
And then there was fibromyalgia. There was exhaustion. You were just so tired, all the time. And then depressed. So sad. All the time.
And those years of just not eating, because what was the point – all that work with your counsellor to get to the point of keeping a granola bar in every bag. Granola bars are not “menu planning, meal prep, presentation.” Granola bars are survival.
These roots are not about mere survival.
These roots are about deliciousness. The deliciousness of planning, and the deliciousness of preparing, and the deliciousness of presentation, and the deliciousness of consumption.
Today you are pretty sick and kinda sad and definitely tired and you still, because you have deep roots and you have not lost them, you still planned and prepared and presented and consumed. And I love you for that.
For all these endless strawberries, and the sharpness of fresh sage crisping in butter, and the careful presentation on a plate.
I love these roots.
They are strong, and deep, and good. And tasty.
