Warning: This post is full of pictures that really only relate to the last few sentences of this post, but that’s okay because everyone likes stunning pictures and delicious food. Right?
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| Believe it or not, these are lemons |
Oh look. Bit of a pause. Okay, so I haven’t been particularly good at writing lately ... at all. I own that. I’m sure your lives have carried you through many days and you’ve all survived in my absence. Truth is though, I’ve missed this. If you’ve missed this as well, I hope you’re excited, because during my little hiatus over the winter months I haven’t been hibernating as one perhaps should when temperatures dip dramatically below freezing and blizzards come roaring in. In the time that I haven’t been writing I’ve taken a road trip up the eastern coast of the United States from Georgia through the Shenandoah Valley to Boston. I travelled to Maine as the leaves began to change, and then again in the dead of winter. Funny thing is, winter in Maine isn’t dead at all. Considering the multitude of layers of clothing that are required to be outside for any length of time, you’d think it’d just be easier to be dead … but that’s a story for a different day. Perhaps a day when the weather outside is cooking us in the northern hemisphere and we need to think back kindly on a day when intellectually we know it was cold even though we can’t fathom what it would be like to feel cold anymore … because it has just been So Long since that has happened.
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| Potatoes and Carrots |
Downsides –
1. It’s been so long since I’ve taken part in this blogging exercise that keeping on track and making any sort of intelligible sense is hard. Like convincing a cat to take a bath kind of hard. Like, me staying in one place for an extended period of time kind of hard. I would continue to tell you how difficult ... but that would be yet another tangent. Focus!
2. I seem to allude to many things … many things that I’m not likely to address for a while. Remember that road trip? Yeah, that’s not what this post is about. Gotcha!
This post is actually about sameness. This post is about the world, as one, with humans on it. We, as a community, have so much more in common than we ever have had as differences. Okay, so a post on sameness alone could either be 5,000 printed pages (and) or the most boring post in the history of posts, which given the qualifications it takes to start your own blog … might be saying something. This post is about one of the grandest things that brings us together. No, not your family. I love my family but I can say with a certain amount of surety that while a family might be brought together just by their familialness … they are also sometimes driven out of the room from one another because of that very same familialness. This is a post about food. Who doesn’t like food? I don't know of a single culture in which food isn’t used to bring people together. You want to entice warring clans to talk – present them with food. You want to convince staff members to come to a meeting and pretend to enjoy one another’s company – provide food. You want students to show up to an event – Food.
Please come to our wedding, oh yeah, and you’re required to give us money/gifts when you arrive – No problem! Just make sure there’s food. Want the kids to come home after they’ve become adults? You ply them with good food their entire childhood and only give them the recipe for the most difficult dishes. They will happily return, if only for Mom’s stuffed shells, Dad’s barbecue sauce, Eje’s beef and tomato noodles, or Oma’s wiener schnitzel. You ask almost any traveler who has been on the road longer than a month or two what they miss most from home and food will likely be within the top three answers … if not the very first answer. I love you mom and dad, and have missed family very much when I’ve travelled, but in 2007 when taking my first bite of real cheese that melts, I cried. What a reunion. My traveling companion and I took pictures with that cheese, and when we returned to our home base away from home, we carried hike packs full of marshmallows, peanut butter, and other scrumptious delights to our fellow travelers, so that they too might have a taste of home.
Most times when you think about getting together with people there is food involved. Dinner parties, dinner and a movie, going out for drinks, meeting up for coffee. Even going out to play sports with friends usually ends with some kind of food … not because we haven’t already eaten, but because it’s a common space in which human beings can share. We don’t all have the same tastes, but we all require food. We all keep each other emotionally alive while the food does the rest. Food is a beautiful thing. And today while we blamed the lamb that was for dinner, I spent time with a friend and she and I ignored the world, enjoyed fellow company, and cooked some food. Bon Appetite, and as always, thanks for reading.
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