My Love

I show my love through my cooking. Perhaps to some that sounds shallow or lacking, but for anyone close to me, they'll hopefully understand. And more importantly, they've hopefully felt it.

I've never been a hugger. I don't say "I love you" regularly. Babies and animals aren't naturally attracted to me. However, I think I give off some good karma. I get smiles and nice gestures from strangers regularly, but I'm not someone you'd say is a natural at close physical connection.

Over the years I've been married, I've spent many hours in the kitchen over a stove, chopping, sautéing, grilling. I've ironed countless white tablecloths and set so many tables, I couldn't imagine the number. I've set tables for four hundreds of times; for ten, many times; for more, some times.

I love to cook. I love to eat, so luckily, I love to cook. I love good food, local food, healthy garden-grown food. Aesthetically, I love to combine colors and food types to present a well rounded and beautiful meal. I use visually-appealing dinnerware and napkins. I love candles, colorful platters, flowers, especially blue hydrangeas cut from my yard. Learning to properly set the table was one of the earliest chores I taught my boys (right after sorting darks and whites for the laundry which amazingly, they could understand at about the age of two!).

I've spent most of my non-work hours cooking for those I love; food planning, purchasing, and creating has taken up most of my weekend hours for twenty-five years. I take great pleasure in watching my hungry family enjoy a hot meal together at the end of a full day. I enjoy making fruit medleys or beautiful salads that are so tempting because of their vivid colors. My boys have always eaten fruit because when you chop it up and layer it beautifully on a pretty plate, it's appealing and they want to eat it. When you make it easy for them, they always will.

To me, there is something so loving in someone taking their time and effort to make you something from scratch. It won't be perfect. But it will be absolutely gorgeous because it was created specifically for you and as odd as this may sound, I can feel the love coming from the food when it is prepared with that sentiment.

I can only hope those I've cooked for have felt my love, have enjoyed the meal at table, and of course, the conversation that comes on the side. If I didn't hug them in that particular moment, I hope they felt my hug nevertheless.

Thankfulness

Hopefully, it's not just this time of year that we are mindful of being thankful. I try to do it daily but am not always successful, sometimes caught up in pettiness, wishful thinking or future planning.

I am thankful for my dear, dear, long term friend Renée. Renée is a person in my life I should cherish and spend time with because after doing so, I am always walking taller, my mind is filled with creative inspirations, and I believe in myself and the goodness of continuing to seek out what is most important to me. When I go to our semi-annual "sleepovah" group of girls at Renée's house, I never bring a book for bedtime reading. Her home is filled with wonderful new books for me to learn about; there is a always a new book on her guest room's nightstand that becomes my before-bed read.

At our October "sleepovah," of course, a wonderful book was given to me by Renée, Life is a Verb by Patti Digh. Another friend suggested I read a different book, a serious book, but Renée interjected that she thought this was more right for me. Right it was. The book provided me with so many writing prompts for this blog....enticing future tidbits for you, I hope!

One such passage I have to share now as we enter into the season of thankfulness is Patti's take on celebrating, whatever, because...why not? Patti's book was written after watching her stepfather die just 37 days after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. She asks what we'd do with our 37 days. What I know for sure is that my children, my husband, my family and friends get more from spending time with me than anything material I can give them....if when I'm with them, I'm fully present and focused on them; if I show them the caring I feel toward them; if I'm kind and loving and make an effort to make their time with me ones where they can feel the way I feel when I leave Renée...rejuvenated, uplifted. My children will remember the "feel" of being around me, not necessarily the words I've said or the advice I've given. In celebrating every day with them and being thankful just to be in each others' presence, we can give them more than anything bought from the mall. Simplicity is a word coming back into our country's vocabulary; might we ponder it a little at this time?

Patti Digh says when her first-grade daughter proudly exclaimed that she got a 30% on her first test, so proud because she got some right.....

"In our house, we sometimes run out of vital supplies like toilet paper, lightbulbs, and Purely Decadent Pomegranate Chip soy ice cream, but 365 days a year you can be sure of finding a rather impressive supply of birthday candles on hand for impromptu celebrations. You lived through the swim test? Your pancakes tomorrow morning will come to you in a blaze of glory. Today you're celebrating your half birthday? Get ready for a half cake after dinner. It's the first snow of the season, National Lightbulb Day, new-haircut day, leap year? Lighted cupcakes will no doubt line the floor from your bedroom to the dining table tomorrow morning. You survived your evil fifth-grade teacher who shall remain nameless? How about Cheerios with candles stuck through them for breakfast? You learned to tie your shoes? You fell off your horse and got back on? You read a 1,600-page book? You learned to cover your mouth when you cough? There are candles in your immediate future. Everyday, ordinary, daily life should be a rambunctious celebration, a focus on the positive, a paean to possibility and glee. Slow down, take time, encourage, celebrate your 30 percent."

Photo: Evergreen Cemetary, Portland
*Source: Digh, Patti. Life is a Verb. Guilford, Connecticut: skirt! The Globe Pequot Press, 2008. Print. P. 32
www.lifeisaverb.net or www.pattidigh.com