Monday, June 3, 2013

up to


Did I show you this bread already? I baked this bread more than a month ago--or two? It was the first bread I baked since feeling better, feeling like I could eat food and smell it cooking in my oven and walk the grocery store aisles. This bread glowed, cooling, in the morning light of the basement apartment we occupied for our first ten and a half months in this northern prairie place.

This is what I have been up to: baking occasional bread. Finishing a second term as a professor: marking essays and exams, turning in my grades, tidying my office. Scrambling to find newsprint and moving boxes. Filling box after box with books and dishes. Scrubbing an oven with baking soda. Watching kind people move my things. Unpacking those things: finding new nooks and crannies for the Turkish coffee pot and the cutting boards and the pile of our first Christmas in Canada cards, which I still intend to tie with ribbon.

Also: choosing a mattress set after nearly nine years on an inherited futon. Also: welcoming my precious mom for four days of basking in each other's presence. Also: planting my container garden. Also: watching my belly distort with the heel-jabs and elbow-pokes of a tiny being bouncing around in there. Also: walking amid breezes and lilacs. Also: writing for deadlines. Also: watching workers re-roof a house down the street, and the elegance with which a man climbs to the peak and upends a large thermos to drink in the late afternoon heat. Also: finding a pathetic looking sodden tea bag in the bottom of a clean cup on the counter many mornings, mysterious refuse to anyone else but a gift from Josh, fished out of his own cup each morning, to accommodate my love of black tea but goal of minimal caffeine.

Reading: The Shack for a church group. Kathleen Norris (again). Eugene Peterson's memoir The Pastor. Ina May Gaskin. Poems.


1 comment:

  1. Glad you are feeling well!
    I hated The Shack. Curious what you think of it.
    love,
    Anna and Lily

    ReplyDelete