pull up a chair

cookbooks we’ll discuss another day. today, instead, we’re tuning in. i have a feeling i’m not alone.
when no one’s around, when no one’s paying attention, i like to mosey into the kitchen with ina, or better still, nigella. i’ll take giada, or paula deen.
i’d rather not with what’s-her-name, the perky one, the uber-perky one, the one who sort of scratches nails on my chalkboard, the one who’s always taking shortcuts to get to dinner on the table in less than 30 minutes.
i make dinner in less than 30 minutes most every single night. i need little inspiration in that department. i am looking for the real thing, the sensual thing, the wrap-your-ample-arms-around-my-shoulder-and-teach-me-a-thing-or-three. that thing.
it is, most days, the only thing i ever watch on tv. and i only watch while i walk. it is, by now, an old bad habit. like blindly stuffing potato chips from bowl to fist to mouth. rather mindless. i walk in circles, horizontal circles that never get me anywhere.
and while i walk i learn to cook. i time my walking so i can walk while ina’s cooking. she lulls me into such a dreamy state i don’t even notice that i’m plodding. she purees, i perambulate. she sautees, i sweat right along.
there is the butter in her throat, the way she talks i mean. and then there’s that salt-worn shingled house with all the sunlight streaming in. i love the way she sets a table. makes it look so easy. makes it look so bountiful. so understatedly over-the-top. so gosh-i-wish-i’d-grown-up-beside-her-stove.
i want ina to invite me over. i want someone to cook for me the way ina cooks for everyone she loves. and she sure loves everyone, it seems. her table, i’m telling you, is practically an orgy. one i want to squeeze into.
i watch ina often as i can. nigella i only watch when my dear friend sandra passes off a pre-recorded tape. i love reading nigella. she flings words as easily as she flings mousse around a silver bowl. watching her rocket-blasts me into orbit. she is something of a seductress. the way she whips an egg white even. or pops the garnet gems out of a pomegranate. no wonder she wears no apron in the kitchen.
i love how she sneaks downstairs in her silky robe, reaches in the midnight fridge, sinks a spoon into something lustful lurking in the shining light of the chilling, sleeping stainless box. licks like the goddess that she is.
i have a confession to make, which i will make because we’ve been pulling up chairs for a while now: i watch ina and nigella in particular because they are especially good at teaching what i’m trying to learn. and not just cooking.
they are teaching something you would maybe never guess needs to be spooned out in half-hour lessons. they are, i pray to God, teaching me how to understand that i needn’t be afraid of cream and butter, avocado and, oh my God, a dab of sugar.
they are teaching me to breathe in the kitchen. not just breathe. maybe even dance. imagine dancing in the kitchen.
i watch them so easily cook and feed because i am trying to learn how to feed myself in the very way that i feed the ones i love so much: i am trying to teach myself that i needn’t choke or sputter when someone steers a crème brulee my way.
i am trying to teach myself that after all the years of being at war with food—starting back when i was 18 and shrank to under 90 pounds then held steady before ballooning at the mouth of the soft-serve machine in my college cafeteria, then whipsawed up and down for years and years—i can, at last, lean against the sturdy shoulder, sink into the ample bosom of my cooking friends ina and nigella, and let myself slowly open to the gentle notion that what comes to me on a spoon will feed me in ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with calories and fat grams, things i used to count obsessively, things i’ve now long left behind.
but still, i’m not as far along on this curriculum as i’d like to be. some day i’d like to taste a bite of my little boy’s birthday cake. or my own.
are you surprised? me, who talks so convincingly about feeding everyone all around me? you shouldn’t be. i’ve spent 32 years studying how it is we eat and feed the ones we love. i know more about the metaphor of food than just about anyone i know. i feel it in my bones. i ache to be fed—to feed myself—in the way i so easily imagine feeding.
my blessed friend jan once did so. i was lying in a hospital bed, stitches running straight across my middle. she came to bring me lunch. she didn’t serve just any salad in any tupperware. she brought blue-and-white china. and real silver. she packed that salad with every bit of goodness that she could gather.
that jan can cook, we say around here. she fed me that day in a way that i can taste even as i type, years later. she fed me through and through.
jan is like ina and nigella. she makes it look easy. and she, unlike the friends i tune into on the screen, is wise enough and knows me deeply enough for me to truly trust. i have been fed in the way i long to feed myself. without fear, or ducking in and out of rules for what’s allowed, what’s safe, what’s not. it happened once—maybe twice.
i tune in to ina and nigella to see if i can gather up the steam to make it happen three times a day.

okay, people, this is about as scary as it gets for me. to lift the veil on the deep and mystifying struggle i have struggled with for, geez, two-thirds of my gosh-darn life. struggles come in many, many forms. to struggle with something so essential–something so potentially rich and filling in wholly non-caloric way–is poignantly difficult. you can’t ignore it, lock it in a cupboard and never worry about it again. it comes at you as many times a day as there are reasons to feed or be fed. it is so simple, i tell myself. but then, midway with fork to mouth, i’ve gotten stuck so many times. turned down so many slices of cake, it’s amazing the baker’s union hasn’t come and shut me down. i wince every time, worry to death that i’m offending. my aim is not to offend–oh God, the hours i’ve wasted worrying that i’ve offended; my aim is to come to peace.
you know i would love to hear your thoughts. anyone else get over this or any other hump they care to bring up here, at the old, banged-up maple table?
by the way, thank you for making this a place where, tremblingly, i could tell the truth.

what with all the hubbub out my window yesterday, it was darn near impossible to get anything done here at the little keyboard that is my thinking life.
that’s mama up there, with the long scrap of muslin hanging from her beak. someone’s old bedspread, i’m pretty sure.
not much later, it was yet another beak and yet another bit of hand-me-down bedding.
the sparrows, it seems, have moved on from simple sticks and twigs and grasses. they are feathering their nest in earnest. deep earnest.
and when not flitting back and forth from wherever their scrapyard is, they were making layovers on the serviceberry and rhododendron right out my window.
lucky me. lucky rhododendron.
for not only were the sparrows deeply engaged in bedding for their babies. they were deeply engaged in, apparently, making those babies.
she would perch, innocently enough. catch her breath, it seemed. he would flutter over. arch wings. ascend. oscillate. again and again. perch. flutter. arch. ascend. oscillate. oh my.
right before my very eyes. all morning long.
so many times i nearly started aching for the mama. i thought about calling out the window, asking if she might want to come in for a little respite. spread her wings, put her feets up. take a gosh-darn break.
but i didn’t.
i let nature hold its sway.
my bird friend tj, he told me. warned me. let nothing get between a sparrow and her intent on multiplying the species.
it seemed, indeed, that something fertile was in the air. ‘twas may day after all. and the moon is full. for the first of two times this month, i’ll have you know. it even smelled, well, ripe outside. this is propagation season.
and i, just the other side of the glass, got to watch it all. got to feel, for a while there, that i was smack dab at the epicenter of the re-creating universe.
while some spend their day glued to CNN, i spent my day tuned into the sparrows. i admit, at a few deeply personal moments, i felt a bit like mrs. kravitz, the nosey-body who minded everybody’s business back in the old days, on “bewitched,” just one of the black-and-whites that i was weaned on.
but mostly i felt blessed. this is, if not quite sacred, rather filled with something anointed by the heavens. i was mesmerized.
far as i know, though, the little sparrows paid no mind to me. they certainly never paused. never tap-tapped on my window, to ask if i might please close my eyes, look the other way, perhaps. they carried on as if i wasn’t there.
how odd, it made me think, the distinctly parallel universes that make up this busy world. especially in the spring. the air, it seems, is buzzing. thick with drama.
no wonder when you open up the door, step outside, listen to the softer sounds–not the city buses, the jackhammers, the screeching tires–but the bird chatter, the calling back and forth from limb to limb, it’s downright action-packed.
only, mostly, we don’t notice.
there is so little intersection between the worlds of us and them. and we, at least, are missing much. they, i fear, are missing little. we are not a species setting such a good example. if only we would stop. if only we would listen.
yet again, i pound that drum: shhhhhh. tiptoe. the world’s unfolding at our feet and at our fingertips. it is ours to gulp. to inhale. to fill our lungs, our hearts, our heads.
the birds, the bees, the buds. they are deep at work, and theirs is the task of recreating. they go about their business without the mayhem that we two-legged, reportedly-bigger-brained creatures seem so particularly adept at these days.
the sparrows have no wars, no school shootings.
they carry on, as they’ve done for hundreds of thousands of years. each spring, as the sun inches ever higher in the sky, as the full moons of may keep the night from turning dark, they dig for worms and bite-size spiders, they tuck their little heads into their wings, they sleep, they lay and warm their eggs.
they pay no mind to the lady watching from the window, the lady who knows full well how rich the show, watching all the world continue on in earnest.

anyone else captivated by the drama out the window? anyone else getting a bird’s eye view of what it takes to propagate the species? anyone else wholly distracted by the fluttering of bird wings?

by any chance, when you rolled out of bed this morning, did you think to stumble out the front door, swipe your hand across the tippy-tops of grass, collect a few dew droplets, smush ’em all around your face?

oh, you didn’t?

i’m so sorry.

it’s an ancient rite for may day. only, silly me, i’m just letting you in on it now.

i’m wondering, do you think we could extend the statute of limitations here, get tomorrow rolled into the equation, and maybe all of us could meet on, say, my front lawn? we could do a little dew dance. wiping and swiping dewy drops all over our visages?

hmm. just a thought.

but i am getting decidedly ahead of the story.

the story is this: it’s may day of course, the most ancient religious festival in the northern hemisphere.

hoh, boy, what a festival it was. until the puritans came along in 1644, that is, and settled the whole thing down.
but let’s back up some more here.

depending on your country of origin, you did may day one of a few ways. to the romans, it was a celebration of the start of summer. they leapt and whooped it up for flora, the goddess of flowers, the bride of west wind.

in france, for some reason, they paraded cows with daisies tied to their tails, poor things. actually the reason why is rather charming: because the grasses by may day had grown so lush, the cows could now be milked three times a day. thus, the anglo-saxons called the day, tri-milchi. and thus, they touted all their happy bulging cows.

if you hailed from parts a bit chillier, say up ireland way, you were a celt and you whupped it up big time. the celts called it beltane, and for three days they honored fertility in very fertile ways.

of course you know of the maypole. did you guess that it was phallic? and, according to a little deep reading i was doing, the may basket, yes, it’s true, would be the female part of the reproductive equation. i kid you not.

and you thought dropping may baskets at your next-door neighbor’s door was a sweet and innocent thing to do on the first of the merry month of may? silly you.

they did not stop there, though, those frisky celts. nosirree. but thank goodness we have the puritans to thank for reining in the raucous.

before the prissy puritans, who in 1644 deemed it illegal, a big part of the beltane, besides the ring-around-the-phallic-maypole, was the frolicksome habit of all the young couples sleeping under the stars, preferably off in the woods.

oh, those fertile celts. is that why all the irish catholics had such big families when i was growing up? some latterday sleeping in the woods.

the other curious celtic tradition was the setting of bonfires for beltane. some wild irish dancers, the morris men, would go leaping about the flames, in hopes that they might assist the gods in heaving the fireball known as the sun high into the summer’s sky.

and then we’ve got the dew.

the dew, of course.

the dew, i told you, is the thing.

the dew of may day is not just any dew. it is magical. all the young maidens dashed into the fields on may day, searching for the little droplets of the dawn. once traipsed upon, they dropped to knees, and smeared it all over their freckled, pocked, or rosy faces.

it was the elixir of the beauty queens. it was thought to do away with spots and pimples, pox and blackheads even. okay, maybe not the blackheads. but all the rest.

as you know, in all these months of pulling up a chair, i’ve not once mentioned any sort of beauty tip. i do not spend my days pondering much the notion of beauty of a facial kind. but this, folks, is one beauty tip i’ll not let scamper by, unnoticed.

i’ll have you know that shortly after crack of dawn, this very morn, i furled back the covers, tired bones be damned. i was a woman on a mission. the groggy lump beside me questioned where i was off to in such a gosh-darn hurry.
“i am in search of dew,” i announced, as if i was going off to battle.

fumbling for my dew-hunt clothes, he beat me to the punch. he was dressed, and armed with bike helmet, while i was still stumbling from the bathroom.

by the time i staggered out the kitchen door, open palm at the ready, he was still two steps ahead. as he sauntered toward his waiting bike, he tossed me this: “dew’s out in front.”

(how dear that he goes along with all my madness, wouldn’t you agree?)

aha. i ran. i crouched. i swiped. i am waiting, as i type, for the dewy beauty to set in.

all i know is, as i ran my fingers over sodden stalks of grass, i thought, geez, sure hope the fertilizer from next door didn’t blow my grasses’ way. that would nix the magic of the dewy potion, would it not? i bet the celts didn’t have such toxins to contend with. worst they had was maybe a little cow dung.

and so, my friends, i have now passed along my first, and probably last, beauty tip, here at the table. had i known ahead of time, i would have tipped you off. i’m sure the dew of may 2 will work nearly as well.

if not, there’s always next year, when i will be sure to send out dew alerts in due time.

please, please let me know if you happen to catch a dab of dew before it’s sucked up into the dry old day. or dew tell (irresistible) of how you plan to spend the first of may? and remember, next year, my house, dew fest. dew put it on the calendar.

it’s truly birthing season right in here. today, a most delicious dewy birthday to one of the loveliest young maidens i’ve ever known and loved. she turns 14 today; i swear she was just born. so does her mother….