notice the daylight sometimes passes in hurry to get someplace else
Did you notice the daylight today? These days are short in December. It comes before dark. Sometimes it passes in a hurry to get someplace else more friendly, perhaps. Fiji, maybe. We become forgetful and miss it some days. In March there were six different warblers in one willow bush. What else could you possibly want from daylight?
Daylight by Jim Harrison in Dead Man’s Float as published in the Complete Poems of Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, WA 2021).
stuff in The kitchen … My kitchen, where treasure is … heart will be also
Got up this morning to make a pie and I got to thinking.
I was using my rolling pin that I have had for years and I posted a photo it on facebook with the question, “Name something in my kitchen that hasn’t been washed in 35 years.”
What did I mean actually by saying ‘my kitchen’?
Did anyone in literature every write a better sentence on kitchen’s than EB White did in Charlotte’s Web when he wrote, “The kitchen table was set for breakfast, and the room smelled of coffee, bacon, damp plaster, and wood smoke from the stove.”
And I thought about kitchen’s in time past for myself.
My Mom lived in the same house in Grand Rapids, Michigan for over 50 years.
I can still say the phone number that started 363 (or if you are really old, EM3 when the city used ‘exchanges’).
There was a kitchen that was the heart and soul of a family.
As there were 11 kids in our family, the kitchen was huge.
Had a island with a 4 electric burners AND a metal surfaced prep counter that by itself was a big as most kitchen islands today.
They was a butcher block ‘sandwich’ counter at one end of this vast wrap around counter that turned into a breakfast area with kitchen stools on one side and then the dining room table that you could land a plane on.
Mom’s kitchen was quirky.
Mom had wooden bread box and the side that opened had a hair trigger.
If it slipped when you opened it, or sometimes all on its on, that side would fall fast and smack the counter with a band like a gun shot and made everyone jump.
The oven, somehow, gave off a AM Radio signal.
If you were in the car and someone was listening to a ball game on the radio, when you pulled into the garage, the radio would start giving off this low buzz buzz buzz and you know something was in the overn.
In her later years when she got a little forgetful, I would often drive over to see her and hear that sound and know that I should go in to turn the oven off for her.
Not hard to visualize Mom on an almost daily basis (Wednesday was prayer meeting so to give my a break that was night we went to McDonalds. Back then we ate in the car and two of the older boys would walk to the window to place the order. They would come back with a tray of drinks and hand to Mom who would then take a sip and say Coke Coke Root beer and pass them out. My brother Pete and I got out this by ordering the Orange Drink.)
She would take a break from the never ending laundry and walk into the kitchen and start frying up pans and pans of pork chops or stir and giant kettle of spaghetti sauce or peel the 10lbs of potatoes she would need for the evening meal.
In one corner of the kitchen was a tall under the counter cabinet.
It was in there that Mom kept the 10 different kinds of cereal we demanded.
Cheerios, Frosted Flakes, Sugar Crisp and Cap’n Crunch.
The Cap’n Crunch was for Dad who liked to sprinkle a handful on his vanilla ice cream.
Then over under the butcher block counter top was a giant two drawer cabinet known as the ‘cookie drawer’ where every kind of cracker, cookie and snack anyone ever heard of was kept.
As we were Dutch, there was always a box of Rusk.
An old friend of mine named Gordon Olson once said he never doubted the business acumen of the Dutch as there were able to sell boxes of stale bread by calling it rusk.
Almost more than the contents of the cookie drawer, what I remember was how the Grand kids eyes would go big whenever they discover Grandma’s Cookies.
They would stand there and almost cry as it was so hard to make a choice of ‘just one’.
Come Thanksgiving Day, Mom and the kitchen when into high gear and enough food to last Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family in their little house in the big woods through the entire winter.
Pots and pans and baking sheets piled up.
Food piled up.
Plates and glasses piled up.
That, folks, was a kitchen!
I realized that there is a big difference between ‘the kitchen’ where you live and ‘my kitchen’ which means more, ‘What’ not ‘Where’.
In the short story, “The Man Who Gave Up His Name”, Jim Harrison writes that the man in question had “In the trunk there was one suitcase, one box of books, and one box of assorted cooking equipment he could not bear to part with in his urge to travel light.”
One box of assorted cooking equipment he could not bear to part with.
That, for me, up what I mean when I say, My Kitchen.
I am happy to say that my box of cooking equipment includes utensils from my Mom’s kitchen.
We have lived in a dozen different homes since getting married and the The Kitchen always changes.
But in that kitchen, I will spread out the one box of assorted cooking equipment I could not bear to part with and once again, I am in my kitchen.
I am reminded of the Bible verse at Matthew 6:21, that says, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
For me, where my rolling pin in, there MY kitchen will be also.
was good night and day, winter, summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days
Adapted from the passage:
Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web.
Life in the barn was very good—night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days.
It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
From the book, Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White (Harper and Row: New York, 1952).
Thinking of the seasons and wondering if this line of words may be the best ever at described what happens and the earth spins around the sun every 365 days.
Night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days.
telling myself, I was impressed, had to be some impression in it
Impressions of Sunrise over Hilton Head, 11/20/2205
Impression I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it — and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.
Louis Leroy’s review of the painting, Impression, Sunrise, was printed in Le Charivari on 25 April 1874.
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (1872)
According to Wikipedia, While the movement and the painting initially garnered controversy, Monet’s Impression, Sunrise gave rise to the name and recognition of the Impressionist movement, arguably exemplifying more than any other work or artist the Impressionist movement as a whole in style, subject, and influence.
Driving to work this morning I could see the sunrise.
I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it.
Jesus says clearly at the end of the world, we’re going be asked …
Jesus says very clearly at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, you know, how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not? And I think that there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening.
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
No one who reads these posts can be unaware that I accept the Bible as the inspired Word of God.
By that I mean, while people on earth wrote the words down, the words themselves came from God.
With that in mind, I join the long line of folks who accept God as one of the greatest writers ever.
Consider that we can show these manuscripts are 1,000s of years old and have been translated and re translated over and over again and still the impact of the WORDS and the sentence structure and the plot and the narrative that comes through in this short passage in Americanized English, is truly amazing as writing.
The power of the words and the story survives and comes through.
You can see a Stephen King plot where someone is in court and defiantly says to a Judge, “when did I see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?“
And the Judge hits the gavel and says quietly, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”
The echoes of this simple sentence reverberate down to the basement of any library.
If you read this in the King James English, its line out of Shakespeare.
I was a stranger,
and ye took me not in:
naked,
and ye clothed me not:
sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
That being said, how can folks who live by this book not see the point here?
But who am I to point that out.
I understand those other verses too.
I am not without sin and cannot throw any stones.
I got a log in my eye and shouldn’t point out the sliver in the eyes of other people.
Maybe this is where the author was going when in the Book of Philippians, Chapter 2, he wrote, “continue to work out your salvation …with fear and trembling”.
The Last Judgement by Michelangelo – it is located at the far end of the Sistine Chapel so the Cardinals can look at it when they select a Pope.
No Haiku For You 