I Am From

I am from bacon grease on the back of the stove
and dog bowls at the back door
and champagne bottles that toasted births
all lined up in a row

I am from the yellow house with pink shingles
and creaky wood floors
and one full bath
for seven people

I am from a family that didn't expect me because it was already full up with teenagers
and long haired boys on motor bikes and girls almost grown up and leaving
but it was also full up on love
and
so I am from babysitters and ice cream buyers and we love you so much

I am from the kitchen
with the worn wooden table and ash trays full to the brim
and coffee cups strewn about half full and kissed with lipstick

I am from Tree City USA full of stately elms
that grew so tall and wide they pushed sidewalks aside
and shaded generation after generation
until a disease infected them all and they slowly disappeared forever

I am from playing under water locusts and china berries and blue spruce
and climbing that one ginko all the way to the top
knowing that heaven was that much closer
because I dared
I remember that tree's
long gone limbs
as if they were my own

I am from Ghost in the Graveyard and Kick the Can
I am from Truth or Dare and lightning bugs

I am from church on Sunday and everything in order
I am from Mama and Daddy and "Aint" Alice and Uncle Roger

I am from damaged bread and honey buns and bear claws left for trash
but rescued by a hard working man who knew treasure when he saw it

I am from "Give me some sugar!" and "stand up straight"
and "You are my sunshine" sung in two part harmony

I am from The Gateway to the West and baseball and frozen custard and thin crust pizza
I am from Atlanta and Emory and Chick-Fil-A and Jimmy Carter and pot liquor
But I am also from Germany and England and Scotland and Prussia

I am from black-eyed peas and turnip greens and fried corn bread and peach cobbler
I am from apple pies and sauerkraut and fresh honey dew
and a cup of hot water first thing in the morning

I am from Meme and a house that always smelled of creamed corn
and bacon and Dove soap and Brach's candy

I am from Grandma whose short legs and generous jowls
now look at back at me in the mirror

I am from the Jim Crow South
and Whites and Coloreds

I am from rural Ohio
and soybeans and corn
as
far
as
the
eye
can
see

And now I am from three boys and a man
and a dog whom we call Stinkerpants all crammed into an ancient house built of stone
I am from writing down the stories with my eyes wide open trying to drink in all of the glory
before I fall asleep

++++++++++++++

One of the many reasons that I love being a part of SheLoves Magazine? Synchroblogs like this, in honor of Heritage Day in South Africa. This is my offering for the "I Am From" prompt, an opportunity for folks around the world to share more about who they are and what has shaped them. We would love for you to join us. You can link up your own poem here. And while you're linking up, be sure to read from the amazing collection of stories already gathered there.

A Moveable Feast

Six sets of hands circled round me

the day that I entered that very fine house

and I was petted and loved on

my head was ringed with kisses and toasts were made to bless me

and I suppose that it was there that my story began

Mine was a childhood gilded

I know

for days stretched long and full and calm

and I sailed my boat upon placid waters

but, somehow, there was always a knowing

and I longed to string those days

on ribbons of silk

one upon the other

and tie them around the necks of the lonely ones

who hid in corners

so that they might know what home smelled like ...

I am writing over at SheLoves Magazine today and I would love for you to follow me there to keep reading my poem on this month's theme of Home.

Join me? Yes? Then follow me here.

Eucharisteo

This is a repost from last year but it remains the prayer of my heart.

As we pack up the car and drive over the river and through the woods 

to family and all those we hold dear, 

I pray that these words would sink deep.

And I hope that wherever you find yourself this Thanksgiving

you will be full to bursting with love unending.

“Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.” 

-Ann Voskamp

Lord,

Despite the fact that I can feel the dance begin,

the one that sweeps up family and feasting, bustling hands and beauteous light and twirls them round and round my heart,

I sense You pulling me deeper.

Yes, it is good to gather, to greet each other with holy kisses and to give thanks.  Generations after generations have taught us that ritual.  We know it by heart.

But Lord, I long to live out my thanks giving.  I don’t want it to be reserved for pre-appointed dates on the calendar.

I need to practice this act of thanks giving so that it becomes a sacrament. 

Because on many days, the thanks are slow in coming.

And some days, they don’t come at all.

How can this be?

Perhaps it is because my wandering heart finds your shadow and declares you absent, choosing to embrace emptiness and despair.  Looking closer I might see that the darkness that puddles around me is actually cast by the breadth of your wing.  And that you are always passing by.

I must burn the Truth on my lips--that your mercies are new every morning-- so that when my heart fails and my vision blurs, my mouth will declare forth your praise.

Lord, may my thanks giving always be a response rather than a ritual and may I learn to see that your love is everywhere.

Amen.

The Feast of Broken Pieces

Photo credit: Bread! Flikr, Creative Commons

We sit at a table round and old, the edges burnished by years of reaching deep and sidling close. It was bought by my parents, this table, when their love was still young and the road less littered. The years and their offerings, they have left their mark and there are scars to remind us all. But when I run my hand across the polished top, I smile at the way that my fingers glide and dance.

We are a motley crew, this gathering of souls, and yet we are all cut from the same cloth. Our blood runs thick with crooked noses and broad shoulders, almond-shaped eyes and cowlicked hair but despite the familiar echoes, I sometimes feel as if I am looking into the faces of strangers. 

For aren’t we all just stories draped in flesh and can’t it take years to peel back the layers that mask our true forms? 

Some of our tales have never even been whispered but yet, they blow silent through cracks, wanting to be heard. It is their muteness that rings loudest.

We’ve all come hungry...

I am humbled and very excited to be joining 

SheLoves Magazine as a contributing writer today. 

You can read the rest of my piece here at the

SheLoves website.

The Golden Thread

It's in the middle of washing that hundredth dish,
fingers pulled tight and wrinkly,
water rushing warm and full
It is then that I catch the joy

It hangs in the air
moist and heavy

You're busy at the stove
swirling riotous color and pattern
upon your chosen canvas
while beads of sweat hug your brow

I watch you at a slant
wanting to catch you unfettered
to see you wholly absorbed
making a life rather than a living

These moments, ripe with rhythm
they hem us in, behind and before
silently threading a golden margin
along our frayed edges

At one point, between tasks
you slide up behind me
and suddenly arms and spoons and curry
they circle me

Your lips find my neck
and you whisper love down my back
You tell me how you are full to bursting
and my face rises in laughter

We are cooking more than dinner
you and I

It will be the stringing of days like this
one upon the other
that will make us round and full
and replete

For this meal
with its swirl of time and place
it warms ones belly
deep and wide

{A Month of Thanks} The Dinner Table

It seems simple enough, this eating together.  But it's not as easy to pull off when folks in the same family are being pulled hither and yon, one to a meeting here, another to a practice there, and aren't all of these things important?  But this is not about discussing the merits of a particular person's choices regarding their time versus the hard fought decisions of another.  No, this is more about the choice I want to make, above and beyond the ones about appointments and time management and such.

The choice I want to make to be together.

Ironically, we spend a lot of time together around here already.  Actually, most hours of most days are played out here...reading, playing, writing, make-believing, dreaming...
That, too, is a choice and a wonderful one at that.

But there's something about the dinner hour that causes us to shift, ever so slightly, from one realm to another.  I think it's that melting of sunshine into pools of lamplight that ushers in a sacredness, a knowing.  It's also that quickening in the belly that causes us to seek out connection.

I grew up with a mother that cooked every.single.night.
And among the many things that I could count on as a child, dinner at the kitchen table was among the most sure and true.  So deeply carved into my daily rhythm was this practice that my first memory of consciously choosing to skip out on it one evening, in order to go to Subway with a friend, still elicits a slight shutter and feeling of complete wrongness, much like it did when I sat there, years ago, eating my sandwich with a guilty pit in my stomach and a disdain for my new found adolescent independence.

Granted, although I was engaged in life, I wasn't an over-scheduled kid, even in high school.  I know that my relaxed attitude made it much easier to be present at dinner on a regular basis.  But honestly, I think that the anchor of dinner time in my house informed my decision making when given the option to be somewhere else at 6:30 on any given evening.  I genuinely wanted to be there.  And I'm pretty sure that one of the biggest reasons that I wanted to be there was because I knew that other people really wanted me to be there too.

And so now I find myself on the other side of that equation.  I'm now the one responsible for cooking the meal and making this dinner thing happen.  It's taken me nearly 14 years to perfect the timing required to simultaneously put several things on the table that are still fairly warm and edible.  And I still struggle to strike a balance between the "You get what you get and don't pitch a fit" and "He has to eat!" camps.

But it's okay.  It's that rhythm that I want, that I want my kids to feel, reverberating deep within their cores.

That feeling that whispers


"this is where I want to be..."


So, how then do we live?

Well, we start by crafting a meal and then inviting those we hold most dear to join us at the table.  Today.  And again, tomorrow.  And the next day.  Until all of the evenings tumble into each other and it becomes as natural as rain and we can't imagine not doing it.

And all the while, as we sit across from each other, looking into eyes and laughing at jokes and listening to the highs and lows...all this long while, we are doing something even more important.

We are living thanks.  Thanks living.  And it is good.

The Real Value of Food

It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato. ~Lewis Grizzard



I've been spending a lot of time thinking about food lately.  Not in a gluttonous way, mind you.  Rather, as a kind of spiritual practice, really.  The famine in the horn of Africa has been haunting my quiet places ever since I first saw these pictures and I can't shake the feeling I get, deep in my non-starving gut.  The never ending questions have frothed up from somewhere beyond deep within me and I've struggled to know how to move forward.  The most paralyzing question is the one that I always end up landing on and getting stuck in: "How can I continue to go on living my life of abundance here when I know that so many are suffering there?"

I mean that with all seriousness.  How can/shall/do I go on?

How do I, as a follower of Jesus, reconcile my entitled existence with the suffering of others?

What am I supposed to do?

As much as I know nothing, I do believe this... the Spirit of the Living God, the One who breathed me into existence, is breathing something else into my deepest places.  His whisper tells me that what I can do

nay,
what I must do
is this:

share what I have.

Although there are many voices within that want to say, "go there! be among them"

I know I am here, for now, and this is what I must do.  share.


We grow some of our own food.  We also had big dreams of being more self-sufficient when we first bought this place.  Those ideals have been greatly humbled by the sheer magnitude of that task, even though that is the very thing we expect those who are starving half-way around the world to do.  Be self-sufficient. 

But we lean on.  We learn more each year and we do what we can.  I know, though, that we could do more and I am living into that understanding.  To grow your own food and to divine all the multitudes of ways to store and preserve that bounty is a process.  And we are such novices.   
But then we have met others who share this desire.  Those who grow children and food and hope.  Those who knead life and prayers into their daily bread.  Those who love their animals and respect and honor the gift those animals share with the farm.  Because isn't that what all of these are, really?  Gifts.
 
So we enter into relationship with folks and animals and life and wonder.  We try, as much as we can, to choose the gift, rather than the trinkets offered everywhere else and as a result, we enter into a sacred place.
 

"You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
'Rejoice evermore.

Pray without ceasing.

In everything give thanks.'

I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions."

--Wendell Berry

We are trying to learn the real value of our food, to better understand what all went into the very food we put in our mouths. 

Understand, though...we are but novices.  We are still, very much, Americans...the majority of whom rarely think about their food, much less sit down to enjoy it.  We don't always make the virtuous choice, the humble choice, the sacred choice.  We still sometimes eat to satiate some other hunger rather than to celebrate the gift.  But we stumble on...reaching...hoping.

We strive for the relationship, the connection.  Because that's when you can't help but share.

(bread by Renee's Breads and milk fresh from a cow named Chocolate at Full Plate Farm)

 

And so I continue to count the gifts:

--a weekend full of being together, listening, laughing

--so many colors in the garden right now and a surprise vegetable, courtesy of that beloved compost (maybe something a chicken ate and passed on as a gift?!)

--a string of ruby peppers hanging in our kitchen, drying, waiting to add needed warmth to winter stews

--sharing the gift with our chickens...oh how they love our offerings of rinds and peels and seeds

--how the chickens give us gifts in return...beautiful eggs in varying shades of brown

--swirls of cinnamon that make the kitchen smell like home

--milk with full on cream that is living and breathing and "tastes like grass", according to August

--the hard lessons learned through chores that bend and shape and make little boys stronger

--sitting around the fire circle on a Sunday night, listening to owls and figuring out where North is and talking about what will become of the Earth

--falling asleep with a book in hand

 

 

This Organic Life

I've been thinking a lot lately about organic living and how, for me, it is so much more than just the foods that I choose to eat or the chemicals that I choose to avoid. It's inevitable, really, this organic life.

I couldn't get away from it when I witnessed the arrival of the cicadas earlier this summer. When they covered the grass beneath my feet, emerging from some deep hole within which they've remained hidden for year upon year and I fell asleep to and woke to the endless wooshing of their wings, rubbing together endlessly, as they sought out their mates.

But then, almost as quickly as they arrived, they left.  In spirit, that is, because all around they left reminders of their presence.  A mini foreshadowing of a rapturous exit from this world.  One day they were here, the next, no more.



And then, there is the garden.  We got started much later than is reasonable this year.  Delayed by the seemingly endless Spring rains that made tilling and cultivating impossible to do well,
we waited. 
And waited. 

When others were already starting to harvest their first yellow squash or zucchini, we were just beginning. 

But we were armed with something different this year. 

Chicken manure. 

Like a slow, magical brew, it has been cooking for over a year.  Chicken waste is too strong to use straight from the coop.  It must be tempered by time and patience.   As it sits in its pile, quiet and unassuming, a mysterious thing is happening deep inside.  What was once waste begins to cure.  Temperature and moisture and air dance together in a mystical trinity, working together for good.  What it becomes is like gold.

 Into this pile of what, in another setting, would be considered trash, waste, crap, we boldly place our seeds.  We do this because we believe that good will come of it.  We do this because our experience has shown us that there is promise in the pile.

Even though every year that we work this soil, more rocks make their way to the surface, as do other remnants of life gone by, the fact that we have this pile of gold dust to mix in makes all the difference.
It doesn't matter that ugly things have been hidden here.  It doesn't matter that others didn't care for it like we would have if given the opportunity.  It doesn't matter that this dirt didn't produce anything for years.  We are allowed access to a miracle. 

A miracle that testifies to an impossibility:  from death comes life.

"...where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace..." {2 Corinthians 4:16, The Message}

I couldn't help but smile when I traced my finger through the soil to make safe havens for my seeds and I came across cicada shells in the dirt.

...from death comes life.

So now, our seeds have transformed into plants.  The tomatoes reach upwards, guided skyward by strings that assist them towards the sun. 

Now there is fruit.

Thanks be to God.

"For if you go poking about the world, intent on keeping the candle of consciousness blazing, you must be ready to give thanks at all times.  Discrimination is not allowed.  The flame cannot gutter and fail when a cold wind whistles through the house.

Thanksgiving, thanksgiving.  All must be thanksgiving.

It took thirty-eight thousand Levites to give thanks to God in David's day; every morning and every evening the shifts changed.  Four thousand were needed just to carry the hacked carcasses of cattle, and another four thousand were needed to sing about it.  The place reeked of blood, was soaked in blood.  The priests stood around gnawing and chewing and giving thanks.  They did not cross-stitch their gratitude on samplers to frame and hang on the wall.  They wrote their thanks in blood on the doorposts every day.

Thanksgiving is not a task to be underaken lightly.  It is not for dilettantes or aesthetes.  One does not dabble in praise for one's own amusement, nor train the intellect and develop perceptual skills to add to his repertoire.  We're not talking about the world as a free course in art appreciation.  No.  Thanksgiving is not a result of perception; thanksgiving is the access to perception."

--From And the Trees Clap Their Hands, by Virginia Stem Owens

And so I continue to count...

--breezes that cut the blazing heat

--the rumble of thunder that tells me that it is raining somewhere

--boys that turn 9 and still want me close

--friends that own cows (named Chocolate!) and share their abundance with us

--discovering like-minded souls and bearing mine to them

--the wonder of imagination and the capturing of such in amazing stories and books

--an impending anniversary that sweetens the week

--conversations around the dinner table that create laughter and good feelings

--the promise of new learning opportunities and wonderful people with whom to share such gifts

--today

Sushi Sunday



He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise. ~Henry David Thoreau



Picture of Nori with the light shining through it.



"Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises."
--Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Spanish Poet and Playwright, 1600-1681



The Simple Woman's Daybook

FOR TODAY


Outside my window...  the still, dead air of a very hot August day.

I am thinking...  that it doesn't help anyone or anything to long for different circumstances.

I am thankful for...  blessed, heavenly air-conditioning.

From the learning rooms...  today was devoted to the reading of tales...Harry Potter, Hank the Cowdog, the daily comics...

From the kitchen...  our first canteloupes of the season (yeah!).  They are large and beautiful and juicy and delicious.

I am wearing...  shorts and a tank top, my summer uniform, evidently.

I am creating...  photographs that have depth and beauty.

I am going...  to my hometown this weekend for my 20th high school reunion.  Thankfully, I am more excited than apprehensive.  I guess I have matured a bit since those days.

I am reading...  The Art of Mending, by Elizabeth Berg, as well as numerous resources for nature journaling.

I am hoping...  for a "settling" into gently organized routines that allow for flexibility yet provide some security.

I am hearing...  the rattling of a rawhide bone being flung across my kitchen floor.  It is the perfect distraction for a dog that demands much.

Around the house...  there are strewn Legos, books, balsa wood airplanes, newspapers, and vine ripened tomatoes.

One of my favorite things...  is peanut butter with crackers or apples for a morning snack.

A few plans for the rest of the week:  to bake lemon tea cakes and banana bread, make some homemade salsa and carefully organize "stuff" for two separate family trips.

Here is picture for thought I am sharing...

The chickens are trying to find shade anywhere they can.  With a heat index of 110, who can blame them?

 
 
From The Simple Woman's Daybook

Life with chickens

One of the big shames about me not posting for so long is that you have been left out of the egg loop. Our chickens finally started laying eggs in October and we have been trying to get into the egg business ever since. Like I have alluded to in previous posts, tending to these chickens has provided a ride on one of the biggest learning curves of my life. We have basically been making this up as we go (okay, we do read a lot about chickens and such but when you've never done something before and you just start doing it, well... there are a LOT of unknowns) and we have found that we've made some good decisions and some not so good decisions. For example:
*Decision to finally take the plunge and order our chicks==good decision
*Decision to order 50 of the darn things==RIDICULOUS decision
*Decision to butcher the roosters ourselves==good decision (for the incredible education we received in the process)
*Decision to butcher dual-breed birds at 24 weeks of age==unfortunate decision. Yes, we have a freezer full of birds, but we can really only stew them or smoke them (on the grill, people!). If I want to make my fabulous buttermilk oven baked chicken I still have to buy it from the store. That right there really frustrates me, especially when I think that the chicken we do have in the freezer is some of the most expensive meat we have ever had in our possession. It's criminal, really.
*Decision to build our own coop with scrap materials=very frugal/green/whatever-you-want-to-call-it of us decision. This saved us a ton of money.
*Decision to build the frame of the coop with the idea of it being a chicken "tractor" and then changing our minds about that idea mid-stream==not so smart decision. We definitely should have fleshed this idea out a bit more before we started sawing and hammering and committing ourselves to an idea that we flip flopped on. What we ended up with is a coop that is really too small for the number of chickens that we have. Since they only use it to sleep in, we can get away with it. One saving grace to having built a quasi-chicken tractor is that it is moveable, which has come in handy as we figure out the best way to fence in our chickens and keep them out of our neighbors yards while also providing them with fresh ground to graze on. Remember what I said earlier about making this up as we go along? This is a good example of that.


Oh well, live and learn, right? Actually, it has been kind of fun to fly by the seat of my pants on this one. There are not many areas in my life where I can afford to make bad decisions, learn from them and not ruin someone's life/future/psyche in the process.

What you see here are the various hues of our eggs. They really are beautiful and the picture really doesn't do them justice. Some of them are a pale brown, others darker, and even some have spots. Just lovely. Unfortunately, our hens started laying as the days were beginning to get shorter and shorter. The number of hours of light in a day is what determines whether some hens will continue laying through the winter or not. So, we were up to a high of 18 eggs a day and now we are lucky if we get 10. We set our price at $1.50/dozen based on that higher number of eggs a day. That would guarantee that we would cover our feed costs and maybe recoup a small portion of the grand investment these lovely birds have become. Now that our daily numbers have dropped, we aren't even breaking even on the feed. Oh well.
By the way, the eggs are DELICIOUS so, even if we have to eat every cotton pickin' one of them, at least our palates will be satisfied.

The latest drama regarding our chickens has been the nasty turn our temperatures took this week. We had our coldest weather of the season these past few days, even some wintry mix the other night. So, with temperatures diving into the upper teens, I became obsessed with how my chickens were going to survive. See, our coop is really bare bones. No, I mean really bare bones. It's walls are made of tin, for the love of Pete! There is nothing about our coop that is insulated. You can see daylight where the walls meet and the top foot of the coop is open air, covered only by hardware cloth and more tin for the roof. Cheap to build, yes. True shelter, questionable. So, the first day of the arctic blast, I did what any self respecting mother would do. I made the chickens hot oatmeal. Yes, I did and they LOVED it! I just felt that I had to do something to help warm their bones, or at the very least, their combs, wattles and ugly chicken feet. Amazingly, though, these chickens are incredibly resilient. They are, of course, covered in feathers, and that said feature is something I depend upon myself when I snuggle in under my down comforter in my freezing bedroom that hovers around 59 degrees this time of year. They work--amazingly. As long as they are out of direct winds, can hunker down over their feet completely and tuck their heads under their wing, they are pretty much good to go. It's helpful that we also have breeds that are more cold worthy. Remember, three of our birds are of a breed that actually have feathers on their feet! Even better. Also, we decided to rig up, out to the coop, a ridiculously long extension cord fitted with the lamp we used in the brooder when the chickens were but wee chicks and their warmth was of the utmost importance. It kind of helped. A little. At least they can look around at each other all night and know that they are not the only chicken freezing their tail off.

It doesn't mean that they aren't cold, though. These ladies had just come out of the coop, had some hot oatmeal and then settled down on this limb in the yard in order to soak up the weak morning sunshine. They're not exactly warm, but they will most certainly survive.

Admittedly, though, we are still concerned so John spent a few hours yesterday making some modifications to the coop in anticipation of even nastier weather headed our way this week (impending winter storm, frigid wind chills). He stapled some opaque plastic around the hardware cloth at the top of the coop and made a temporary "second" wall out of hardware cloth on the inside of the coop. He then stuffed the pine shavings that we use for bedding and some extra hay down inside of it. We'll see how well that works.

I suppose the worst case scenario is that one morning we might find we have more frozen chicken than we thought. Wouldn't that be grand?

Some more first peeks at the garden

Well, we're beginning to see the beginning fruits of our labor (John's loving attention to all of our seedlings all spring and my tilling contributions as well as seed planting). We have a gazillion green tomatoes all over our plants--Beefsteaks, romas, a yellow variety and several unknowns, as they are volunteers that shot up in our small kitchen garden just off the back porch. We are battling some end blossom rot on a couple of plants but John thinks that can be solved by adding some lime. The crookneck squash and zucchini (a very pale Italian green variety) are also emerging, however we are also having some blossom issues with them that we don't understand. John has scoured all of his grardening books, to no avail. If anyone has any ideas, they would be greatly appreciated. We've staked the tomatoes with both good old tomato cages, as well as "bamboo" stakes and some are just left to make do on their own. The cucumbers have two kinds of stakes, one created from fiberglass poles connected with twine and another arch support created with salvage something or other that John found in our barn. I like it the best because it is the most aesthetically pleasing thing in our garden, asied from the plants themselves.
We finally got the melons in the ground and they have lots of room to sprawl. The boys are most excited about them.
All in all, it is starting to look like a real garden. We're learning tons everyday about what we did right and what we could most definitely improve upon next year. But it is incredibly exciting to watch things come to life and to know that you had a small part in that.

Miracle

The first gatherings of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel
like a mother about her baby - how could anything so beautiful be mine. And this emotion
of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is
nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling,
as gathering the vegetables one has grown.
- Alice B. Toklas


Tonight's dinner was made miraculous by the first green leaf lettuce and baby spinach salad harvested from our kitchen garden. I kept it very simple: a little olive oil in the salad bowl, a big clove of garlic rubbed all around within, greens tossed in with a little more olive oil, a splash of red wine vinegar and salt and pepper. That's all. But that was everything! Delicioso, as my mom would say. How wonderfully thrilling to taste living food. Truly wonderful.
The salad was beautifully complemented by another simple food--parmesan crisps. August just couldn't believe me that they were made with just parmesan. "What's below the cheese, Mom?"
"Nothing. It's just made from parmesan cheese, cooked on a cookie sheet."
"But it's just sooooo good!"
Too bad neither boy would try the salad. Stinkers!
Oh, the three tomato pasta sauce wasn't half bad either.

All in all, a wonderful way to share a meal together.