Wake early. Make coffee. Notice the sunlight warming your shoulders through the kitchen window.
Choose one album whose story you can follow as you putter: cook, start laundry, find a million dirty cups. Press play. Feel your shoulders, hips, stockinged feet begin to move.
Pull your snarled hair up and secure. Smile at your reflection – a slash of white, earned, you have no intention of coloring.
Turn on the oven. Peel strips of bacon and layer them on a cookie sheet. Place them in the oven and forget about them. Heat two cast iron skillets on the stove. Ease the pages of your red, Betty Crocker cookbook binder open; they are stuck together with drops buttermilk, smears of eggy fingers, years-old flour dust.
Triple the recipe:
1 = 3 eggs + one for good measure
1 c. flour = 3
1 c. buttermilk = 3
1 c. blueberries = entire bag
and so on.
wash – crack – sing – stir – sizzle – flip
Eat pancakes over the stove. Ignore the hot blueberries burn your tongue. To feed the masses, you must first feed yourself.
Drink your coffee while you listen to the last song of the album. Realize that this moment is the first song in yours.
Wake the one, two, three, four teenaged boys inhabiting your house – one yours, three borrowed. Listen to the thud of elephant steps on the stairs, laughter, guitars.
Revel in your status as ‘that house’ and realize ‘that mom’ always has to do a fuck ton of dishes.
Let the boys – paradoxes all of them – scruffy and smelly and intelligent and articulate and infinitely scatalogical – commandeer the music. Cock your head and really listen to the clarinet solo. Be impressed.
Watch the food disappear.
Send them outside. “Pitter patter, boys. Go make music.”
Pour another cup of coffee. Sit on the front steps.
Look. Listen. Feel. Remember.
xoxo
Heather
from midnight oil 