{by Amanda of Last Mom on Earth}

(photo source)

We went on a special date, just Louise and me. She crawled through the aisles of the bookstore and I slowly meandered behind her, reading passages from crisp, unspoiled novels I knew I wasn’t going to buy. Maybe someday.

She talks a lot, when she’s alone with me. She points to things and tells me about them in her funny, amazing language. When something surprises or delights her, her tiny hand flies to her mouth and she chews on her perfect little fingers.

We came home to an empty house and I sat a carton of blueberries on the floor between us. My hands were clumsy and imprecise, picking up toppling handfuls and eating them without discretion. Louise, with her dainty, pointed fingertips, thought carefully about each berry before she chose it with an attitude of satisfaction and ate it, all by itself, like it was the most special and singular blueberry on the planet.

So much thought and care goes into chewing and swallowing a single blueberry when you’re one years old.

{by Melinda Wentzel from Planet Mom}

(photo credit: wolfgangphoto)

When I was nine or ten, I remember well my enthrallment with my mother’s hands. They were delicate and slender, sweetly scented and rose petal-soft—so completely unlike my own nicked and scraped, callused and chafed boy-like hands that were better suited for wielding a hammer and throwing a fastball than anything else.

Mine were distinctively earthy, too, largely because remnants of dirt and grass simply refused to be removed. Or at least that was the sentiment I held for much of the summer. It was a byproduct of being a kid, I suppose, literally immersed in a world of sod and soil from sunup to sundown. Never mind my fondness of forests and rocky places, which typified a deep and abiding bond with nature—one that I’m not quite sure my mother ever completely understood.

At any rate, my hands told of who I was at the time—a tomboy given to tree climbing, stealing second base and collecting large and unwieldy rocks. Everyone’s hands, I’d daresay, depict them to a certain degree, having a story to tell and a role to play at every time and every place on the continuum of life. Traces of our journey remain there in the folds of our skin—from the flat of our palms and knobs of our knuckles to the very tips of our fingers. As it should be, I suppose.

For better or for worse, our hands are the tools with which we shape the world and to some extent they define us—as sons and daughters, providers and professionals, laborers and learners, movers and shakers. That said, I’m intrigued by people’s hands and the volumes they speak—whether they’re mottled with the tapestry of age, vibrant and fleshy or childlike and impossibly tender. Moreover, I find that which they whisper difficult to ignore.

{Original post by Tarrant Riglio of Retro-Food}

Well you ask me
to sing you a love song
and I smile ‘n say
Hold on
Let me think
~Melissa Ferrick, Love Song

And then I sing you a love song in a foreign language-the language of food, of recipes.You know this blog is your love song. You can pick out the words and hear the tune. But, will you ever understand it? I think you do now.

You have learned the words and the tunes. You have watched my movements as I flip through cookbooks, plan meals and dance my messy way through the kitchen. Just in case…let me explain a bit more because as I thought about how to talk about this curious mixture of love and recipes…I learned more about myself, you, and those whose recipes I cook.

Joseph says I cook because I love. Is that his epiphany or mine? Both I think. I do. I cook to woo. I cook to nourish. I cook to teach. I cook to love. Meals can show off. Meals can feed people. Most of all, my meals are a hug, a kiss, a wink, a thank you, a caress, and the recipes the love songs that play in my cooking.

That is the draw of old cookbooks and recipe cards. Sure, the commercial ones with their funny pictures and fussy ideas on keeping a home amuse me. The ones that sing to me though come from Junior Leagues, churches, Women’s Auxiliaries, ones handwritten on a recipe card, ones with names attached. Those women share the love songs they sang to their families and their friends through their cooking. The ingredients may be foreign or impossible to find in these times. (celery Jell-o for example) The ingredients may just hide behind another name: oleo, xxxx sugar, #2 cans.

But listen to the tune…you know this love song. This is the dinner made for a mother with a newborn. This is the cake made to celebrate a son’s birthday…his favorite. These are the pork chops and potato pancakes counted on to bring a smile to her father-in-law’s face. These cookies sing holiday tunes with Mama in the kitchen with excited children. She tucks these memories away as she tucks the cookies in tins to give to her friends. Recipes sing the love song of a cocktail party or a brunch filled with laughter and friends.The recipe that makes a full meal out of stale bread, an egg and a few slices of cheese? This is a longing love song to feed a family with a bare pantry and days to go before a paycheck.

This recipe? The chocolate fudge pie? It sings a love song of a mother distracting a brokenhearted teen daughter when she learned that not all friendships are forever. Look at this one! It is the recipe for the aspic that great-grandmother made for Sunday dinner. She never said I love you out loud…but she always had a cake on the glass cake stand in the dining room for you. Maybe the Lemon Cheese Cake? The Caramel Cake? Or the beautiful, slightly wicked Devil’s Food cake. Love.

{by Mary of Giving Up on Perfect}

We sat shoulder to shoulder in a tiny dorm room around a tiny TV, watching one of our favorite movies. Just as Johnny marched over to Baby and pulled her out of the corner, our friend Jared walked in the room.

As he took in the room, looking from one girl to the next . . . to the next . . . to the next, he said, “What is wrong with you guys?”

Blinking, we looked up at him and realization dawned. Every single one of us was staring at the screen with a [ridiculous] dreamy look in our eyes. It was like we were in a trance.

The same kind of romance trance I slip into when I read romance novels.

{by Erika Wagner-Martin}

For so, so long it felt like we would never get here.

We smiled show smiles through home visit after home visit by social worker after social worker.
We steeled ourselves as we bundled them up for trips to the visitation center far too far away.
We held our breath, our hearts the frontline cavalry from the back row of the courtroom
anytime we attended a hearing.

I have knocked on wood — and by wood, I mean anything comprised of matter — thousands of times,
gasping for air as I’ve constricted and believed and constricted and believed our dream
of being a forever family with these precious, precious girls.

The beginning of this process is full of fear for people like me.
You’ll never get a newborn, they tell you. You want two together?
They will be damaged and you will spend a lifetime trying to save them
and love alone cannot save anyone, they say.

{Originally posted on Goody Bastos}

Juliet: I thought you were going to take out the trash.

Romeo: It’s your turn for the trash, my week to bag the recyclables. Look at the chore wheel on the fridge, for Chrissakes.

Little Tybalt (looking up from his Legos): Mommy, Daddy swore!

Romeo: A greater power than we can contradict hath thwarted our intents to be the best husband and father, I’m sorry, Little Tybalt. It’s just that Mommy and Daddy have been through a lot.

Juliet: I’ll say. There was a plague on both our houses.

Little Tybalt: Hunh? What’s Mom talking about?

Juliet: Never mind. Why don’t you go play Wii?
(Little Tybalt takes his Legos and sulks off)

Juliet (reminiscing while drying the Ikea china): Remember how in love we were?

Romeo: Do I! It seemed to me you were a rich jewel upon the cheek of night.

Juliet: It seemed to me that parting was such sweet sorrow, and now I can’t wait for girl’s night out.

Romeo (slapping his palm to his forehead): O woe!

Juliet: What is it, honey?

Romeo: I forgot to take out the clothes from the washer. They’ll be all mildewy.

Juliet: Again? Didn’t I tell you not to forget to take them out of the washer? Little Tybalt’s gym clothes were in there and he needs them for gymnastics tomorrow. O woeful, woeful, woeful day! Most lamentable day. Most woeful day that ever, ever I did yet behold O day, O day, O day! O hateful day! Never was seen so black a day as this. O woeful day! O woeful day!

(By D. Smith Kaich Jones)

the ever-wonderful michael was telling me about this thing that happened, and that’s because, well, remember? he said, that she is married to that guy? and this happened?, and then a while back when that was going on, there was this kid who . . . and his grandfather bought him this toy airplane, and he was friends with another kid, and did i ever mention that they moved across the street from these people who . . . ? and all those stories were separate from one another, but not really, they just looked that way on the surface, they were really all tied together, because that’s how stories work, at least stories in conversations, stories told by real people.

that’s what i think i do. at least that’s what i try to do. i start out telling you the story of painting the front room at work, and that reminds me of what i felt when i was buying the paint, the paint was yellow, honey colored, and that reminded me of autumn, and i remembered what i felt when i was standing in the paint store, waiting while the paint was mixed, lots of time for thinking and looking out the windows at the leaves falling away from trees, at the different blue of the sky, lots of time for remembering last autumn and where i would have been on a saturday morning, lots of time for wondering if my need to paint a few walls was a working out the grief i still feel for maggie-the-cat, remembering that’s what i did when my father died, not comparing the two deaths, just thinking about how people deal with grief and moving on, which is not the same thing as “getting over it”, it’s just moving to a different place in the grief. and i move from that thought back to autumn, which always gives me the blues, just not outside the window, and really it is late autumn that makes me feel this way; early autumn is just a phrase here in east texas, just a mellowing of summer, and i think about the leaves leaving, the turning away from the world that we all do; we go inside, even here where it doesn’t get all that cold ~ it gets cold enough ~ and i remember that that night is turn-back-the-clocks-night, an earlier darkness now, and i move from that thought back to maggie, back to my father, and i am filled with missing.

{By Karey from mackin ink}

this is one of those stories i need my girlies to remember. when i’m here. when i’m not. whenever. forever.

it’s a story about strength. the iron giant kind of strength. stronger than that, maybe. it’s a story about love. a fierce and fighty love as everlasting and as heartbreaking as old dan had for little ann. it’s a story about keeping your word until the very end. kind of like inigo montoya. hanging on to dear, dear life even while scaling the cliffs of insanity, even when battling rodents of unusual size, and even in the pit of despair.

oh, it’s a good story. because this story? this story is all yours. it’s about your aunt lin. a real-deal hero. who was all yours.

(by Emily from In The Hush Of The Moon)

there’s nothing colder than a turned back and he shivers

we don’t fight often, and this isn’t a fight, more of a bruised heart and confused language and tripped-up-tired and finally, the back-turn

but it feels like a fight and it rips me because i wonder if he’ll remember this one when it’s over: just like the others

“what others?” husband asks, eyeing my burger as i bite, barbecued offering, and his salad which he says is fancy because of the shredded carrot and he hates shredding carrots and i’m already melting but i hate to tell him this

i remind him of years ago, when i wasn’t eating nor sleeping and the mascara-streaked pillows and the punched walls and the days he’d sit in the car for fear of coming into the house and he says

“i don’t remember that. i remember watching tv with you until you fell asleep. i remember the meals you did eat with me, the pizza we’d share, the popcorn, and i remember never waking angry.”

the carrots taste fancy in my mouth…

Put yr right hand on the nape of the neck and glide it up upwards to the back of the head.
Open yr hand wide, fingers lacing between hair or gliding on soft bald skin.
Direct eye contact always. Keep a distance between yr bodies but lean in ever so slightly.
Tilt yr head and let yr lips part. Move yr eyes up and down in tiny glances.
Let yr pupils dilate and stare swoony onwards.