Page 71 of 80

Posted on

Stewing Dinner, Spinning Stories

FullSizeRender

“The place I like best in this world is the kitchen.  No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me.  Ideally it should be well broken in.  Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate.  White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).” Banana Yoshimoto in her 1988 novel, Kitchen.

Today I am off to the pre-transplant clinic support group for those in the lung program.  It’s quite an adventure, requiring two tanks of oxygen and other paraphernalia and it takes some time to get there.  Best take a book, eh?  We were at the library yesterday and I found this one. The lines quoted above are the opening lines. Wow!   I couldn’t agree more.  Some of my best times – simple but sweet times – have been spent in kitchens.

I love to write in the kitchen. I often wonder how many women over time have practiced multiple creative arts in that most basic room . . . the heart of the home … the hearth of the home.  At least one fictional writer … Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote … plied her craft in the kitchen.  It seems so natural to stew dinner and spin a story at the same time.

For those who are interested, here’s what lung transplant is about … and my own wonderful physician is featured here.

© 2015, words and photograph, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved

Posted on

the threshold of wonder

photo-85at the tender nudge of a gentle wind, the flowers genuflect
and the well-tended rose garden holds me spellbound,
my rapt soul is brimming with its grace-filled movement,
with the vivid and heady mix of earthy and sublime

at night the garden is as incandescent as a saint’s prayer,
as sacred and nearly silent as the ruins of an ancient temple,
in the morning mist we tumble, me with this wealth of roses,
plummeting heart over head beyond the threshold of wonder

“When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming . . . In the experience of beauty, we awaken and surrender in the same act.”  John O’Donahue, The Invisible Embrace, Beauty: Rediscovering the True Sources of Compassion, Serenity, and Hope

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

If you are viewing this from email, it’s likely you will have to click through to the site to view the rose garden slide show.

©2015, poem and photographs, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved

Posted on

Today is Earth Day …

IMG_8428

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

© 2015, photograph, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved

Posted on

the humble wool of their lives

she charmed them spinning poem out of story
and laughter out of words and deeply religious
their mother put on piety each day for holy Mass

all the while her kitchen crockery stood empty
her dish water whispered of drowning spirits
her coffee was rank with unheard confessions

her pots and pans were hot with delusion
when they walked Stations with her on Good Friday
in their seventeenth year they recognized their lives

as a Calvary of emotional whipping and crosses to bear
the father having washed his hands of them all
while she stayed to pit twin against twin

to cruely play with the humble wool of their lives
with games of schadenfreude and tag-you’re-scapegoat
until they grew too smart for her insane machinations

“One of the oddest things about being grown-up was looking back at something you thought you knew and finding out the truth of it was completely different from what you had always believed.” Patricia Briggs in Bone Crossed

© 2012, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; Photo credit ~ Vera Kratochvil, Public Domain Pictures.net.