Recipes

There's a blogger on this site named Clare. Clare writes Three Beautiful Things each day. She succeeds because it isn't smarmy whiskers on kittens stuff, but real things that she sees joy in. Simple things, recipes for small inward smiles, the holy of the everyday.

Here's a fall recipe, too.

Ruby red
sweet beets
in the long late
light,

juice like
candied blood
from the cut gems
stains my hand .

Two colors of red
revealed in the slicing,
soaking in the
chestnut balsamic
while garlic browns
and onions become
tiny window panes
in hot oil.

Add the garnets
to the oil and it begins
to steam--
tart vinegar and garlic
season the kitchen.

Chop the greens:
from the beets
green and burgundy;
then kale, dewy water
rolling off the oddly
pale leaves.

Now oiled greens and reds
deepen,
filled with life,
the suicide drug for
cancer,

so pleasing
and useful.

Reaping what is sown

On Friday this week, the traditional Harvest Moon appeared: so named because the timing of the moonrise early in the evening, before sunset, actually lengthens the work day for those working in the fields to gather the fall harvest in the Northern hemisphere. And this year’s moon was stunning. The clear skies and mild temperatures made it possible to wander out after dark with Ben and moon gaze. “Moon” was one of Ben’s first identified objects, and remains an enthusiastic word for him. There’s a spectacular moon flower outside Peachtree School, and each morning until our first frost last week, Ben would drag me across the street and to the stunning white flowers and say, “Moon, Mamma!”

This morning we spent an hour on the couch, me sipping coffee and reading the Times, and Ben watching Thomas on TV and trying to interfere with my reading. Beside me in the to read pile was the Business section, with an above-the-fold story on Rosa Parks memorabilia. Through my distracted haze, I heard him saying, “Mamma’s hair,” and lowered the paper to see him pointing at picture of Rosa’s silver hair piled in a braid on top of her head. Leave it to Ben to spot race-bridging commonalities.

When he jolted me with his observation, I was reading a piece about the destructive human interaction with elephants. Our disruption of their powerful familial bonds by enslaving, jailing, killing, poaching and encroaching has led to a breakdown of elephant society. Adolescent males of the species are traumatized by the loss of elders to show them the way; rudderless and rampaging, they have killed alarmingly increasing numbers of humans and are known to rape other species. Young females are reproducing without developing elephantine attachment to the larger group and without the extended support network of mothers, grandmothers and aunties.

In a perfect world, young elephants spend their first eight years no further than 15 feet away from their mothers, learning how to attach to the larger group and be elephants. The introduction of elephant elders, male and female, back into the destabilized groups of immature and orphaned adolescents can stabilize them in a year. In some sanctuary areas, human caretakers serve as allomothers: matriarchs to work with orphaned elephant youngsters to develop attachment and cohesion with the larger group. Rosa Parks and elephant matriarchs and saving the world.

Today Ben and I traveled to northern Washtenaw County to the Three Cedars Farm, a touristy but somewhat tasteful pumpkin and hayride place. We petted the goats and looked at the pumpkins and odd gourds, and we wandered off the hayride into the pumpkin patch. Ben did not want to pick a pumpkin. Instead, he went up to each kid his own size, and asked to hold hands. Some kids walked for a while hand in hand with him.

Amygdala rondala

Love, that noble emotion;
dethroned patriarchs
and beguiled matriarchs
with chemicals manufactured in the brain.
Dopamine makes us dopey;
neurepinephrine makes us mad with love.

The amygdala governs the mixings:
physical responses,
organs tighten and engorge
lusty attraction before attachment.

A primate learns to grasp
and kiss his mate
from the front;
she learns this is pleasant
like the baby clinging to her breast.

Mother's love for lover's love.

Front to front,
two backs outward,
shielding the inner body,
the soft bellies,
from the world.
Very god of very god
the pre frontal cortex then
lends attachment to the soup.
That scent,
like lavender
or maybe like fresh fruit:

the scent of survival.