The Kitchen

It’s a new day, a new year and a brand-new appetite. Yeah, a few last-year’s scraps remain. So what? Let’s begin. Where? In the kitchen where every day starts.

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Why the kitchen? What’s a better ‘good morning’ than sausage sizzling in the pan, Mr. Coffee percolating, biscuits baking and black-eyed peas boiling? Yes sir, we’ll soon be serving up a batch of something hot.

But patience is required in the kitchen. Nothing good is cooked up quick, like in the microwave, unless you’re interested in the frozen dinners packaged by factories for the hurry-up crowd. It’s wisdom to allow the simmering have its perfect work.

So today let’s start with last-year’s leftovers, the good, the bad, throw ‘em in the pot, stir in some laughter and see what pot-luck recipe comes out. Laughter sets the tone. There’s plenty of time later for personal agenda and listening to the latest horde of suspect sages spouting out prognostications of things to come.

Already the 2020 ‘clear vision’ concept is cliché. Let’s dispense with it now. It doesn’t take much sober thinking to know that the important things will remain. Life is not one big rush, one grand scheme where everything is dependent on one big issue. Things change daily, every second something new. Think about it…86,400 seconds in a day. We shouldn’t complain about opportunities, no matter who gets elected this year.

We forget, as Dr. Crane says, that “Every day is a new life. Every evening is a day of judgment, every morning a resurrection. The past is God’s; the future is ours.”

The dog is looking at me funny. Wants his morning walk. I tell him it was a late night. He doesn’t care. So we cut up some good-boy treats, harness up and take off up the road for adventure. Every day something new, like life. Adventure with every sniff of grass.

He’s a big dog, bad about getting on a sniffing trail. When he gets hot on a trail, I feel like I’m water skiing, him the boat, me the skier. He drags me over trails of yesterday’s raccoons and deer. I have followed trails of lesser importance than these.

Have you ever tried to communicate with a dog on a trail? It’s hard enough to communicate with people. It does no good to scream. He doesn’t care what day it is, what year it is or what you think. He’s focused. There is no yesterday, no tomorrow, only now. What a life.

The grass is full of smells, the trees loaded with squirrels and doggie playmates everywhere. All things are new if we had 2020 vision to see it. In an hour we’re back at home where the kitchen air is thick with smells of food. This is the way to begin any day, especially 2020.

Here’s a poem by Barbara Crooker called ‘Home Cooking.’ Poetry is interpretive—it reads us as we read it. It’s a pretty good way to cook up this first Weakly Post as we begin a new year:

“Let me stir up a batch of something hot,
Beef stew or red bean chili, something simmering
Just below the boil. You let me know if it needs
More seasoning, more spice. Let me spread
Some butter on your cornbread, darling;
let it soak into all the cracks. Let me fill
Your glass with something red and juicy.
The oven is hot, and all the burners
are glowing. If you can’t take the heat,
then get out of my kitchen. But
if you need to take the chill off, baby,
I might be able to dish a little something up…”

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So, out with the old, in with the new. And whatever recipe you dish up for 2020, darling, I hope it’s hot and spicy. Happy New Year


Bud Hearn
January 3, 2020