AND THEN YOU SEE THE CLOUDS

Der home in dis weather.

So soup weather, right? It's 19 degrees again here tonight. Yesterday, I made this Spicy Tomato Soup. It went so fast, I decided to try a variation with some of the frozen yellow tomatoes I "put up" this summer. Quite good, but the original was bettah ...

M and I are determined to eating healthily again. This soup was not very hard to do and relatively low in calories. For sure I am not buring many as I can barely make myself go outside in this weather. (I did drive to the market to restock seltzer water as M and I live on it.)

I had a kind of frustrating day as I had computer problems, access of several kinds, and could not really settle down to work nor my "to do" list. I did make some progress on organizing my room which has some items that have been undealt with ... wait ... isn't there one word that would better describe that? Neglected? Ignored. I think undealtwith ought to be a compound word we all use. At any rate, I did make some progress. 

(Parenthetically, check out this article on 20 words from the English language we ought to bring back.

Tomorrow, I have to get ready for a 3 night trip down to the city. I hope to catch up with some folks (one of the B's, JV and MM, and ?) as well as attend MSS's father's memorial on Monday. Then I am back here for a night (Tuesday) and gone again for Wednesday and Thursday nights. Busy. Busy. Busy. I hope it warms up a degree or so.

Meanwhile, E's bf, C, is still here. This evening he paid me a sweet compliment, thanking me for the instruction in food and music. That's pretty much where I live, right? 

And then you see the clouds.

And here's the first Poem of the Week of the year.

POPPIES

There is a sadness everywhere present

but impossible to point to, a sadness that hides in the world

and lingers. You look for it because it is everywhere.

When you give up, it haunts your dreams

with black pepper and blood and when you wake

you don’t know where you are.

But then you see the poppies, a disheveled stand of them.

And the sun shining down like God, loving all of us equally,

mountain and valley, plant, animal, human, and therefore

shouldn’t we love all these things equally back?

And then you see the clouds.

The poppies are wild, they are only beautiful and tall

so long as you do not cut them,

they are like the feral cat who purrs and rubs against your leg

but will scratch you if you touch back.

Love is letting the world be half-tamed.

That’s how the rain comes, softly and attentively, then

with unstoppable force. If you

stare upwards as it falls, you will see

they are falling sparks that light nothing only because

the ground interrupts them. You hear the way they’d burn,

the smouldering sound they make falling into the grass.

That is sound for the sadness everywhere present.

The closest you have come to seeing it

is at night, with the window open and the lamp on,

when the moths perch on the white walls,

tiny as a fingernail to large as a Gerbera daisy,

and take turns agitating around the light.

If you grasp one by the wing,

its pill-sized body will convulse

in your closed palm and you can feel the wing beats

like an eyelid’s obsessive blinking open to see.

But now it is still light and the blackbirds are singing

as if their voices are the only scissors left in this world.

—  Jennifer Grotz, from The New England Review