A year of transparency…

what happens inside when you eat my winter food?

 

  Home Cooking


by Barbara Crooker

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 ….

 
“Home Cooking” by Barbara Crooker, from Some Glad Morning, © 2019.

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, December 28, 2019


Definition #227 Simmering

Owen mimics his Mom; grabs her eyeglasses, and grins. He took 35 years to study this look!

expression simmers:

thirty years later erupts

with volcanic grin!

It’s the birthday of Walt Whitman , born in West Hills, Long Island, New York (1819). Whitman worked as a printing press typesetter, teacher, journalist, and newspaper editor. He was working as a carpenter, his father’s trade, and living with his mother in Brooklyn, when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” which claimed the new United States needed a poet to properly capture its spirit. Whitman decided he was that poet. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman later said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”
Whitman began work on his collection Leaves of Grass, crafting an American epic that celebrated the common man. He did most of the typesetting for the book himself, and he made sure the edition was small enough to fit in a pocket, later explaining, “I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.” He was 37 years old when he paid for the publication of 795 copies out of his own pocket.