Listening: Over and over again, Sam Lee, Old Wow, and yesterday, over and over again, this song (“Sweet Sixteen”).
Sipping: This morning’s Black Mountain coffee, brought to me in bed, in my green cup.
Reading: Last night I finished Jeannette Winterson’s The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold. I turned out the light and thought for ages about Perdita, the foundling, and how her story echoed (in a way) my mother’s origins. Foundlings left in the baby hatch, taken and raised, with love, or not, and then given the story of their beginnings. Perdita was alive to hear hers. My mother was not. But it’s a story I carry now, in my bag of necessary wonders.
Thinking: About our own bags of wonder.
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.
Remembering: My mother in her blue suit, eager for my father’s homecoming. Her smile. The smell of her Avon deodorant.
For it’s hishaba for I’m your maAnd Lord knows where your daddy goesSo it’s all take care and you all be bewareOf the young men and the gloaming o.
Wishing: The old wishes, every one of them.
Eating: This tart for lunch yesterday (and there’s enough for today’s lunch too).
Watching: Rain falling beyond my study window.
Wearing: Dry clothes after a morning swim, in rain.
Loving: The sound of rain on our blue metal roof.
Hoping: The old wishes, every one of them.
Enjoying: The sight of a coyote pup, nearly grown, coming out of the woods to sniff around our house. In these moments, there is the ancient memory of wolves hanging around fires, eager for scraps. This pup, curious, its ears open for the sounds of our household, maybe even Sam Lee.
The Ainu say that the deer, salmon, and bear like our music and
are fascinated by our languages. So we sing to the fish or the game,
speak words to them, say grace.
Appreciating: The rain, the music, a blue feather, a basket of tomatoes on the counter, the scent of dark coffee, the dish of pine cones in the entrance hall, calling cards of trees from the Nicola Valley, a side road near Lytton, oyster shells hanging by the front door, the Merton Beauty apples. “If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful,into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people…”
Note: the passage by Ursula K. Le Guin is from “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), the lines of Sam Lee are from his song, “Sweet Sixteen” (2019), and the lines on animals and music are from Gary Snyder’s “Tawny Grammar” (The Practice of the Wild).
...Theresa Kishkan 
Would I look for a “Tomato Tart” recipe online to try to duplicate yours? We will have ripe tomatoes coming out our ears very soon and your tart looks like a lovely lunch.
If you email me (my email address is on my contact page), I will happily write the recipe out for you (and I’ll have your email address as a result!). I can’t remember where I found this recipe but I have made changes, scribbles, little shifts, and so I can tell you how I do it. It’s delicious.