follow, hand printed, a recipe

she left you

for every holiday

fill up a void

with her fluffed cheesy mass

from bread firm, one whole

cloud of a loaf

is un-sliced

            boil, double boiler, boil. . .

~ Excerpt from “Your Mother’s Appetizer,” ©KellyDuMar

Wind howled outside my window as I woke, and the branches blew. I walked with Charlie under the feathery blue clouds through the woods to meet my friend and her two dogs. The sky was the story, feathery clouds and blue bright over the sodden landscape. All the snow gone and the brooks and river are high with melt. We walked miles; I took her across the trestle through the meadow and back and I found a lovely bird’s nest. At home, today was the annual making of the cheese puffs, my mother’s appetizer for the family holiday party. Every year, my sister Joanna and I and our girls gather in my kitchen to produce this beloved holiday food, just the way our mother taught us growing up. Often, my nieces join us, but this year, crunched for time, we were a smaller group. My girls came, pictured here with their Aunt Jo, dipping the cubes of sliced bread into the melted cheese mixture. Then we freeze them on trays, and they stay frozen until the party, Sunday, or Christmas day, when they are baked frozen and served hot to cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, nieces, nephews, who grab them eagerly as they’re passed. Our way of keeping close to my mom who made them as long as she possibly could. (Friends, if anyone wants my mother’s cheese puff appetizer recipe, email me, and I’ll share it with you so you can start your own tradition. It’s great to do this with a team, because all the bread has to be sliced, the cheeses have to be melted, the egg whites have to be whipped and the bread has to be dipped. It’s a messy and fun and delicious process!) This morning I woke with an idea about my meditating woman picture, how she might belong to a poem I’ve written about the swamp that hasn’t felt quite finished to me. I was pleased when Jane, a daily reader, wrote me that she couldn’t see the woman in my picture until I described what I saw, and then she had no difficulty seeing her. And, on my Instagram feed, I found a message left by a friend from the International Women’s Writing Guild, who happens to be a student of Jungian Analysis, and she wrote these encouraging words:

“This might be my favorite ever of all your marvelous photos, Kelly. It is like a terrific abstract painting.” From Enid Madaras Dec. 14, 2019, via Instagram

So, Enid seemed to sense the depth of this image as well. I will continue exploring this image, I know, in my writing and otherwise. I need to make a decision about what poem to bring to workshop tomorrow night. I will have to make some time to revise one as I doubt I’ll have time to generate anything new. The wind had stopped. All the nocturnal birds and animals are busy in the woods and by the river. This is their time and place.