Nourish Me

5th of august

A breathlessness has settled in my lungs of late, something I can explain but won't, nothing bad, just complicated. Yes, complicated. Deep sighs punctuated our walk today, out on familiar streets, picking off heads of lavender along the council strip, trying to mindfully take in the long, slow breaths my shoulders seem to need.    

Ran into Phoebe while buying bread earlier. Talked of our respective Leonine birthdays, of sun salutations, about this city/country divide thing. Unprompted, she reminded me - a gift of a teacher, is she - that slowing down the breath will slow down more than just breathing. Helped to fix a few wayward thoughts, pull me back together.    

Edward wrote a sweet message in my birthday card last week: "Thank you for making such delicious meals for us to eat. We are one of the few families we know who rarely eat the same meal twice." He's a vegetarian because I made them see how utterly satisfying vegetarian food could be. I doubt he'd have found his way there alone. Such beautiful, grown-up boys. They bring so much joy and light, and though not of my own making, at times, I know that really they are the adults they now are, in part, because of something I did that was very right. 

 

Looking up while walking, I realised that the treasures of autumn are all there to be had. The office is placed in an old area of Melbourne, a suburb of gardens graced by established trees and fruiting hedges, and I draw a mental map of where the free food lies. Persimmons glow in trees that arc over paling fences, there are lemons and olives and quinces, of course, but also oranges to be found in the cobbled back lanes. Poppy and I like those lanes best of all when we are missing the quiet of our country home. There are at least two feijoa hedges - a great garden idea - that we regularly pass, rosemary that thrives in the sandy soils around us, and a wonderful tall, dense hedge of bay that I always snap a leaf from, to crush and inhale deeply on our way back from wherever we've been. 

 

Bowls-full

This week, the fruit bowl finally holds something worth crowing about. Small, hard nectarines, patiently softening and, better still, a clutch of delicious almost-there apricots. That bowlful there is my mothers'. She got in a week earlier than I.  

When Nellie bends my elbow to push it gently across my back, she always holds my hand. My fingers (of their own accord) often curl up to greet hers and gently grasp back, a gesture I find intimate and comforting but I wonder how she feels about it. Beneath her tiny, hot hands, my shoulders have dropped, my neck moves freely and I haven’t had a headache worth mentioning in months.

I'm feeling kinda good.

Walking home, shoulders loosened, the light falls beautifully on the neighbourhood gardens. A single wild strawberry pokes out between the fence posts, a bright orange nasturtium blossom peeks at me beneath a freshly-painted white gate. Birds of paradise looked curiously - proudly – over a fence line and a grape vine that tumbles onto the pathway each summer is lush and green.

Soup for one, tonight. A little bowl of cold sorrel soup from Patience Gray's Plats du Jour, one that uses no cream, no butter, no nothing bad. One apricot will be halved when the sun sinks below the fence, stalk end to pointed tip, and prised carefully apart. Its hollow will be filled with a few crushed amaretti, mooshed with a teaspoon of butter, a drizzle of honey then into a moderate oven until done.

Quite enough for a happy solo diner, and the dog, naturally, can lick the bowl clean.