I was going to shut myself away in a quiet room, but my wife’s making homemade chicken noodle soup and the enticing smell is irresistible. It’s the smell of home, but a nostalgic kind. A place where hungry people come in from a wintry outdoors and suddenly find themselves ravenous in a warm, aromatic kitchen.
And so, with no preparation, I sat down and wrote a little about it. I don’t know what this is. Just stream-of-consciousness stuff. I provide it as an unedited example of how easy it is to get writing momentum some days, especially when you’re not overly concerned with structure or other grammatical rules.
I’m writing at the kitchen table
with headphones in.
It keeps out the distractions of home life
Yet allows me to stay within my family’s presence.
I sit here so I can smell my wife’s homemade chicken noodle soup.
As it bubbles on the stove
Its pepper enticing, the rich broth,
the concoction of ingredients that dance merrily in a savory swirl
“Pepper makes me sneeze,” I said as a kid.
It no longer has the effect I pretended it had back then.
Now, it’s an enticement, I want to bask in its aroma
and be inspired by cauldron thoughts
and salivating mouths,
of cooking herbs found near the camp
fresh-picked and green,
their earth nourished by a nearby brook that delights in its passage.
I cannot hear the roiling water as it swirls upon the stove.
It waits for noodles, thick and grand, pleasures each to taste.
And so I type, I write.
I take white pages and darken them with hope.
With no planning save that which can be done in preparation to sit
and bask within a kitchen breeze
its peppered breath a kiss,
A promise,
An inspiration.
Perhaps it will be worth editing later, or pieces will be borrowed for something else. At the very least, it got my mind ready for the other writing I intended to complete. And it got me hungrier.
It’s time for a luncheon interruption.
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© Michael Wallevand, March 2020
The Lost Royals 