The Furious Spinner

I have a thing for bowls. I am sometimes particular in my lust for bowls. I like them plain without much hooping and a hollering. I like the ones that are white on the inside, colored on the outside, mostly. I think my grandma had similar bowls, for mixing fresh pie dough and decadent cake recipes. I know Mario brought a blue one into the marriage. We called it a cereal bowl. Deep, you know, so you could stir the cereal, milk, and whatnot around with a flourish. When this blue bowl broke, I was desolate. Relative desolation, of course. American desolation. “Oh, my favorite TV program went off the air” kind of desolation. Still, I missed the old thing. It never chipped, you see. Something about chipped dishes. Well, they just kind of make me shudder—it’s like seeing a chipped bone. When no one is looking, I climb onto a chair and slip any offending chipped plate to the back of the top shelf of the cupboard, where—I hope—no one can hear it scream.

Seriously, though, I like my bowls. I don’t buy a lot of things. For instance, I have one pair of jeans. OK, two if you count the cranberry-colored ones. To me, jeans are blue. Until a week ago, I had two pairs of shoes. Penny loafers, which really need replacing. The heels are so worn down on the outside. (It’s difficult finding nice-looking loafers.) And a pair of running shoes that I use for hiking. Wait. I almost forgot the blue/black pair of shoes I used to wear to work; now I sometimes wear them when I put on a dress. They’re twenty years old, give or take, so they don’t really count. I’m getting lost in detail here. Sorry. The point is that I don’t buy stuff. But I have many bowls. Forty-two, I believe, counting the mixing, serving, salad, soup, and cereal bowls. The plain bowls—they’re made by Tag—are my favorites. These bowls are beautiful in their simplicity.

Sometimes I open the cupboard and stare at the Tag bowls. Piled on top of each other. Egg yellow, split pea, plum, blue, dusty cranberry. They’re like huge open flowers, each one spooning the next. Or bowling the next, I suppose. Almost nesting, but not quite. I like the colors. I want to take photographs of them the way I take photographs of rhododendrons: up close and personal.

Every time I make something that requires using one of these bowls, I smile. I reach for one deliberately, slowly, and take it off the pile. I look inside at the translucent white well to make certain nothing untoward has dropped inside. This one could be split pea colored. Perfect for the split pea soup I am going to eat this Thursday. Or perhaps that is too monochromatic. I will try the egg yellow instead. Chick yellow, really. I like that description better. It’s kind of that fuzzy yellow that baby chicks have. If the yolk of an egg was that color it wouldn’t be tasty; it would mean the chickens weren't getting enough sun and running around time. (Do I understand I’m speaking of the same creature only in a different form: egg or chick? Do I understand I am talking about myself in the trois person?)

I don’t have the ingredients or the time to make fresh split pea soup. So I saute organic shitake mushrooms in olive oil in a soup pan. I open a can of Walnut Acres Split Pea soup (all organic ingredients; vegan; no sugar) and pour it into the mushrooms. I heat it until it is very hot. Then I drop a handful of frozen organic peas into the soup. (Just assume if I’m cooking or eating it, it’s organic.) While the soup continues to heat for a bit more, I lightly toast rye bread, crush several garlic cloves onto the bread, slap on a couple slices of baked tofu and a rainbow chard leaf, and then I close up the sandwich.

I set the sandwich on a small green fiestaware plate. My mother sent me four place settings of the pastel fiestaware about a decade ago. Every time I use them, I feel strangely elated. I ladle the soup into the chick yellow bowl. As I eat, I feel as though I have engaged in some kind of ritual—as though I am preparing my body for nourishment, even if it is fast food natural food. The bowl becomes a kind of down home cornucopia. Barbara Walker says bowls represents the “divine female principle” or the womb. She says in “Babylonian scriptures, the whole earth or the whole cosmos was represented as the Goddess’s mixing-bowl.”

So I stir the soup and stare at the cosmos. Then I eat it.

On Saturday, I talk to my friend Linda. She is so sick: another infection, reactions from medications, on a liquid diet for months because she has none of her back teeth. I feel so frustrated and angry that I can’t do something for her. She loves my pumpkin pies but can’t eat them any more. So I say, “Wouldn’t you like some pumpkin pudding?” Just pie without the crust. We’re speaking to each other over the ether. With a telephone. Her voice perks up. “Yes,” she says. “I would like that.”

As usual, it takes a long while for us to say goodbye. I don’t like talking on the phone, normally. Except to Linda or Mario. But Linda and I have trouble saying goodbye on the phone. She’ll spot a wren or towhee at her bird feeder, and she’ll have to describe it to me. Or I’ll talk about the rhododendrons blooming in town: the wedding cake white rhodie at the library, the blood red blooms on the bush at the courthouse annex, and the one by the church, the one that is the color of a peach that has suddenly decided it would rather be a flower than a fruit. But finally, we say goodbye, and I pull out one large Tag mixing bowl from the cupboard below the counter. Split pea colored.

I wish I were the Great Goddess. I would stir health and healing into the pumpkin pudding. Of course, who knows what part of us is Divine. Or at least witchy. One and the same? In the bowl, I pour 1/3 cup of honey. (Honey given to me by my friend Barbara whose husband Paul is a melissae, a beekeeper.) I add an egg and whisk the honey and egg together. Into this goes a can of pumpkin puree, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon clove, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoon ginger. I stir the ingredients all together until it is a dark pumpkin color.

Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

I pour the concoction into a glass pie plate and put it in the oven at 350° until it sets, which is about 30 minutes.

I wash out the mixing bowl with reverence. What a wonderful thing it is to cradle that which nourishes us—even if it is only for a short while. To be a container of sorts. I wish I could alway be a container of pure joyful love—but it doesn't always work out that way.

The next morning, Mario and I put the pumpkin pie without the crust in the cooler in the trunk. Then we drive to the mountain and walk to the top again. I talk to the East wind and listen for the wisdom of the sea tree hags. Rough and prickly. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. I ask for healing for Linda and my mother. Myself. I leave polished stones on the rough black slate.

The day is blue like my blue bowl. Is the sky the color of the bowl or is the bowl the color of the sky? Doesn’t it make you giggle just to think of it? Linda looks drawn, tired, thin as she comes out of the house to greet us. She hasn’t the energy to be her usual cheery self, which certainly isn’t a requirement for us. She takes the pudding and puts some on a plate. We walk to the fenced flower garden next to her farmhouse. The house leans into the earth like an old woman leans on a cane.

We sit on weather-worn benches, the dark green grass at out ankles. Swallows swoop above us, singing their watery arias. A wren sits on a small willow tree near the large bird feeder and sings his heart out. Linda is sure the bird is a “he.” Flowers grow along the fence lines, wild and brightly colored. Linda says, “I need to cut the grass and weed the flowers.” She sighs, exhausted by the prospect. But she eats the pudding as she sit sheltered by the bowl of the sky, with us alongside her.

Later, Linda is in so much pain that she calls an ambulance. I don’t learn about this until the next day when she calls to tell me she went to the hospital. She is home again. I don’t fuss over her. She hates that. I just listen. When I get off the phone I go to the cupboard, open it, and stare at the bowls. They’re still beautiful. Full of memory. Potential. Color.

I go to the other cupboard and pull out two big mixing bowls. One is split pea, the other is chick yellow. Mario loves my blueberry muffins. Only they aren’t muffins. That’s too much fussing to pour the mixture into a muffin tin. Too much bother to clean. So I make blueberry cake. I have the recipe memorized. First I measure out two cups of barley flour and put it in the split pea bowl. I should shift it, but I don’t. I drop in two teaspoons of baking soda and then whisk the dry mixture together.

In the yellow bowl, I put a teaspoon of vanilla extract, 1/4 cup olive oil, 1/4 cup maple syrup, and one egg. I whisk them all together and then add 3/4 cup water. I gently pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients. I stir it all together with a bamboo mixing spoon. Next, I drop a cup (or more) of frozen blueberries into the bowl. I fold the blueberries into the mixture carefully. Almost immediately the cake mixture turns blue. Not ordinary blue. But a blue-green. No, that’s not it. It’s the color of blue that you imagine a mermaid’s tail would be. It’s so deep and light and natural and perfect that I can only oooh and aaah. I show it to Mario. If I were a painter, I think, I would spend a lifetime trying to create this color. But then, why bother? Nature has already done it.

I oil a Pyrex dish and then pour the blueberry mixture into it. I put it in the oven at 375° for about 30 minutes. I wash the mixing bowls carefully, reluctant to clean away the blueberry cosmos.

Later, I serve my beloved blueberry cake. I watch him eating my love along with the blueberries, egg, flour, and oil. I wonder what he would think if he knew he was eating the cosmos, too.

Tomorrow, he has promised to make one of my favorite dishes: a kind of stir-fry with rice and tofu and veggies all mixed together. He will use the huge chick yellow Tag bowl that we have not had an occasion to use yet. It will be a glorious sight, I am certain. A great feast.

“This is even better than usual,” Mario says as he eats the blueberry cake. “Did you do anything different?”

I smile. “It’s the bowls, darlin’. The bowls.”

Labels: food, Linda

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Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Attention All Time Travelers!