I can't sleep…
Home at last, I haul in the grocery bags, swallow a couple of extra-strength Tylenol, put the entire Van Morrison play list on the stereo, and spend the afternoon roasting vegetables and making pasta sauce, salad, and a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Outside, the rain comes down in sheets. I am singing “Days Like This,” belting out the song. The kitchen fills with good smells.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes: Related posts: Katrina Kenison
As for the querencia,
we all have a place where we feel safest,
even if it is only the idea of a place,
maybe an idea by itself,
the place that all our being radiates out from,
like an idea of friendship or justice
or perhaps something simpler
like the memory of a back porch
where we laughed a low
and how the setting sun
through the pine trees shone on the green chairs,
flickered off the ice cubes in our glasses.
~ Stephen Dobyns, from “Querencia,” Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992
Notes:
One thing we’ve learned this summer is that a house is not an end in itself, any more than “home” is just one geographic location where things feel safe and familiar. Home can be anyplace in which we create our own sense of rest and peace as we tend to the spaces in which we eat and sleep and play. It is a place that we create and re-create in every moment, at every stage of our lives, a place where the plain and common becomes cherished and the ordinary becomes sacred.
― Katrina Kenison, The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother’s Memoir
Painting: Edward Gordon, Wind from the Sea, via The Sensual Starfish
