Erka+Days

Saturday was ….  house cleaning, library visitation and grocery shopping. Semolina, olive oil, eggs, salt, and kneading love makes for the pasta dough. The long thin yellow counter becomes the work place, a cutting board held to the counter with a huge clamp, the pasta machine in turn clamped to the wooden board. One person feeds the machine with lovely golden dough, the other tends to the filling and sealing, finally plopping ravioli onto a floured cookie sheet. We laugh, we cross arms and bump heads as we do the kitchen dance, wine glasses in hand, flour dusted. Sage butter sauce and or pomodoro. Sausage and onions, or shirmp creates the menu. A champagne toast to the new year, to a perfect intelligent new/old girl friend for my muffin, a new president and the new thrum of society feeling the love, learning to say it loud, we are proud to be alive in this moment.

I decided to make Zuppa di Garno Cuturru for Sunday dinner. I cooked after spending the entire day in and out of the range of the couch reading  and knitting cardigan sleeves (that I ripped out), petting cats and listening to the radio. I cried as the sweet chemical reaction of cut onion hit my face. I cried as I listened to the elderly african american tell his story. A story that includes me and you. I am a child of the 60′s I grew up in a city exercising its rights in racial turmoil, the burning of the Motor city, I watched the tanks lumber up and down scared, listened to the rhetoric and walked the walk of a white girl in a predominantly african american school. I was sheltered by my race but not to the extent of the masses that insisted on leaving the city of Detroit high and dry, without a tax base, their lily white tails between their legs. Either way, I am a better person from the experience. Just sayin’.

I have been reconnected with old friends via facebook. I have looked at my older face in the mirror and wondered what will come next. I have skyped with Moo and Giovanni in Rome and smiled. I have to locate a changing table and a bedtime for the boy, when he arrives he must sleep in style. I have watched the snow fall and the sun shine. Neen is in his element in Mexico, slathering his language skills with masa and pork, cilantro and chile, the hues of the town he is in will put him over his edge in the end I just know it. Returning to the states with its brown and gray and the occasional pale yellow homes will slay his aesthetic.

We watched Darjeeling Limited as we slurped our zuppa. I am reading the gurnsey potato peel pie society and behind the scenes at the museum.

I knit the sleeves to a fair thee well on the Llama sweater, and then I ripped them out to begin the shaping process again. I could not just leave them in such a sad ass state. It was not possible to sigh and keep going.

I wached the birds all day on the feeders. It was definately a laid back sort of day to be experienced on the hog. Not with out it’s quilts but traveled through anyway.