Suppertime

"yeah, it's suppertime...oh, it's supper, supper, suppertime, the very best time of day"

Like most families with middle and high school age kids, we don't have supper together more than once or twice a week. We've all gotten to where we enjoy those evenings, though. There's less of the "I'm done, so can I jump up and race off" than there used to be (when Walker was small, staying in his place for an entire meal necessarily included dancing in place beside his chair). There's more preparation done together, like table-setting and sometimes even suggestions for what to have. Since none of us enjoy planning meals or cooking but all of us enjoy eating, we've found ways to make the task less onerous over the past year.

Last night we all came in about six and had to take care of our caged animals, who get released and entertained and/or petted once a day, and we had to find things in the refrigerator that we could fix for a quick supper. We discovered that we're out of salsa, a staple in our house and something that we keep a spare bottle of in the pantry, ordinarily. But when we had to throw away everything in the refrigerator during our nine-day power outage, we didn't realize that we'd just opened the last bottle of salsa, and so we had none for supper last night. The meal was more bland than usual, but the conversation is getting better all the time.

After supper and homework and video watching and showers, I had to read this poem to everyone. It's by Lisel Mueller and entitled "Love Like Salt":

It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays by the sea.

Ron waited until I'd finished reading the poem to say that salt crystals are square, and so not "intricate" as far as he could see. I said I didn't really get the "wineskins" part. All of us enjoyed the image of the salt on the floor, as something all over our kitchen floor is a pretty usual part of fixing supper around here. And we agreed that "talking of holidays by the sea" is the very essence of love, for us.