Notes From Home: The Bird and The Soup

Notes From Home: The Bird and The Soup May 27, 2017

So there’s this bird, this small horrible bird with a beak, who comes every morning before the sun has even had time to roust himself into the sky, he comes and bashes his beak on the tree right outside my window. He’s quite punctual, and persistent. He keeps at it until 8 on the dot and then flies away.

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He’s making hash of the tree, not contenting himself with one hole, he just whacks his way around that whole section of the tree. And what I ask myself, is persistence and punctuality enough? Does this bird deserve to succeed in his life just on effort alone? And also, Go Find A Different Tree you wretched bird. I mean, I do, of course, love all nature, and want it to flourish and so on. Except the hostas.

Last week we went and bought a lot of flowers at Frog Pond, a nice nursery about half an hour away, one of those charming places that litters up everything with goats and baby chicks and ducks. To get to the plants you have to run the gauntlet of little baby animals crying out to you to bring them home. Stood in front of the bunnies for a solid ten minutes and tried to persuade Matt how much better our lives would be if we had one. The cats, for instance, would surely be charmed. He remained unmoved. But then he was suckered into two roses and a bunch of other flowering perennials.

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I just think it would be really nice if it would stop being so cloudy and rainy so that I could obsess over the outdoors, instead of making warm winter soups, as I have done all week, what with it being so cold. Turns out that finely dicing a leek, sweating it for a while and then adding a bag of red lentils and a whole lot of diced ham and some minced carrot along with the ham gravy from the day before and letting it mellow together for a while with just a dash of curry powder is really, how shall I say it, divine. The opposite of that stupid bird. Lyrical. Raving with energy as I was I made focaccia without the oil and the herbs and the salt. And that turned out really nicely too.

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I really like the occasional poverty cooking–buying less food than you know is required, but one enormous item like a ham, and then just making it work all week. Perversely, I prefer an empty fridge so that I can see the few things that are in there, instead of so many items that they sit and go bad. Which means I must be perfectly happy now because there is nothing in there at all. And yet there is a vague gnawing sense of doubt. So perhaps it’s nice to have some food, a middle way perhaps.

Anyway, I must get up and do some things. So many things. Including standing at the window and shouting at that bird. Pip pip.


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