◎ Crumbs from the Master's Table

Remember I said something about arcs, and how the latest one seems to have brought me to a place where everything just seemed to tie up nicely? I continue to be surprised. 

This kitchen stuff has a lot of memories attached to it that I didn't expect. Visions of little me... excited because I knew how to make pancakes from scratch by the time I started first grade. The good-natured rivalry between my mom, aunts, and grandmother around the holidays. Or maybe it was just my dad throwing in the Apple of Discord each year, I don't know. 

I remember when I made cookies for my boyfriend at 3am because he said he was hungry. The time I tried to make him a turtle-shaped cake for his birthday, and didn't tell him I burned my arm so badly on the oven door that it took three years to finally disappear. When I hosted Christmas dinner and spent my entire month's grocery budget because he and his mom were coming over for four hours, so he could experience Christmas as I knew it, even though I ate oatmeal, granola bars, and chef Boyardee the rest of the time.

But then what was warm became cold... I remember feeling it was very difficult to work full-time and be a full-time homemaker, until we decided to "share," though it just meant things were always dirty, and I just had "a lower dirt threshold." I remember he disliked or tolerated almost everything I made, until he started helping because he was unemployed and it only seemed fair... I have a lot of gaps in my memories, after that, and attempting to recall them makes me physically dizzy. I will leave them in the cloud. Praise be to God that I am not there anymore, anyway. But I remember that eventually it was feast or famine, with several complex but delicious meals spaced out with peanut butter on toast... 

Additionally, it was only in the earliest years that we had people over, and then things changed. He would often become irritable and jealous when I made friends or spent any time with them, and I was often so sleep-deprived and drained from working full-time and accommodating his anxieties, that I eventually didn't have any friends or energy to worry about it, anyway, outside of work hours. 

...

I think the first thing that I started to enjoy again was a cookie and some coffee as I sat in a cafe I would go to before work. It was a little something... for me. I could wake up earlier than anyone else, I would bring my journal, and write out my thoughts and plans for the week. And when I got that taste of enough space to breathe... I started carving out more, and I started writing again. Dealing with my emotions in the only way I could remotely come close to touching or looking at them. In cafes, the library, a place down the street that had unlimited coffee. They still remember me today, when I come in. If I could have slept somewhere, I would have, but I didn't know anyone I could have asked back then... Not without stirring the pot more than I would have been able to handle, yet. 

And in retrospect I see that the food I'd been recharging with was very much like my own family's baking, because it came down matrilineally, even though I often identify as English, and am actually more than half Scottish and entirely Canadian. But anyway... I find it interesting, I guess. 

But you know what I think really did it?... Once, for my 33rd birthday, a friend of mine hosted a party. It was a Lord of the Rings marathon party, and she made a whole bunch of beautiful food. Not only was she a huge fan, so it was thematic in some ways, but it had been a long time since I had felt so absurdly special. And I have come to become a firm believer in the strength of impact that comes from receiving love from strangers to really show you what such light looks like, when you haven't seen the sun in years. That we have value. And I have felt special in other ways, by other people, for different reasons, but this really sticks out to me as far as the return to an enjoyment of food. Say nothing of the months I subsided on a friend's excess loaves of sourdough that made me feel nourished heart and soul, at a time when the chance of seeing a friend was the only thing that got me up each morning, and I would not have been able to do so on my own. 

And now... it has been a while, and things have moved very fast, but... I now want to feed myself, too, properly. I know I make good food, I want to share, and I want people I love to know I love them... And I want everyone else to know Jesus does. (Haa.) 

Yes... Food is important. This is why Jesus feeds people. This is why we ask for daily bread, dearest reader, isn't it? Man does not live by bread alone... it is also what that bread is so often a symbolic vehicle for.