From My Cupboard

I imagine serving jerk chicken and rice on Blue Delft pottery, fun juxtapositions (like drinking ice-cold gin from your grandmother’s bone china teacups, the taste of juniper like a kiss by moonlight in a line of caves in a southwest canyon the year before college, and then with autumn coming on heading east with T.S. Eliot’s book of cats from the Paris bookstore in your new washed leather satchel, the silver shaman pin on your flannel jumper strap, your yoga mat rolled around the gift of Je Reviens perfume . . . )

Imagine sitting around an outdoor copper fire pit eating the jerk chicken, so tender it falls off the bone, and spicy on everyone’s fingers, the serious blonde child as well.  The laughter and companionable constellation-spotting, making up daring new groupings of communications satellites and stars.

Imagine that amiable grouping.  Cousins passing through (bringing a children’s book on javelinas), friends down from Mt. Tam, the poet and her little mischief-eyed grandson.  My favorite Norwegian Buddhist, blithely renaming the Big Dipper Lucinda’s Cart, in honor of a homeless woman he admires and the day a week or two ago he helped her retrieve all her belongings, spilled out of her fallen shopping cart over the inimical curb, spilled out in story now across the heavens.

image:  Provence Mon Amour