"Stirring the oatmeal" love

For Valentine's Day I preached about small acts of love, what one author called, "stirring the oatmeal" love, ordinary, undramatic, daily acts of love: picking up the dry cleaning for a husband, baking cream cheese twists for a family that needs something sweet, feeding the baby in the middle of the night...

Here's a poem that would have fit well into that theme.

Ordinary Life by Barbara Crooker

This was a day when nothing happened,
the children went off to school
without a murmur, remembering
their books, lunches, gloves.
All morning, the baby and I built block stacks
in the squares of light on the floor.
And lunch blended into naptime,
I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,
one of those jobs that never gets done,
then sat in a circle of sunlight
and drank ginger tea,
watched the birds at the feeder
jostle over lunch's little scraps.
A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,
preened and flashed his jeweled head.
Now a chicken roasts in the pan,
and the children return,
the murmur of their stories dappling the air.
I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.
We listen together for your wheels on the drive.
Grace before bread.
And at the table, actual conversation,
no bickering or pokes.
And then, the drift into homework.
The baby goes to his cars, drives them
along the sofa's ridges and hills.
Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,
tasting of coffee and cream.
The chicken's diminished to skin & skeleton,
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard cold knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves
into the winter night.


Enjoy this day,
Joanne

I'm reading poetry again

And today I found this one, in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems.

The Cure
by Ginger Andrews


Lying around all day
with some strange new deep blue
weekend funk. I'm not really asleep
when my sister calls
to say she's just hung up
from talking with Aunt Bertha
who is 89 and ill but managing
to take care of Uncle Frank
who is completely bedridden.
Aunt Bert says
it's snowing there in Arkansas,
on Catfish Lane, and she hasn't been
able to walk out to their mailbox.
She's been suffering
from a bad case of the mulleygrubs.
The cure for the mulleygrubs,
she tells my sister,
is to get up and bake a cake.
If that doesn't work, put on a red dress.




For me, baking has been a small act of love given by a friend who shares her love with sour cream twists.

It's been a long winter already, even without snow, mulleygrubs alive and well.

Russ says winter is nearly over. The sun is shining at 5 p.m.

Get up, bake a cake, put on a red dress, dance in the light!

Joanne