The Drink of Me

The dog's light snoring, a dueling tick-tock of clocks, my neighbor shoveling the driveway after a night of heavy snowfall – Sunday morning threatens to fall back asleep on the entire town. I tend to indoor plants and shovel ash from the fireplace to prepare for a day of being housebound. Which soup would you enjoy today, beloved . . . potato leek, red lentil chili, maybe a simple cabbage broth? My heart is always in the soup.

After cocktails with friends, I realize I have a signature drink. There is a way people see me and there is a way I see myself and I wonder about an amalgam of all the perceptions. The drink of me has liqueur made from violets grown on the Swiss Alps, and gin, and freshly squeezed lemon. The paradox of common growing things found in a hard to reach place is not lost, nor is the idea that my clothes are second hand but my drink (or the fact that I even have a “signature drink”) might be seen as pretentious. I ordered the drink on a whim in a moment of splurge. Yet after the first sip of tentative whimsy and the childlike discovery of something unexpected, I knew things I didn't know before. I recognized flavors and essences and generations of care for ingredients and methods and heart. I tasted love – mine and theirs and yours and God's. Fine; yes; I'm being effusive about a drink. But there is more here that I'm trying to say.

Raking the roof, shoveling snow, stacking wood. Today is a day for managing Michigan. I have decided on a soup: white bean, chicken, and kale with thin table crackers on the side. As the soup simmers I break a piece of cracker off and let it melt on my tongue. The image of the priest putting the consecrated host in my hands always comes to mind. I never let him put it in my mouth like the others do – too personal – too intimate. Maybe that's why he left the priesthood. Maybe that's why I left too.

The secret path is not a secret. She is curved and understands her slavery and therefore, understands yours. Someone invisible is always with you . . . in the fields, at the river, in the pines, on the mountain. She swims in the lake naked at night and she knits warm scarves as an eternal gift.

I know these things in a single sip; hear them in a note; taste them in a saltine cracker. Who needs to know this; who cares?