hitting the high notes
Okay, okay, I’m a word nerd. I love words and I love language. I’ve studied both. Four years of French, two years of German. Latin and Norwegian, a year of each. Majored in English, minored in Journalism.
I guess you could call writing my love language.
But, as I’ve learned over the years, one of anything is never enough. Also, I’m restless. The polymath in me constantly craves variety. So, I experiment a little. Try my hand at haiku, write a poem or two. Draw a few bad sketches of the spruce trees lining the cove. Last summer, I even dug up the Carpenters “Close to You” sheet music, long buried among my mother’s hymnals and songbooks since my tween years and struck a few chords on the tiny piano in my old island farmhouse.
(from a 2019 trip to France)
Until recently, I’d never considered cooking as a language. Probably because I’ve vigorously avoided it in recent years. And when I came back to it a few months ago, cooking was like any other language I’d learned and placed on my “too busy” shelf: music, art, French. The muscle memory returned. Maybe not to its initial levels, but never forgotten.
Quietly lying in wait for me to love it again.