Into This Tangled Space

4.22.25

I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out. Cacophony of laying hens enters my open shed door. And the midday sun gowns the overgrown juniper that scratches the door and gentle spring air wafts scents of the pine. Fragrance quintessential… there are few pleasures like it I breathe in I know the time I feel the place I breathe out Papa? Papa! My girls have returned from their morning fun and they have seen my truck in the drive they’ve noticed the open back door they run through it and search for me in the yard and are surprised to find me here. Yes I’m usually somewhere else but there are undigested thoughts swollen yes yes swollen and heavy I carry them with me wherever I go and I’d like to set them down and… my littlest is holding dollar store flowers Papa! Papa! and she hands them to me and Mama says she saw them and wanted to get them for you… she kept pointing at them and saying “Papa, Papa” and I accept this gift and my littlest runs along in her blue floral dress and bouncing curls her bare feet pattering on soft green grass they are setting up the picnic table in the shade beneath the weeping cherry for arts and crafts and it isn’t that I’m depressed—oh the shock!—no it isn’t that it’s something in the what am I here to do?… searching searching and it’s easy to lose myself in the process of creating this restaurant and I have lost myself in the process of creating this restaurant the thoughts the searching thoughts become tangled like my hair that I’ve put up for too long. Yes a tangling inside of me and I reach for the German artist Anselm Kiefer who’s always untangling untangling and it isn’t a restaurant it isn’t a writer’s retreat it isn’t whatever anyone says no it’s an infinity of tangled thoughts being untangled. A laboratory of soul. A rising to face my demons. And yes I will allow into this tangled space the luxury of caviar the fleeting deliciousness of ramps and morels and I crack the eggs just collected still warm with life into the freshly milled flour and I mix. I fold. I kneed. I set aside. To be rolled and cut and shaped. Spring ravioli. And the cooking—that craft—is one part of this evolving story one small gigantic piece. I’m looking to satisfy something inside myself. I don’t know what that something is. I write the words. I take the photograph. I collect the meadow grasses and the dead but not dead bones of Queen Anne’s lace yes those radiating rods shriveled up in some quiet corner grasping all. I knead the dough. I butcher the fish. I light the fire and it burns all. There’s an energy there in the blazing wood. Immediate. And it goes into me. It travels into the food. And I pass it through to you. And it radiates, leaving me.