And you wake into a new day and the first thing you do is to chop and dice up all your thoughts and put them into a great big pan to sweat in extra virgin for hours on end. And you go about your business thinking about the pan and what you might add. The new day adds new things along the way. Little bits of life that come upon you like waves by the shore, unstoppable, necessary, ultimately the truth. 

There is no avoiding that. The day is rich in insight. The garden stalls in its growth and so I amble down with a watering can laden with tomato feed. Avoid the foliage. Avoid the leaves. Get to the root. I know I fail in details. I try desperately to follow the instructions.

Lost love. That comes up in the day. Broken hearted person sits at my kitchen table and cries over love and what has been and quotes Fitzgerald and all the romantics and it stirs me. This rambling over the  bog bursting with literature. The lines, the words, the hidden, the lost of all I read rises up in my being and brings about a new life. I feel sad that what is a loss for one is a gain for me. I try to speak about what is to come while all the time wishing to peruse the book shelves, the cobwebby homes of the pages where all the answers lie.And yet, there is a sense of doing what is right. The person who speaks is of my being. I did a fair job. His heart is vast.

Eventually I have a time to retrieve the sweating onions and add the beans and the asparagus spears, the bright blood red peppers, the anaemic courgettes, the red veined onions, the garlic. I set aside the artichoke hearts and basil leaves and the perfect tomatoes until the end. The kitchen reeks of growth.

Cake. Bake a cake. Chocolate heals. I do. I put a recipe into force. Simple. Effective. I line a cake tin with delicate parchment. Melt the butter, the cocoa, the water. Blend the flour and the bread soda and the sugar. Beat the eggs and add the buttermilk and vanilla and soon the kitchen is a mix of cake and dinner. Smells drift out over into Joni Mitchell and her sadness and I am in a flower sprigged apron dancing in bare feet. And there is no one to answer too only myself. I cast an eye out beyond where I stand and see the distant fall of a rain shower turn the sky to grey. Grey to begin with and then a deep purple like a vein throbbing with life, ready to explode. Nothing is ever set in stone. You mind yourself, I say to the broken-hearted soul. Trust and believe. Your kind is in decay. Love your tears.