boiled down

It’s early afternoon. My old self is playing on the radio and I am standing over a Tupperware container filled with freshly made baby food trying to remember what day it is. I stop. Jaw slack and just stare for a moment at the bright orange liquid. I feel my eyes well up without reason. Maybe it’s the music reminding me of old roads and miles of ambition. All these ideas I have had about what my life will be and has been, about my own importance boiled down, like these over steamed carrots, into a swirl of oarnge. Condensed into this moment. Me, standing in my kitchen with liquefied vegetables to feed my sleeping son. The truth hits in the oddest of unexpected moments. These elusive, evasive understandings that assault and awake us. I want to do so much. I want to do it on some grand and important scale. I want to write songs like these musicians are singing. Songs that can reach out into the kitchens of strangers and make them feel. I want to paint some masterpiece that somehow grapples with the great mysteries. I want to write poems that penetrate the mundane. But all I can do these days is tie the shoes and wipe the nose and zip the coat of my little boy. I am the playground fairy. The living room rock star. Making the wild mommy music and doing the rockin’ domestic dance. I want to cast my net out into the multitude of possibilities but I am here holding this line. Hooked into this one being. I am so singularly focused I often forget to look up from the page. I forget to remember the old campfire promises of youth. Until I find myself 32 years old with tears on my cheeks, standing in a comfortable kitchen wearing the well worn apron of my mother and trying to remember. Trying to remember anything.