I love you and dinner’s at 6

I’ve been a languid writer of late, everyone. I know that discipline begets inspiration, and both of these noble qualities are eluding me recently. Is it laziness? Busyness? Preoccupation? The jury is out. But I look at the page, and I’m frustrated. I push the page with the back of my pencil, then walk away. “Maybe tomorrow,” I think. My mind reels with a thousand thoughts in no direction.

Writing is a sport, a practice, a discipline. And I am out of shape.

Yet still, in this dry time, I am not wholly lacking. Writing is good for my soul and my mind, and I need it. But it is not the only thing. Recently, the rhythms taking place around my kitchen are keeping me and comforting me and inspiring me. Menu planning and setting a table, chopping vegetables and melting butter in my cast iron, deglazing a pan and sticking a skewer in a muffin. These routines of planning and cooking and cleaning and repeating are just so familiar to me. This is what I grew up around. These are the activities that comfort me, that I understand, that make me feel like my feet are on the ground again.

Because even when my well is feeling dry, I can look to the greats– rifle through my cookbooks and my mother’s salvaged copies of Cooks Illustrated — and make something worth sharing. When I can’t find my way, I can find my way through my beaten up old recipe journal. I can feel inspired, and I can feel that power of creating something good and giving it freely to those I love.

I am, as Shauna says, getting to the place, where the most important words are, “I love you, and dinner’s at 6.” And that feels plenty inspiring.