Truth is—as my 13 year old says—I am not a simple woman. If given a choice between simple and complicated, I’ll go with complicated every time. It’s not even willful, it just is. My poems are contraptions teetering on the edge of collapse at all times, and sometimes plummeting directly over that edge. And, as my husband points out, because people are just like their poems, my life is complicated, too.
It took me a long time to get here—twists and turns, mistakes, heartbreaks, bad behavior all around, years of agonizing over my own failures, J.D., M.F.A, the works. And now—even settled in here to our little corner of the world—my life is not simple. The girls are playing sports, practicing piano, looking for their dance gear, baking cookies, finishing homework, and often bickering, all at the same time. David and I are both running organizations, driving kids to and from lessons, maintaining friendships here in Portland and around the country and trying to think two thoughts in a row in order to write the occasional poem.
In short, it’s complex, noisy, baroque, and sometimes, a snarled up mess. The laundry asserts itself in huge piles. And, I know we are not alone. Nearly everyone I know feels hurried and hassled. Every time we turn our attention to one crisis, another pops up behind us. There are days when I can’t even bring myself to read the newspaper. I wasn’t worrying about air quality in the Columbia River Corridor, and look, there it is, something real to worry about and fix. And climate change. And broken down schools. And incivility in Congress. And on and on. It makes me wonder if we have exceeded both our human capacity to respond to stimuli and our institutions’ resilience in the face of change.
Maybe we don’t just feel like we are wobbling on the edge of chaos, maybe we actually are. Thomas Berg, in his fine new book on the Minnesota legislature—Minnesota’s Miracle—posits that part of public dissatisfaction with government is that it has become more and more impenetrable in order to deal with an increasingly complex and fast-paced world. He suggests that government feels out of scale to individuals because the society it responds to and is a part of has become out of scale.
So, as we all careen from one thing to the next, some of it joyful, some of it necessary, some of it merely distracting, are there any safe harbors available to us? Strangely, for me, I have found one in the kitchen. Of course, by disposition, I am attracted to complex recipes and time-consuming preparations. I love to caramelize onions all afternoon for a melt-in-your-mouth French onion soup. I like curries that start with hand-ground spices and trifles that take three days to soak.
But recently I have found other comforts as well—the comforts of fresh peas with butter, a strong cup of black coffee, a plain baked sweet potato. In short, I have discovered—or rediscovered—the pleasures of simplicity. I have always taken irrational joy in packing leftovers for lunch. I love stretching a pot of spaghetti sauce with a few extra tomatoes so that unexpected guests can stay for dinner. I adore a winter soup made from whatever’s in the crisper.
Now though, paring back, simplifying, reducing waste feels more intentional and even more urgent. At the suggestion of the wonderful poet, Martha Silano, I recently read An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler. In the book, Adler challenges us all to think about food differently. As she put it in her introduction: “Cooking is both simpler and more necessary than we imagine. It has in recent years come to seem a complication to juggle against other complications, instead of what it can be—a clear path through them.”
Yes! That’s right, isn’t it? Cooking can be a place to slow down, to use what you have, to see and smell and taste fresh vegetables and simple herbs. It is a place where—like Adler—we can make tomorrow’s broth out of the scraps from tonight’s stir fry. It is a place where we can take control and pay attention. It is a place where radishes with butter and salt can linger on the tongue and in the imagination. It is—or can be—our safe harbor.
And, as I try to fight back complexity, at least in the kitchen, I can not forget the beautiful poem, “Potato” by Richard Wilbur that starts here:
An underground grower, blind and a common brown;
Got a misshapen look, it’s nudged where it could;
Simple as soil yet crowded as earth with all.
Cut open raw, it looses a cool clean stench,
Mineral acid seeping from pores of prest meal;
It is like breaching a strangely refreshing tomb:
Therein the taste of first stones, the hands of dead slaves,
Waters men drank in the earliest frightful woods,
Flint chips, and peat, and the cinders of buried camps.
Cooking and eating simply, re-experiencing the earthy potato, they bring me into communion—and solidarity—with farmers and truck drivers and cheese makers. They make me slow down and be grateful for what I have in the pantry and to reflect quietly—rather than frantically—on the suffering of my fellow citizens who can’t count on a handful of carrots and a pat of fresh butter.
So tonight, when I make a winter vegetable soup and easy popovers for my family’s dinner, I vow to slow down. I vow to chop intentionally and gratefully and practically. And, at least for tonight, I vow to be a simpler woman.
