It's needless to explain that I haven't been much for blogging...for a while. Since The Staff Sergeant returned, I have fallen more deeply in love with cooking for the 567,436th time in my adult life, and that has taken up more of my creative time than I would like to admit. It's probably my truest north but like everything else that I love deeply, my passion for it ebbs and flows like the tide. Since my sudden infatuation for growing fresh veggies in the spring, my interest in seasonal and organic cooking has grown exponentially. Here are a few of my latest cookbook recommendations. Despite a large library of others, these have found homes all over my house in easy to reach stacks. Their luscious photos are like food porn--really.

No taste for words

I chose the kitchen because I was hoping that its inspiration would caress something more thought provoking than the itch to bake peach muffins. They have now been made the reward for writing the story I must write today regardless of how dry my well of creativity may be, and it's dry--buckling, cracking-earth dry.

I don't ever feel like writing anymore, save the grocery lists that are composed according the the tastes that I wake up craving. There is ample inspiration fueling the homemaker in me but I can't earn a grade in a creative writing independent study based on the texture of tonight's ginger chicken with baked potatoes and fried green tomato towers (with feta and pesto sandwiched between slices, all stacked amid a mote of marinara sauce). And so it has recently occurred to me that maybe what I want to write about is food, or maybe it has occurred to me that what I want to do is make [food] and write...sometimes.

Every now and then I tell someone that I would love to open a bakery, only half believing the words myself. Yesterday morning the sun nudged us awake and hung over and head-cold-y I dreamed of bright-flavored berry muffins with lemoniness of an unknown origin. And as the day went on and I read of chocolatiers and couldn't get that Cake Love citrus bunt cake recipe out of my head for yet another consecutive day running, I didn't need to speak them. A vision appeared out of the dusty cyclone that is my future plan at the moment--turquoise walls and sunny yellow accents, muffins and homemade artisan loaves clustered on shelves and in pastry cases, vintage plates and tea pots and old tables salvaged from the roughs of flea markets. It makes a lot more sense to me than trying to write this paper right now, and it's all that I can do to stay planted in this kitchen chair as the peaches call to me from their crate, rotting by the second, desperate to be saved by the miracle of muffins. But still, I have to compose some pages on how I am different from a time before, or how a time changed me.

Who wouldn't have something to say to that prompt? I've lived 25 years and when I ponder the right tale, the right season of growth, I remain empty and flat. This writers block is the season at hand and if I knew how to send it elsewhere, I absolutely would.

things afoot in these parts

His banner, complements of Etsy

His homemade, chocolate-with-strawberries cake

And a mad canning phenomenon

(banana nut bread, balsamic pickled peaches, and classic dill pickled cucumbers)

All's well that ends well.

The long of it is logged in days and months and thousands of miles, and the short of it can be summed up in a mere two words:

he's home!

Deployment concluded.

universal truth

Sometimes I feel the great weight of this whole thing--being apart, knowing it isn't the last time, and knowing I still have to perform, [all] at once.

Mine is an act of blind compulsion. At 7am the squealing pulse of my cell phone goes off. I have nowhere to be, most likely, but anything later than that hour feels wasteful and lazy. I sit up in bed bed, fumbling for my glasses and make my way to the bathroom. Everything following this routine is the result of the necessity to hurl myself toward darkness, another day's end. If I don't think about the "great weight" or if I simply move forward faster than I think it can keep up, or if I tell myself that the inconvenience is almost over, not a pattern in the cycle that will soon form our life together, then the hours feel normal, like my friends', like the lives of conventional people.

No one spells out the phases of separation. No one has so kindly written What to Expect When You're Expecting Him to Return. Maybe I wouldn't have liked knowing that the last weeks would split my personality into multiples, none of which perform independently. Instead they vie for the spotlight hungrily, without reservation. I am angry and broken hearted and giddy with excitement, and overflowing-happy, while tears pool in dark spots on my clothes and vainly shouted curses ricochet from wall to wall, unheard. I have embraced the control that lies in day-long check lists and home projects and rendezvous with friends that have become my family. There are time-spots left open for washing dishes and ceremonies put into play for scrubbing sinks and the tub. This autonomy makes sense, this is what had to happen.

Now I am asked to hang in waiting for a coded word, then the next one and the next until he finally steps from the magic vessel that will bring him home. I'm no good for these terms, and what about after, when my lists are disrupted and my support group is pushed into second place, and the Army has control again of more than just an arrival date. How does the switch flip smoothly? How is it possibly fair to be expected to bounce from one existence to the other without suffering an inevitable and utter breakdown?

the full significance of a character

It's the second of two acts: World War II era, South Pacific. "Peggy the pin-up" takes the USO stage in a sequined red dress. The sparkle of scarlet in contrast with her platinum wig and the soft spotlight and the quintessential period microphone set the scene. We are the "soldiers," the audience. This song is dedicated by the Marilyn Monroe look-alike to us, to them. She wraps her delicate fingers around the microphone's base and as the piano cues, her sultry lips part to shape the words that I can almost entirely sing along to.

I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places...

She slowly swings her hips into the lounge-like performance, maintaining her persona of deliberate sensuality. Peggy croons through the second verse, the third, and in the fourth she unexpectedly falls out of character. Her bright lips fight against the stage smile that she so diligently attempts to hold against the weight of reality. Stepping back from her microphone, she turns away from the audience. It takes longer than a moment for her to regain composure, long enough that the accompanist glances up from her music, concerned and confused, long enough for those of us in the audience to realize that this is not scripted. Her grief ripples through the dark theatre--contagious. I see the silhouettes of other women subtly wiping tears from their cheeks, just as I stretch the sleeve of my cardigan over the inside of my wrist. Pressing it to my face, trying to stifle my own sadness, I blot at tears more slowly than they fall dripping down the front of my dress. The actress uncoils a couple of times, fans her face in efforts to reestablish the order of necessary existence, and eventually turns again to face us smiling. She finishes the song breathy and with a wink. She finishes not as the Army wife we catch a glimpse of, but as "Peggy Jones", starlet, pin-up, community theatre actress-in-role.

I don't have the patience or the focus to write. It certainly isn't that I don't have material. Turn on the news--I have LOTS of commentary. I have traveled to both ends of America this summer. And now that my personal life is slowly settling down, while the world is keeping it's usual, tumultuous pace, I just can't find the desire to express myself in words. The Middle East has temporarily made me a reader instead of a"writer."