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Sheila Knell's avatar

Quote on my chalkboard kitchen wall by Neem Karoli Baba: Love people and feed them.

I will squeeze lemons and peel ginger and add water and cinnamon and honey and then simmer, pour, deliver.

I will pick chicken from bone, add broth and vegetables, season and serve soup when you feel depleted.

I will make fresh scones and clotted cream and homemade raspberry jam and tea when you come home from England wishing you were still there, young and full of dreams of travel.

I will shave dark chocolate into full fat milk with sugar and just a touch of cayenne and cinnamon to warm February bones.

I will send cookies and brownies to your air force base and when you are home on leave I will fill the kitchen with every favorite, every dinner a Sunday meal and eggs every which way for breakfast.

I will step away and let yeast and water and salt and flour become better than the sum of their parts and bake in a blazing cast iron pot and call you to the kitchen while the bread is still warm.

I will let flour fly and sugar sparkle, berries will join hands, buttery crust will flake and pie will be served.

I will grind the beans and pour the water into the French press and pick a mug I think you will like.

I will pick and cook and peel and process beets in a kitchen stuffed full of hair frizzing humidity.

I will stir, mix, blend, chop and toss, simmer and grill, boil and broil, bake, saute and simmer, coat in olive oil and season with salt and roast for you.

I will feed you like an oak feeds squirrel and jay, like goldenrod feeds September bees, like snowmelt feeds streams and rain feeds puddles. I will feed you like a middle-aged lady feeds her birds.

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suse's avatar

“Tell me about a skill you possess”. My heart sinks heavy and I want to hide. Please don’t ask me this. I don’t have any skills. Not now, age 50. Not anything that would mark me out as special, different, unique, worthy of the telling. My first instinct: to tell you about the skills of others. My friends, my family, the little boy who lives next door and pretends to be a dragon. Or to say that I did, once, have skills, but so distant in time it’s barely memory. Talents and abilities I possessed as a little girl. I could do backflips! Turn endless perfectly dizzying cartwheels until I collapsed in a giggling heap, the world still spinning around me.

And yet. My friends, my colleagues – have they not sung the song of myself to me, when I could not (or would not) sing the song myself? My friend who admired my hand-knit jumper, striped in the colours of the summer Hebridean sea, unknowing of the hidden months-long labour of its creation. A colleague who felt able to share with me some of her deepest worries, knowing she would be truly heard and seen by me in the telling. Awards given more than once for being ‘best educational supervisor of the year’ from former students.

Perhaps what I have lost is not the actual skills, but rather the skills of seeing, of recognising, of valuing. My skills. Myself. Perhaps it’s now more than time to regain this long-lost skill.

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