I do not cook from recipes. I don’t have time for them. When a dinner guest asks me for a recipe, I email them a tome.

I used to bad-mouth recipes and recipe cooks, but why spew negativity on a tangent?Recipes and cooking are distant cousins whose names and ages we don’t remember. In my mind, anyhow.

Cooking is about seeing where a dish can go. My repertoire is narrow but deep. I can go years and not add a new dish. Slowness and almost imperceptible shifts through sameness like greying hair—this is cooking.

When I first made kielbasa and cabbage, a dish my mother learned from her mother and I from both of them, there were no carrots or dill seeds, both completely ordinary compliments to potatoes, and now I find myself saying, There’s basil in the garden. Why not? I have explored the dish from so many sides and so many moods, I know what basil will do. It’ll make it taste of basil. Why pay allegiance to one sausage or another?

I can hear my mom now, saying, I wouldn’t like that. She likes it how she likes it. It’s her jam. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days debating broth or no broth, simmer or braise. You can do it however you choose.

I used to garden for the sake of raising plants. Eating from the garden wasn’t relevant to the enterprise. Learning from it was. Times have changed.

Now I let the garden tell me what to cook. I planted the stuff, so maybe I should listen.

It’s the long and slow listening I love. Lately, when I make sausage, potatoes and greens (kielbasa and cabbage), I braise it. I sit on the couch and watch tv. I know when it’s time to stand up, open the oven door, and slide the faraway end of my chef’s knife into one potato.

It’s the being present in moments which is cooking. The rim of the enameled cast iron with vapors of caramel stuck to it. How small the turnip greens have become! How nicely the potato yields to so little pressure. How badly I want to find someone I love to be inside the joy.

The gifts we would give if we could, and we do try.

I’m on my morning coffee break at work. I had to wear my waterproof boots this morning because everything is wet. I didn’t much feel like going to work this morning, but I’m dedicated and honest, and so there I went. But I stopped in the garden for five minutes before leaving the house.

Last week, I decided that it was time to reduce the number of heads of iceberg lettuce by half. In each spot, two heads were growing, and it was time to cull the smaller of each. That gave me about nine small heads to enjoy. I’m lazy when it comes to salad dressing. I just squirt on some creamy dressing from the store, shred half a carrot, and crumble a little bleu cheese on top, if I have any.

Iceberg from the store can be uninspired, but I still love it. I would be willing to bet quite a bit of money (that I don’t have) that 100% of iceberg lettuce in the store is grown hydroponically and rapidly juiced with so much water so that it can get to market quickly, and this is what accounts for it’s very watery texture and near total lack of flavor. Don’t read that as a complaint or even a criticism of iceberg lettuce. That’s how it’s supposed to be. It’s a bona fide industrial crop, or so it has been since anyone can remember, which is why it thrills me to grow it in my garden. It goes without saying that iceberg lettuce grown in your garden retains all the qualities that we enjoy and to them adds flavor. Imagine that!

I won’t say that I’ve become lazy in the dinner department. It would be more accurate to say that I spend 4 to 5 hours working in the garden and on the farm after work each weeknight. The result is that I don’t have as much time to mess around with complex meal prep at 8 PM or 7:30 or whatever the time may be. Last week I had a breakthrough. Into one large bowl I threw my chicken potatoes, sliced onions and chopped scapes, and bbq sauce mix. I let all of the components get some color over a ripping hot fire of seasoned oak, and then I rotated the entire grate to transport my dinner to the cool side of the grill so that it could roast, lid on, until the chicken and the potatoes were cooked through. Hot damn were those potatoes smoky and amazing. Coupled with an iceberg salad mmm mmm mmm.

What if you were an empty can? When somebody lost their bearings, would you turn around and ask yourself how to find your way?

There was a time when I knew a man who collected long pauses. Once, I found him asleep on an armoire in an antique store. I nudged him through his beard and thought, Maybe that’s how Renoir did it.

Of course I never understood a thing about Renoir. Manet. Yes. Renoir. No.

In my favorite pre-Impressionist paintings, I can feel the temperature of the air. When I was older and more self-assured, I could talk confidently about Gustave Calliebotte. I could tell another man about the light on the sweaty backs of the men in The Floor Scrapers and not worry how I would be taken.

I have scraped more than a few floors myself, and I have earned this confidence.

Freedom from fear. Freedom from worry and want. I looked at a house today with a Chinese realtor. Iris was her name.

Somebody put their fist through the wall two times at the bottom of the stairs. They put it through the bathroom wall two more times. I thought, somebody here has an anger problem. And then I looked up the stairs at the torso-sized hole outside the bedroom. “Angry,” Iris said. It was sad to behold.

I was standing before a still life with grapes, silver, and crystal when I realized that the still life tradition wasn’t about fruit and shellfish and dishes. It was about challenge and competition and one-upmanship.

I don’t want to compete with anyone anymore. I’m not sure I want to tell stories.

A wise man once said that a story is a floor you walk on for a thousand years before you realize you have a home.

In the afternoon, when I am hair and pruning shears, the wood thrush is my company. Company is good.

It didn’t do well in 2024 either. I don’t remember why.

I’m hoping that it’ll do well this year. The soil is in better condition this year.

It’ll be a nice garden eventually. It’s a semi-circle with a 20 foot diameter. I pulled a lot of stones from it this spring. It had drainage problems.

I moved the stones to the perimeter of the circle. I liked the idea of a short stone wall around it instead of a wire fence.

Like I said, it’ll be a nice garden one day.

There’s a large pile of stones in the back field. It’s a lot of work moving them to the front gate.

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It’s a funny thing to say “do poorly” when when what you want is a small onion—it would be smarter to say “do diversely” or “do small and big” or even something outlandish like “do erroneously”—but farmers and non-farmers alike, the whole world round, agree that bigger is better. Big is abundance and small is poverty. A poverty of onions, a shanty-town of tomatoes, a shoeless little orphan of a green pepper. Yesterday afternoon, I snuck around the corner and spent a couple blissful hours at the eggplant flophouse. It’s hard to come back from a place like that, and perhaps there is no point.

In my nearly fifty years of life, I have done more than learn to question value systems. I have also learned to pull my frozen pizza from the oven and then ignore it for ten minutes. I have a great respect for the roof of my mouth, and I would like to instill this knowledge in my children.