Yesterday, Nick put water on to boil and left it for me to make tea. That boy. Can he boil his own water? Yes. Can he even cook? Yes. Somehow I’m still the one who makes it for him. Mike said one day when I was grumbling about constantly cooking for him that he thought I should always cook for him as long as I can. He said it was what his mother did. He said it was what my grandma did, to cook. I think maybe he’s right, but I get tired. I get overwhelmed with cooking and cleaning and cooking and cleaning and no, I don’t know what’s for dinner tonight.
Food is love though. I assure you that for most of us mothers and all of our children, the sense of being loved is inextricably intertwined with food. For me, it is the smell of Grandma’s coffee-can bread baking. It is the gentle way she fried bacon and baked biscuits as an alarm clock at an ungodly hour and never once yelled for us to get up. It is the taste of a hot dusty tomato popped into my mouth and the burst of warm juice when I bit through the skin.
Yes, food is love.
So what should I make for my guys today? I finally feel like cooking. It took me over a week to cool down after that colossally hot day. It hovered at one hundred and twelve degrees for two hours. No one wanted to eat even though we were lucky enough to have some cooling, two competent room air conditioners and when the power went out right at the apex of heat, the cool of the basement floor.
We survived, but my Western hemlock is shedding needles like a maple dropping leaves in the fall. The slugs come to greet me every morning when I water. And I don’t see nearly as many hummingbirds as I saw before the heat wave. It still hasn’t rained more than a few drops since then. So, yeah, it took about ten days for us to recover. It took me this long to want to cook anything but three bean salad and refrigerator pickles.
I was trying to tell you about watching water boil. Remember the tea?
Somehow, I stood in the kitchen and watched this pot boil. Nick filled my oldest pot. It’s the pot that wobbles under the heat because it’s bottom isn’t flat any more. It’s the pot that’s cheap and shows visible dents inside from being dropped over the years. My old pot and the water began to rattle on the burner and I stood on one foot and watched.
I’m trying to regain my balance. Don’t mock me.
It didn’t rattle continuously. It would set up a rattle until standing waves inside threatened to spill, then settle down again. Did you ever see the experiments people have done with water and a speaker? Sounds create beautiful geometric patterns: Cymatics / Cimatica - Experiment 8 (432 Hz) - Bing video
You’re back?
That was cool, wasn’t it? Now, Imagine that without the pretty music and replace the neat container of water with a dented and rattling old pot of water. The rattling water began to make geometric wave patterns, always threatening to spill out at the same places on the circle. To see better, I turned on the light over the stove. Suddenly, the light on the water created a white bird fluttering, hovering on the surface. Then, there were signals like what moved across my dad’s oscilloscope in 1969 when he hooked it up to a microphone and showed me the shapes of sound. And then there were words I couldn’t quite read. It kept cycling through this pattern as if trying to give me a code written by aliens. I couldn’t crack the code, birds, signals, words, birds signals, words. I didn’t want to crack the code. If I did, aliens would make contact with me and the science fiction movie would begin. No way. I was wearing a red shirt.
I tried to drop the video here, but I’m inept so you’ll have to use your imagination until I educate myself further. Your imagination is probably better than my videography anyway.
Eventually, I came out of my trance, turned off the heat under the battered pot, threw in a few tea bags, and left it to steep.
I had my chance with the aliens and I blew it. Better not to know. They’ve probably already contacted the guys from the cymatics video.
Food may be love, but food is science too. Watch out for food.
Thank you for listening, jules