The Cook




Somewhere in some poem by Seamus Heaney is a scene from the poet's memory where he is watching a woman in his family (his mother? aunt? grandmother? My power of recall is fading!) perform a mundane task in the kitchen. She is cooking or canning or jarring. The poem builds to its teaching, which is that that is what love looks like. Or something like that.

I have retreated to that image many times, because I don't trust the images from advertising and celebrity culture that purport to show us what love looks like. 

And I have used that half-remembered poem fragment to make sense of what I see every day in the kitchen in my house, where Shelagh, my wife, loves our little family into existence according to an ancient recipe. 

I am no moviemaker, but I wanted to try to capture that reality as she made meatballs yesterday. 



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