six impossible things before breakfast 125plow? The answer, he says, is yes. Eternal is the right frame of mind.
“When I’m out there cultivating the corn with a good team in the quiet of
the afternoon, watching the birds in the hedgerows, oh my goodness, I
could just keep going all day. Kids from the city come out here and ask,
‘What do you do for fun around here?’ I tell them, ‘I cultivate.’ ”
Now that I’m decades older and much less clever than I was in col-
lege, I’m getting better at facing life’s routines the way my friend faces his
cornfield. I haven’t mastered the serene mindset on all household chores
(What do you do for fun around here? I scrub pots and pans, okay??), but
I might be getting there with cooking. Eternal is the right frame of mind
for making food for a family: cooking down the tomatoes into a red- gold
oregano-scented sauce for pasta. Before that, harvesting sun- ripened
fruits, pinching oregano leaves from their stems, growing these things
from seed—yes. A lifetime is what I’m after. Cooking is definitely one of
the things we do for fun around here. When I’m in a blue mood I head for
the kitchen. I turn the pages of my favorite cookbooks, summoning the
prospective joyful noise of a shared meal. I stand over a bubbling soup,
close my eyes, and inhale. From the ground up, everything about nourish-
ment steadies my soul.
Yes, I have other things to do. For nineteen years I’ve been nothing but
a working mother, one of the legions who could justify a lot of packaged,
precooked foods if I wanted to feed those to my family. I have no argu-
ment with convenience, on principle. I’m inordinately fond of my dish-
washer, and I like the shiny tools that lie in my kitchen drawers, ready to
make me a menace to any vegetable living or dead. I know the art of the
quickie supper for after- a-long-day nights, and sometimes if we’re too
weary we’ll go out to a restaurant, mainly to keep the kitchen clean.
But if I were to defi ne my style of feeding my family, on a permanent
basis, by the dictum, “Get it over with, quick,” something cherished in
our family life would collapse. And I’m not just talking waistlines, though
we’d miss those. I’m discussing dinnertime, the cornerstone of our family’s
mental health. If I had to quantify it, I’d say 75 percent of my crucial
parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our fam-
ily convenes for our evening meal. I’m sure I’m not the only parent to
think so. A survey of National Merit scholars—exceptionally successful