Choreography
Dancing My Days
The rhythm of meals The rhyme of routine the day as dance, as poem
Talking to my kids I sometimes joke — though it’s borderline not a joke — that my days are not so much well-planned as exquisitely choreographed.
This is most noticeable in the kitchen, or as I think of it, the galley (for over a year, I made my home on a 36-foot sloop, and its galley was not much smaller than the ditto in my landlocked Northern California cabin — and by Northern I don’t mean the Bay area, I mean Northern as in a few blocks south of the Oregon border).
I live by the golden rule (especially in the galley): a place for everything and everything in its place. I don’t know who came up with it or coined it but it’s a spot-on rule in my book.
Perhaps I would not put money on it, but I believe that, by now, I could prepare my salad blindfolded.
Nor am I sure whether I should be embarrassed or not to admit, even to myself, that my hand- and feet- and arm- and eye-movements during salad prep (cutting, slicing, measuring, mixing, et cetera) are the very same from one day to the next. Truth is, I don’t think about it much anymore, but when I do the word “choreographed” waltzes in and makes a nuisance of itself again.
I kind of like that word, though. I see myself in one of those diagrams that shows the dance steps for, say, the polka, or the waltz. That’s me, right there, slicing cucumber and zucchini: numbered illustrations, arrows, feet, the whole thing: well-choreographed.
The rhythm of meals, the rhyme of routine, the day as dance.
As poem.
© Wolfstuff
