TIME TO SAVOR
THE REDOLENCE OF FALL
Journal of Healing – Oct. 15, 2003
By Mary Koch

There’s an herb called "summer savory," but fall, it seems to me, is the savory season.

Our kitchen is redolent (I looked up the word to make sure it was the one I wanted. It is. Definition: "exuding fragrance") of the bountiful harvest that followed our lingering summer. I savor the scent of sultry steam as Concord grapes give up their juices; the blended aroma of tomatoes, basil, shallots, onions, and garlic simmering into a rich sauce, the tantalizing smell of browning zucchini bread.

When my husband settles in with a book on tape or a M*A*S*H rerun, I escape from care-giving to the kitchen, ignoring the supposedly more important things that need to be done. I especially ignore that quarrelsome voice inside my head.

"What do you think you’re doing?" the voice complains. "There’s a mountain of work on your desk, windows to wash, laundry to fold and promises to keep. You’re wasting all this time fixing food when there’s only one of you to eat it!"

"Hush," I tell the voice. I was going to tell it to "shut up," but I’m trying to be gentle with myself.

"I am not cooking for my stomach," I explain. "I am cooking for my soul."

* * *

YOU KNOW THE old saying about people who live to eat instead of eating to live? Well, there are those of us who don’t cook to live, but live to cook.

This feast for my soul is especially treasured because there was a point in my life when I thought I would have to give up the joy of cooking.

Before John’s stroke, our kitchen was the heart of our home. Cooking was a shared delight, a release from daily stresses. After the stroke, a feeding tube was implanted in John’s stomach. I thought our kitchen was doomed to become a sterile laboratory serving up only the liquid nutrition he needed to stay alive.

I could not expose John to the tantalizing aromas of food preparation, when he could not participate in the eating. I hid in the kitchen, out of John's sight, eating microwaved food that tasted like the box that produced it.

* * *

BEFORE LONG, John set me straight. "Stop sneaking around to eat," he spelled out with his eye-blink code. He made it clear that he enjoys the smell of food cooking even if he can’t eat it. A house becomes a home when it is redolent of bacon in the frying pan or pot roast in the oven,

When things are going well, John does eat a little bit. I stir a large kettle of soup knowing full well we’ll be lucky if he can down as much as a half-cup. But I figure the bigger the kettle, the richer the flavor, even if it's just a bite or two.

Cookbook author and caterer Siri-Ved Kaur Khalsa advises that as we prepare food we need to "be filled with heartfelt love for those (including the self!) who will be eating the food, joy in its preparation, and most importantly, a sense of the Divine coming into the food."

Thus we are better filled from the cooking than from the eating.