Fish for Breakfast

I'm restless this morning.

All I see are open projects, things left undone, papers that need to be collected and recycled, things out of place, things that have no place yet.

A coal seam in the landscape of my home.

I look around and feel bewildered. Where do I begin? It seems that this needs to happen before that can be done, and that needs to happen before something else can be done. Layers upon layers of things calling for my attention. 

My attention feels like a limited resource these days. And I'm not sure that there's enough of it even on a good day to begin to clear things.

So they sink, dead and decaying organic matter that falls into shallow and stagnant waters. Buried. The temperature increases and the pressure becomes greater. The compression and heat turn it into something harder, and harder still.

Carbon? Diamond?

Sometimes I open my fridge and look inside when my thoughts feel too big. I notice the fish I took out of the freezer last night to thaw for dinner tonight. The two small glass jars with stewed veg and sautéed veg that looked good but that I had no idea what to do with when I moved them from freezer to fridge. I'd cooked up all that just before the unexpected trip to see my mother in the hospital. 

The oven is preheating and the mahi mahi is seasoned with olive oil, salt, and pepper in my cast iron skillet. The jars of veg sit on the counter. I'll add that when the fish is mostly done to heat everything together and combine the flavors. 

My tea has gone cold while I've been writing.

The skillet goes into the oven and I set the timer I brought home from Mom's. It was a gift from my daughter to her grandmother. It looks like a chubby blue bird with big eyes and yellow feet. My daughter said, "Please take this home with you, Mom. I like thinking about you using it and it being in your kitchen now." She told me to take other things too. A set of beautiful, hand-painted measuring bowls, a small plate with a beautiful quotation. 

What has heart and meaning will find its way in. In the meantime, there's fish for breakfast.

Creating Space: Three Months of Showing Up for What's Showing up is a daily writing practice. Turns out that a lot of this writing explores the landscape of grief. My mother died shortly before I began, and this is what's on my mind most of the time.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.