Writing Assignment

#1

I got a book today called The Daily Writer, with subjects or areas of writing concentration to do every day of the year. Today’s task is to write about the senses and the first thing I encountered after reading the prompt was my onions.

I chopped onions for a White Chili. I chopped them small and while the knife sliced through the apple-crisp bulb the smell was overpowering, a smell I’ve always thought was like underarm odor--thank goodness perspiration doesn’t usually make your eyes water or make you want to leave the room (unless it’s a teenage boy’s). I also noted the stiff papery outer covering of the onion--so substantial that a person could probably use it to write on if paper was scarce but onions were plentiful.

Now the onions are in the hot pan, with olive oil and garlic, sizzling and turning transparent and the smell has transformed into something appealing, rather than appalling. And when I add the coriander, the cloves, the oregano and the cumin the smell becomes exotic as a spice bizarre.

#2

I am processing oregano. This oregano began in my garden, growing to stems of 2 to 3 feet. “Cut it when it flowers”, my Greek mother-in-law advises, “it will be stronger then”. I cut it and hang it in bunches in the garage, up high where it won’t get in the way. I dry it for all the months since summer and then I climb a ladder to get one of the bunches down, bring it in the house and strip the leaves and flowers off the stems. I spend 2 days stripping for one bunch. I watch the season premier of Lost, including the catch-up hour, while doing this. My fingers get tired and a little sore from breaking the flowers off the ends of the stems--they don’t strip off the stems easily like the leaves do. I am doing this in our bedroom because that’s where I’ve recorded the program and the whole room smells like an Italian kitchen by the time I’m done. Will we dream of Italy tonight?

Now I am taking the next step, grinding the herb that I’ve stripped from the stem. I tried putting it in the food processor but it was so light that it merely whirled around and around, it didn’t chop or break down at all. The oregano was mocking me, saying, So you think there’s going to be a shortcut? Get over it. So I’m doing it the way I’ve done it before, with mortar and pestle. I have a big brass mortar and pestle that we scoured the Plaka for in Greece on one of our trips. My half-Greek husband wanted one like his Yaya had and we finally found one in one of the little shops that looked like all the other little shops, filled with alabaster owls and marble Greek god statues and many-colored sets of worry beads. It is a heavy piece of manual equipment and could be used as a weapon in a pinch. Each piece has such heft that if dropped on a foot or finger there would be damage to the appendage, not the brass. The weight of it does a lot of the work for me.

At the rate of about 1/2 cup of leaves and flowers at a time, I pound and grind, up and down, round and round, until I have a much broken down result that more resembles what comes in a jar. The aroma is heady, I dream of spaghetti while pounding, a spicy bubbling red sauce flavored with this fresh, garden-grown, hand ground herb. My hand gets tired with all this pounding and round and round motion and so I have to rest after 5 or 6 batches, do something more hand soothing, but still I can smell the results of my work all over the house. Later I will pour out the ground product on a cookie sheet and pick out any tiny stems that are left, reminding me of the days when my husband used to pick out the stems of another popular herb of the day, preparing it for smoking. I think I could get high on the smell of my oregano as it moves from garden to kitchen to stew pot. Sometimes I wonder if all this effort is worth it, the result of one big bunch of stems will barely be 1 1/2 cups of the herb, but when I bring the jar from the shelf and dump a tablespoon of it’s green and fragrant contents into my Sunday vegetable soup, or into the white chili or the burritos or whatever recipe cries out for it, I’m glad for time I took.

#3

I don’t suppose itching is a sense, really, although maybe the sense of touch is involved. I have an itchy head. Over the years I have struggled with seborrhea, which I guess is just a fancy word for dandruff. Sometimes it is located only at the nape of my neck under the hairline, but sometimes, like now, it is all over my head. And it itches. And I scratch it. And the flakes are big and they fall all over my shirt--dare not wear black or dark colors--and I am ashamed to say that I not only scratch that itch, I pick at it and pull away pieces of skin. There is something horribly satisfying about this. Scratching doesn’t really relieve the itch as it might if you had an itchy place on your back. It is more likely to make the itch worse, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying it. I try, try, try to stop myself, even yelling STOP IT! to myself. I am trying to put something else in my hand, like a set of worry beads I have. The other day I noted that even with the worry beads in my hand, my arm still moved to my head and my fingers, though they were wrapped in the beads, still managed to scratch and pick. I grabbed my arm like Dr. Strangelove, and held it down, but later it went right back up there.

It must be kind of like biting your fingernails, which I’ve never done. They are right there, and so tempting. They’re portable--they travel with you. It’s not a habit like drinking where you have to be somewhere where there’s booze, you have to have a bottle, a glass. Your fingernails and your head go with you wherever you go. You can bite or scratch in the car, in the bathroom, in bed, at the post office, at the mall--anywhere.

That little pile of dandruff on the wooden end of the couch is somehow satisfying, but it stares at me and taunts me and says, “You idiot woman! What are you doing? See how you can’t stop? Don’t you have any control?” And I answer, “I’m trying but no, I don’t have any control!” The only thing that remotely works is to have something in both hands, like my ITouch. I have to grasp it in my left hand while my right hand works on a word puzzle or a Falling Gems screen. But I can’t do that all day.

I’m using the proper shampoo, washing my hair with it every day, working on the “build-up” as the bottle calls it, so I’m doing the right thing in that sense, but I long for sunshine, which is the best cure of all. And it’s only February, the sunshine months are still far away. I look out my window at the gray, the damp, the steady rain and I scratch and pick. There may be more blog posts as a result of this lack of control, because I have to use both hands to type. The silver lining.

If my old friend, Jim Morgan, was still alive, he would be disgusted at my writing about this, but hey, full disclosure is what I’m all about.