Food keeps me humble and reminds me that I'm as kin to a cabbage or a clam as to a Bengal tiger on the prowl. That's why I decline the epic view from the battlements in favor of the view from my kitchen window, fogged by steam from the soup in the pot. When I chop onions and carrots, crush garlic, and hunt out meaty bones for my soup, I'm doing what I've done for decades and what women before me have done from the beginning of time, when they used stones instead of knives and ashes instead of pots. There's comfort in this, in the need, in the craft, in the communion of hands and of hungers. A wooden spoon links me to my grandmother in her apron and to the woman who taught Jacob to stir a mess of pottage.
History can turn on a spoon, on a soup.
But the songs of an old stove, no matter how darkly they glitter, are gay.