You could at least make soup

from the sea  (5) - Baubo’s bird ludes by freda karpf

She felt a fondness for the woods, the weeds, the dry crackling grasses that winter winds brushed. She enjoyed their sense of presence.  She acknowledged this to the trees, to herself.  She knew the trees were alive with thought, consciousness, whatever blessed thing people think they have that is so much better then nature. She knew and this world knew her back.  It was the same seamless seam that Mrs. Scattergood moved along. The slick in the water that smoothed out in odd shapes with the run and ripples of the river providing the frame. 

~

     Mercury came out of Eleusis with messages for everyone. Forgetfulness drowns out immediacy and connection. Mercury, that quicksilver being, was a love channel. Everything either swam up that river or down. Nothing was impeded unless some fool damned it up and tried to secure all the love for themselves.  Monotheism, the ruination of flow.  Baubo and others still worked all the connections.

~

     Mrs. Scattergood had abandoned herself to forgetfulness.  If she had only stuck to things she knew she would remember. She rarely did that. Her soups were a good for instance. A recipe should be a plan. She read them. Studied them. Copied them out. Created her shorthand to make them quick and easier to follow. The same recipe brought into her being over and over again like a student studying flash cards, just seeing the card sparks the memory. But does that last outside the review of the cards?   One could allude to the study of the Talmud and be congruent with who Mrs. Scattergood was. But this would only be a red herring. Not even the kind of herring Mrs. Scattergood would eat; that being only creamed herring, that being mostly for the sweet onions. But that sort of half on half off the tracks was just the thing with her. She would learn these recipes until she felt fluent in them. Once a part of her liquid memory she would change everything about them. Not Navy beans but cannelloni beans. Not just any cannelloni beans but cannellini runners.  Salt pork, you say?  A ham bone?  No, not just any ham bone but one that wasn’t preserved with nitrites. Poisons. Such poisons. For that?  Isn’t smoking good enough? 

~

     The first year that Mrs. Scattergood quit writing Telltale, she began to make soup. She had the aunt, the niece Leah, and the old couple, the Gartens, all these characters waiting to be brought to life again, abandoned. Nobody knew this. Only she knew this. It felt a little crazy. The writer is now The Soupster. That is what gave her bones comfort. She even headed home because of the call of the soup. This is what happens when grief pays a call and life is not what it was. What it was is forgotten amidst the hubbub of the soul stirrings and the confusion of history crowding memories while the day rolls through its minutes. 

~

     Even if she didn’t know who she was, at least Mrs. Scattergood could make soup.  The characters that she abandoned had been running their lives in her head like a film for so long that when she went to write their story, she felt she had already lived it.  She got tired of being a television screen for them.  As soon as she had decided that she couldn’t write the novel she made a parallel decision that she could make soup.  She made variations on navy bean soup; every combination of every navy bean soup recipe she read eventually reduced to their primary elements became her generic Navy bean soup. Without the Navy beans, of course. 

~

     There are only so many ingredients one can accommodate before you begin to realize that the act of making soup is a blessing. Who really needs a recipe?  Soup is open to all.  Nobody is stopped at the door, or, the rim of the pot. Every kind of vegetable, fruit, or meat is welcome. There are no barriers to what it can be and no hard line to what it must remain. Soup gone to storage in the refrigerator one evening will be tastier the next. Does not wisdom achieve the same outcome?

~

     Just like Baubo, Mrs. Scattergood was always speaking as if someone were there.  Most often they weren’t.  As much as she loved people, she was most often without them.  She knows some things were going on.  Things shaping up, taking a form that was one of the benefits of the agreed upon world. 

~

     The world is becoming more and more complex.  No matter.  The way through is simple.  If you never had the road anyway, go with what feels right.

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf

It’s hard to sing with a caterpillar in your mouth

from the sea  (5) - Baubo’s bird ludes by freda karpf

Going back even further, you can connect her lineage to Baubo’s.  So strange really and who would have thought it so. But back when the hanging gardens of Baubo’s follies were amusing the fools on Eleusis, even back then the connection to Mrs. Scattergood existed, if only a shadow waiting for the fullness of her being to embody.  Journeys are complex and yet the arrival point, waking up to the present, is simple. You are there and there is no tangible past that can pull you back to another time and place.  Unless you have mischief in your back pocket and an old fart like Baubo jogging your memory and picking apart the lines of zig so that she could enjoy the lines of zag. 

~

     Baubo was drawn to mischief. She didn’t always know what drew her but she was good at following that thread. She loved to watch the story unfold.  ‘So birds?’ she was thinking. And wondered if there were any rare birds brooding here.  That would protect Mrs. Scattergood’s land from development if that was ever an issue. That would mean her home was a home to others as well. That would mean, there is, as there always seems to be, more meaning than you know in the place you call home.

~

     Just about the time these plovers were rocking in the sand building their cradles Baubo saw a wren, prolific little singer, singing along, one song after another. Never a full verse or chorus but a continuous shuffle of song parts until it picked up a piece of a caterpillar. Then it was trying to announce its catch. It’s hard to sing with a caterpillar in your mouth. Baubo can attest to that. There was a momentary silence. 

~

     Baubo made claims about many things but every molecule of mischief, every shit and giggle, wasn’t going to be so transparent. One had to look a little harder than just suspecting. It was against all odds that plover eggs would survive the tide of overdevelopment, loose dogs and wild cats a’hunting.  Wasn’t it? Everyone wanted their return; wanted them to thrive. Hoped against the odds. But many knew it took more than hope. It took laws and even then it might take, a mechanic gone mad, someone like Barry, to forge plover’s eggs and bluff a would be buyer. ‘Wouldn’t that be special’, Baubo thought, for the moment, admiring someone as wicked as herself.

~

     Back in Eleusis, that sacred land, the great ones and their friends enjoyed being stoned out of their minds and discovering new connections. That was the time when the universe exploded with stars and the ancients gave birth to rock candy and piñatas of philosophies. Until everyone split for a spice to make the soup just right.  Soulful times.  As you know, Plato predicted it, others have noted, the descent into the realm of the material world concurrently required the need for musicals and variety acts.  It is a difficult process putting on time’s skin. Once you zip up you’re forced to live half in sun and half in shadow.

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf

the red thread was longing

from the sea  (5) - Baubo’s bird ludes by freda karpf

Baubo came into Mrs. Scattergood’s life for a season and got there early in spring to be ready for it.  The one family season that Mrs. Scattergood knew before forgetting and grief was summer.  People might ask themselves the why of it all.  Mrs. Scattergood didn’t. She just welcomed Baubo into her stream of her being. 

     It’s entirely possible that you meet people late in life solely for the purpose of introducing you to things you’d been missing. Anais Nin wrote that "Friendships nurture all that has been lost in our lives."  Memories have come alive because of Baubo’s presence. Desires and ghosts too. The golem has nothing on her and she had an entire beach front to work the sand up into whatever she wanted.

~

     The possibility of being met is embedded in the idea of beshert. You may have to go through trials and any number of un-fated meetings; but eventually, you will be met.  In a sense, because fate would have the coupling that you desire, it is similar to the notion of being called.  A soul mate calls to one. Distance is collapsed.  Or becomes inconsequential. Or it is bridged.  Fate and soul are fused so that fate means soul-mate. Just as beshert is beshert. Just this way, Baubo and Mrs. Scattergood were connected. Each had notions of why and how. For Mrs. Scattergood it was fate, of which kind, she was not sure. For Baubo it was the soup, the need she perceived in Mrs. Scattergood and the sense of mischief she loved to use even if only as a lens on this world. She also sensed that Mrs. Scattergood’s red thread was longing.  She was there to see what that longing was all about.

~

     Mrs. Scattergood paired passion with grief. Right there in the kitchen. That’s when Baubo appeared.  There’s no way of knowing how your energies and emotions will get diverted over the decades.  Who could predict that with any sort of accuracy?  Baubo could.  Or Mrs. Scattergood’s soup had quite the come hither and drew Baubo from her world to this narrow spit of a wetland and Mrs. Scattergood’s home.

~

     Baubo told Mrs. Scattergood about the red thread. It is a way through, a passage. The thread pulls a person through whatever it is that has them confined. If you find a thread you are connected to the source on the other end.

~

  Mrs. Scattergood might be connected to it but she could not summon passion. She would have to pull her way back to it as if she repelled through the years to the depths where passion could not dive. She joked with Baubo that she once wished she could have allowed herself to go after women the way some pick out cigars.  She didn’t care if they were in a humidor or not.  She just wanted to smoke.

~    

     People find their way here.  "Beshert is beshert." When used as a noun, it means "soul mate" or the one with whom you were destined to be.  Fate is something we all get whether we want it or not. She was destined to be with Baubo. 

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf