My dirty hippie roots are showing.

I think we have mice

but only in the cabinet where the loaf pans loaf and the pie tins wait, forlorn and empty of tart treasures.

Crumbs of nourishment litter the floor because the baby roams wild as he feasts upon what he forages, what he gathers, what he gleans to feed his monstrous, howling appetite. It must be a wormhole, that mouth of his, that leads to an entire population of raving, starving madmen who speak through his lips words of a fool, words perfectly common to someone who has been alive on this crazy planet for not even a thousand days.

Dog hair—whispy white strands of clever evolution—flits and fumbles across the buttery wood of the floor. Cotton napkins and painted blocks and scraps of paper, of poetry, of genius, of my children’s zen scribbles, all collect and scatter throughout the house, created in passion, abandoned without concern as they are left to be swept up or torn or lost under the couch, behind a dresser.

I eschew the cleaning.

My dirty hippie roots are showing.

You can see them here, as I perch on a chair in the living room—

The brassy blue garbage truck huffs and grumbles outside, taking away my sacrifice of packaging I never wanted, a few soiled diapers, daily ambitions, the dreams of my late twenties—

in my husband’s wife beater, stretched with age and hol(e)y, book before me like a habanero too hot to consume outright but delicious and dangerous and tempting, feeding flames on my fingers, the tips of my bare, shifting toes. Like an affair I do not want but I want, it beckons and maddens and I hold back and I yield all at the same time.

But there’s bread in the oven, so there’s that.

Even if there’s no dough in the wallet. Between jobs, useless, my brain a beautiful machine of neurons and nephilim and shortcuts and impatience and so much love for this earth mother lady that we never call on Sunday or send flowers to, but no one wants me to use my higher mind. The job listings are a dull maze of meaningless words. Middle men and women, middle of the middle men, paper shufflers, enablers, cheaters, swindlers, dealers. The only ones employable in this bona fide twenty-first-century world.

I just want to dig my hands in.

I want dirt and manure and fish emulsion on my skin, the stuff that feeds the seeds that grows the stems and roots that swells the fruits that feeds our bellies.

I want flour and yeast and water on my hands. I want fresh milk, aging and fermenting and dying and reborn as cheese that is creamy or tangy or hard-rinded or bitter with herbs.

I want to bring people joy directly. Unadulterated joy. The kind we’ve forgotten about. The kind my sons know when they make each other laugh. The kind that has made our bodies shuddering starlight hot spring thunderstorm lovelies since our species began.

Today, my dirty hippie roots are showing.