Breakfasting in Winter

A memory & a poem

Barometric Breakfast

Egg me on.

I’ll boil summer, lick it

like ships skimming over

clenching death.

Nights of corduroy & velvet,

of smoke & stars

moaned until morning’s quenched fire.

You of the dry eyes,

our yellowed yolk of summer

dulled, cool & still.

Leave the cracked crockery, the coffee

cold in my belly,

your broken breath scattering shards

of embers, frosty ash

casual in its cruelty. Our crumbs

are better suited to winter’s bones.

Published in The Ekphrastic Review, 2021, inspired by the artwork above.

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It’s 40 degrees outside right now with a feels-like of 38. That is Winter for this Southern gal even if the technical start of Winter is on the 21st. Whenever the temp drops below about 65, it’s Winter to me. Soon, I’m sure, the temps will rise back into the 70s as is the way of the semi-tropical climate I live in.

On these cold mornings I gravitate to a warm breakfast. I mix up biscuits to eat warm with honey. Cook old-fashioned Quaker oatmeal on the stove. Drink more coffee than I should. Sometimes I’ll fry up eggs and bacon but I’m trying to watch my cholesterol so fried food and cured meats are a no-no. I found out in 2019 that my LDL cholesterol was high, most likely due to the auto-immune disorder I was diagnosed as having. To be honest, I watched what I ate for a few months then slid slowly back into my old eating habits. I liked my cakes and cookies, my pie. I liked fried food - what good Southerner doesn’t like fried chicken, shrimp, fish, hushpuppies, okra, etc. I grew up eating all that and more except the shrimp because I lived inland where the only shrimp (at that time) was available at the local Mug ‘n Cone in a shrimp basket with fries and hushpuppies and cost more than I could afford. But you don’t miss what you can’t have so it didn’t matter anyway.

My mamma made biscuits every morning when I was a kid and I had them with cane syrup for breakfast before catching the school bus. Thinking back, I believe she made biscuits most mornings for most of her life. From scratch, baked on a cast iron flat skillet like this one. The bottoms always came out crusty and crunchy and were my favorite bits, smothered in butter and syrup. I avoid eating cane syrup now that I’m older (what?! When did that happen?) but I sure do miss it.

After I moved to New Orleans and went back home to visit, mamma still cooked biscuits for breakfast. On cold days, we’d eat breakfast then have coffee while watching a little morning TV, the rolling Mississippi landscape outside the window, beautiful and serene. Later, I’d walk around the property listening to the deep quiet punctuated by the calls of the killdeers defending their nests in the ground (this was probably in summer, lol), and from the pasture the braying of John the Baptist, the donkey, and the lowing of cows. Once in a while, the crunch of gravel as a car passed on the road down the hill. Later in the day, we might drive into town and do a little shopping.

I miss those visits to my mamma’s house where being a grown up kid had special benefits.

I made biscuits the other day and I’m doling them out to myself like gold coins that might disappear in a puff of smoke. I look out my windows and see palm trees instead of pastures and hear cardinals instead of killdeer amidst passing traffic. And the world keeps on turning.