Slowly but securely supplying Les Pierre’s pantry for winter with the fruits of our summery labor, an ongoing and time-consuming process of estimating, planning and actually taking action, feels different this year, more laisser-faire driven, despite the pandemic and possible impending confinement. I blame the enduring intenser focus on ourselves and our own preferences and am loving its laid-backness.
My earliest memories of thematic play as a child generally involve a pretend shop or restaurant, preparing all day for the forced visit of parents and other relatives, who in turn had to fake extreme enthusiasm for my imaginary culinary delights.
Soon hereafter, still as a child, these fantasies became substantially less of a caprice when my mother expressed her inability to cook fancy, which, combined with her need to regularly entertain because of my father’s work, allowed for years of this make-belief practice to become very real. Not only would I cook them and their guests four or five course dinners, I would serve them as well and do the dishes, a perfect learning experience for all kinds of future endeavors.
To assert that I spent much of my later professional life playing shop without telling other tales would be selling short of my creative aspirations, but I do see a pattern in my desire to please others, culminating a couple of years ago in thinking starting and running a b&b would be fulfilling a long lost dream, which in essence turned out to be true, just not mine.
Good to know, one would think, and to reorganize accordingly, yet I was still not cured from the delusion of building my future in hospitality by creating a catering service with accompanying life principles, in extenso only proving that old habits die hard. Thank goodness, it never really came to life.
To renounce a franticly chased juvenile fantasy turns out to be childishly simple if you dare to give in to its limitations. The rewards are numerous, as angelically trumpeted by our Brugmansia, in its second bloom of the year, easy to distinguish from her twin Datura or Devil’s Trumpet, who’s flowers point up, while hers look down from heaven. Her nickname is Horn of Plenty. Of course.
Which in essence turned out to be true
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