I had to smile at your suggestion to say a blessing to the bread before baking. My mom always blew kisses to her bread as she placed them in the oven after rising on top of the stove. I still do this to this day. I use her recipe for babka often. I find that all kinds of home baked bread offer more then just nourishment.
It is 1974. I am 11 years old and my grandfather is picking me up in Boston and driving me back to my grandparents’ house in southern Maine. I’m hungry but it’s already 9 pm and my grandparents don’t hold with fast food. Instead, when we arrive I find my grandmother has set out a plate of cold ham sandwiches and a little cut glass bowl of sliced pickles. The sandwiches are on white bread that is soft, but no too soft. One slice of the bread is buttered and the other has mayonnaise, and in between them are thick slices of ham and some butter lettuce. There, in my grandparents’ cozy kitchen, it is the best ham sandwich I have ever eaten. Simple. Perfect. No other sandwich has come close since (and believe me I’ve tried), and I realize now of course that it was as much the time, the place, and most of all, my grandparents that made that sandwich such an enduring symbol of love for me.
I come from a family of string beans. We are tall, lean people with few exceptions. When we gather, we talk about food. One boyfriend said, after a weekend visit: they’re not even finished with one meal before they’re planning the next. I understood his comment. I had often thought the same. Until now.
“...food is a tool that holds more than just vitamins; it holds love, courage, and a key to survival.”
Thank you for this beauty of a newsletter and all the people here.🌱
Oh, Pádraig, your recipe commentaries make me grin! (No fish sauce in the soda bread!)
The recipe for Butterhorn Rolls from the 1960’s era “Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook” is more than is printed on the butter-stained, marked up page, fragile with age. It is the tradition of baking rolls for the holidays. The kneading of the soft, fragrant dough, the memory of my mother. Only the cookbook and the memory remain of my mother, gone for 40 years.
I make these with my daughter, she butters the flat circle of dough; together we roll the dough triangles and form the crescents on the pan. And the best ones are those we eat fresh out of the oven, too hot to eat, really.
My grandmother’s pound cake was her ministry. She was a quiet yet opinionated, no frills depression era matriarch. She always had a pound cake ready for guests, potluck suppers, visiting the sick or bereaved. I have many memories of sifting the flour 3 times as her assistant in her spotless kitchen. It’s become part of my ministry as well. Many people in my life and work also know and love Eloise’s pound cake. Its ingredients are simple yet symbolize radical abundance. I’ve passed this tradition on to my children who also love it and will hopefully continue to share Eloise’s ministry with the world.
I’m not too proud to beg. Pádraig, please please with non-scorched oats on top write a cookbook exactly the way you wrote the recipes you’ve shared with us.
:begging sequence complete:
I’m cracking up here, causing a premature wakening of the household. Thanks for the recipe! Can’t wait to break some poetry and read a little bread (something like that) later!
Mandy. I was thinking about a story Padraig tells about being asked for the recipe for his soup. All I remember about it is that Padraig had me in stitches in the telling. And there was a requirement not unlike the blessing for that one as well. Perhaps he will share it with us on this thread. Yes, let's break poetry together here.
"it’s clear that the food is a tool that holds more than just vitamins; it holds love, courage, and a key to survival. " Oh, I DO know this to be true but, even after all these years, I can't get myself to that place with food. I grew up as the eldest daughter in a large Irish Catholic family. I was assigned to the kitchen on a daily basis when my seven brothers were out and about living the big life (in my opinion anyway!).So I know how to prepare food, I just can't make it into that loving gesture that I think it could be. I see food prep as confining and limiting. I like the idea of food as a tool for sharing love but I have yet to figure out how to make it that. It remains a resentment of mine. I would so much rather spend my discretionary time painting, reading, writing, enjoying the great outdoors. To be honest, I am not even a big fan of eating food! My favorite meal is the one that I don't have to prepare...
BUT, here's the thing: I very much appreciate the devotion that other people have to cooking and serving beautiful food. I see it as an art that I didn't get to experience. In my formative years, it was a chore I resented but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the art and love wrapped up in food. I am always grateful for food that is prepared for me. Indeed, I am grateful for the food that i do prepare on a daily basis. It is simple but healthy food so maybe there is an art just in that.
Thank you so much for your words, Padraig. I look forward to your contributions every week.
Food comes in many forms! And it certainly doesn't have to be eaten or prepared to appreciate it. So good for you! Your food is taken elsewhere. We all adapt our passions according to our life experience and our temperaments. I love your honest appraisal of food in your life even as it expresses a true loss.
Thank you for your comment. You know? I did think a bit about that when I wrote this. I though about how everyone who knows me , knows that I am not a fan of cooking/food. But they also know I will paint them picture, I will laugh at their whimsy, I will love their children, I will recommend a book - so, yes, thank you for reinforcing for me the idea that food/nurture comes in many forms.
I've been thinking about this whole question. I don't cook complicated things but I can make a delicious salad or a simple red sauce with pasta or a tasty pan of enchiladas. I offer my cooking efforts to my family and friends with love. They are simple offerings but good enough, right?
Thank you! I wrote that as dawn was breaking here and it just sort of fell off the fingertips. I didn't want to be negative but I also am envious of those who can love preparing food.
My two teenagers firmly believe it's not a proper birthday without overnight blueberry cream cheese stuffed French toast. Decadence! An extra measure of blueberries burst in a saucepan of maple syrup heated on the stove then dumped over the whole thing. Deliciousness. All things in moderation... including moderation!
Thank-you, Pádraig, for the wheaten bread recipe - an equally literary and culinary delight. I'm adding this recipe to my collection and will get the fixings with today's grocery to make this - pronto. I have a century old cookbook from my grandmother that has recipes I'm still trying to decode. Small handwriting in acadian french is challenging. There are some delightful treasures i've saved: my grandfather's blueberry wine and my grandmother's pet de soeur (nun's farts) sweet rolls. But the recipe that i treasure the most is her banana bread which she used to make in old food tins (from beans or tomato juice cans). A simple and unfancy recipe but it always tastes like love: 1/2 cp soft butter; 1 cp sugar; 2 eggs; 3 large mashed bananas (the riper the better); 2 cp flour; 1 tsp baking soda; 1/4 tsp salt (only if using unsalted butter); 1/4 cp chopped walnuts (optional). Grease breadpan (1 lrg or 3 small). Mix wet then add mashed bananas then mix dry then combine all but don't over-mix. Bake 35 to 45 minutes (check at 35) at 350F. Add poems and/or prayers liberally (also blown kisses of love).
Banana bread done! Beautiful texture and just enough sweetness! (I doubled the nuts because we love walnuts). Thanks for sharing! Now we have a little bit of your grandma's wisdom with us!❤️
truly awesome. I am so pleased and touched. And, of course, happy for you that you are enjoying our beloved family recipe. I've yet to get around to my baking today.
I loved my grandmother’s banana bread too and her zucchini bread. I make both, but I think her recipe called for two cups of sugar so I have cut that in half. I miss her. Just this week, I bought a garage sale dish set that makes me think of her, especially the tea towel that buttons on the oven handle.
This is the best place. We come for poetry, and leave with recipes (and a lot more besides). Mmm…Some of the more besides I’m currently experiencing includes a hankering for a local restaurant’s “Sunrise French Toast”, which is French toast using banana bread in place of plain bread, then dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon. You don’t need any maple syrup, but I always add a touch, just for the flavor. My most decadent addiction.
oh my! French toast with banana bread. I'd never imagined such. And it sounds decadent, indeed. Will have to give it a go. Bananas are ripening, as we speak.
Not much of a story, i'm afraid. First, it was just what they were called and i didn't know the meaning. And while my mother and her sisters and, i suppose, my grandparents, were all schooled by nuns, i was not and so had some distance from the playful irreverence of this dessert's name. Nonetheless, it was fun to say this mildly scandalous (sacrilegious?) phrase. And I do seem to recall delighting in asking my me-mere to make this dessert just to be able to use the phrase. What kid doesn't like to say "fart" in any language?
“MaMere was how my husband called his grandmother and what our children called his mother. And even if irreverent, “pet de soeur” is surely not a sacrilege, in my view.
Your recipe, and the comments from others, are making this recovering anorexic soul catch a glimmer of the deliciousness of these moments...and grow hungry.
Homemade ice cream was served on the summer Sundays my family visited my uncle’s farm. It was a communal production with eggs and cream supplied by the chickens and cows, my aunt’s tender nurturing of cooking the pudding, and my uncle breaking up the ice and snuggling it down between the metal cylinder and the sides of the old White Mountain ice cream maker. Of course the arm strength of several uncles and male cousins was contested as we took turns churning until the handle could not be budged till cousin Jennifer, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, came along to give the benediction, and move the handle one more rotation. It is finished and tasted heavenly!
Wow, how delicious your words always are, Pádraig. A sweet bread that they sell in French bakeries ~ the baguette-shaped 'Viennois' ~ always symbolizes abundance & good fortune for me. When I lived in Paris, I'd savo(u)r one while ogling the Eiffel Tower from any part of the city. It gave me a feeling of having 'arrived' in life, & a taste of true gratitude.
My grandmother’s cucumber sandwiches made with buttered bread and served with cambric tea which is mostly milk with a splash of tea. The tea was poured into beautiful (very fragile) tea cups collected over the years. We were careful to hold them properly - pinky finger up. I shared the tradition with my children and now they do the same with theirs. The tea cups survived and have been passed down imbued with lovely memories of afternoons spent together.
Mine would have to be my great-grandmother’s family recipe for a dish called pastere. It is basically a mixture of several cheeses, pasta, ham, and eggs that is cooked in a casserole dish and sliced up to be eaten by hand. My sister makes it in a large pan that belonged to my great-grandmother as well (I’m not sure anyone else in my family uses the phrase “casserole dish” but me, come to think of it).
I have almost no memory of my great-grandmother, and our grandparents and parents have all passed on, so what this recipe holds for me is that it’s one of our few traditions, and being a family from Boston (originally, though I am now in New York), it is always a good laugh hearing guests and family friends try to pronounce its name correctly in their Boston accents. It’s never quite right, but then again, very little is. But the food itself is good, and everyone always looks forward to it. Happy Sunday, all. Make something delicious today.
We eat the earth. I savor this image and see it alive in Padraig’s photo of his bread baked on the road and ingested wherever he might find himself with poetry coming out his mouth. A human of the cloth, of the road, of the earth. With a language of ancestral nourishment. What a bountiful feast you offer us, Padraig!
Meantime, I go to my garden early morning to pick fresh mint for tea. And lavender to put in the tiny porcelain vase from my grandmother that blesses the sink below where the garbage disposals grinds the waste that did not make it into the compost.
Simple this morning ritual mirroring generations of tea drinkers from the Isle of Man. Where they got their tea, I do not know. I am just grateful to wander out to the garden in bare feet in the misty moisture of morning to find that steady over abundant mint waiting to be picked.
Chris, first time to follow a “like” back to your AHA! posting What a wondrous wealth of writings! Only time for a short meander but resonated with this:
I return to that tricky Armenian saying: “Three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for the listener, and one for the one who heard.”
So, just who might be “the one who heard”
Perhaps the one who listens may hear in one ear and out the other whereas the one who hears holds the gift of listening, carrying it forward as a new seed of wisdom.
Your beautiful words! And well said about Padraig here: “I savor this image and see it alive in Padraig’s photo of his bread baked on the road and ingested wherever he might find himself with poetry coming out his mouth.”
Thanks Shelly. Yes, I often have the sense that Padraig's words are like the sieving together of his Gluten Morgen Baby bread’s basic ingredients that help “rise” the creative muse in all of us.
I had to smile at your suggestion to say a blessing to the bread before baking. My mom always blew kisses to her bread as she placed them in the oven after rising on top of the stove. I still do this to this day. I use her recipe for babka often. I find that all kinds of home baked bread offer more then just nourishment.
That's adorable.
It is 1974. I am 11 years old and my grandfather is picking me up in Boston and driving me back to my grandparents’ house in southern Maine. I’m hungry but it’s already 9 pm and my grandparents don’t hold with fast food. Instead, when we arrive I find my grandmother has set out a plate of cold ham sandwiches and a little cut glass bowl of sliced pickles. The sandwiches are on white bread that is soft, but no too soft. One slice of the bread is buttered and the other has mayonnaise, and in between them are thick slices of ham and some butter lettuce. There, in my grandparents’ cozy kitchen, it is the best ham sandwich I have ever eaten. Simple. Perfect. No other sandwich has come close since (and believe me I’ve tried), and I realize now of course that it was as much the time, the place, and most of all, my grandparents that made that sandwich such an enduring symbol of love for me.
This sounds so delicious, especially with the simple and tender touches of your grandmother.
What a tender memory! I'm glad you had grandparents who clearly cherished you.
Padraig and Poetry Unbound people,
I come from a family of string beans. We are tall, lean people with few exceptions. When we gather, we talk about food. One boyfriend said, after a weekend visit: they’re not even finished with one meal before they’re planning the next. I understood his comment. I had often thought the same. Until now.
“...food is a tool that holds more than just vitamins; it holds love, courage, and a key to survival.”
Thank you for this beauty of a newsletter and all the people here.🌱
Oh, Pádraig, your recipe commentaries make me grin! (No fish sauce in the soda bread!)
The recipe for Butterhorn Rolls from the 1960’s era “Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook” is more than is printed on the butter-stained, marked up page, fragile with age. It is the tradition of baking rolls for the holidays. The kneading of the soft, fragrant dough, the memory of my mother. Only the cookbook and the memory remain of my mother, gone for 40 years.
I make these with my daughter, she butters the flat circle of dough; together we roll the dough triangles and form the crescents on the pan. And the best ones are those we eat fresh out of the oven, too hot to eat, really.
That was beautiful, Karen. Lovely counterpoint to Padraig's recipe.
My grandmother’s pound cake was her ministry. She was a quiet yet opinionated, no frills depression era matriarch. She always had a pound cake ready for guests, potluck suppers, visiting the sick or bereaved. I have many memories of sifting the flour 3 times as her assistant in her spotless kitchen. It’s become part of my ministry as well. Many people in my life and work also know and love Eloise’s pound cake. Its ingredients are simple yet symbolize radical abundance. I’ve passed this tradition on to my children who also love it and will hopefully continue to share Eloise’s ministry with the world.
3 times: that is serious sifting!
I suspect my mother may have attended the same seminary. : )
Radical abundance. I like that!
I’m not too proud to beg. Pádraig, please please with non-scorched oats on top write a cookbook exactly the way you wrote the recipes you’ve shared with us.
:begging sequence complete:
I’m cracking up here, causing a premature wakening of the household. Thanks for the recipe! Can’t wait to break some poetry and read a little bread (something like that) later!
haha YES to Padraig's cookbook and poetry recipe book and to breaking poetry and reading bread. Cheers!
Couldn’t agree more! Yes yes <3
Mandy. I was thinking about a story Padraig tells about being asked for the recipe for his soup. All I remember about it is that Padraig had me in stitches in the telling. And there was a requirement not unlike the blessing for that one as well. Perhaps he will share it with us on this thread. Yes, let's break poetry together here.
Oh, the journey he took us on with that soup! The man has the recipe writing gift. 😉
Amen to that. I’ll bake the bread just to reread the recipe.
Ah yes, Padraig. That would be... delicious...
"it’s clear that the food is a tool that holds more than just vitamins; it holds love, courage, and a key to survival. " Oh, I DO know this to be true but, even after all these years, I can't get myself to that place with food. I grew up as the eldest daughter in a large Irish Catholic family. I was assigned to the kitchen on a daily basis when my seven brothers were out and about living the big life (in my opinion anyway!).So I know how to prepare food, I just can't make it into that loving gesture that I think it could be. I see food prep as confining and limiting. I like the idea of food as a tool for sharing love but I have yet to figure out how to make it that. It remains a resentment of mine. I would so much rather spend my discretionary time painting, reading, writing, enjoying the great outdoors. To be honest, I am not even a big fan of eating food! My favorite meal is the one that I don't have to prepare...
BUT, here's the thing: I very much appreciate the devotion that other people have to cooking and serving beautiful food. I see it as an art that I didn't get to experience. In my formative years, it was a chore I resented but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the art and love wrapped up in food. I am always grateful for food that is prepared for me. Indeed, I am grateful for the food that i do prepare on a daily basis. It is simple but healthy food so maybe there is an art just in that.
Thank you so much for your words, Padraig. I look forward to your contributions every week.
Food comes in many forms! And it certainly doesn't have to be eaten or prepared to appreciate it. So good for you! Your food is taken elsewhere. We all adapt our passions according to our life experience and our temperaments. I love your honest appraisal of food in your life even as it expresses a true loss.
Thank you for your comment. You know? I did think a bit about that when I wrote this. I though about how everyone who knows me , knows that I am not a fan of cooking/food. But they also know I will paint them picture, I will laugh at their whimsy, I will love their children, I will recommend a book - so, yes, thank you for reinforcing for me the idea that food/nurture comes in many forms.
I was visiting a friend recently and she said "I don't cook, I plate" and she did so creatively and lovingly. Perhaps that is enough!
I've been thinking about this whole question. I don't cook complicated things but I can make a delicious salad or a simple red sauce with pasta or a tasty pan of enchiladas. I offer my cooking efforts to my family and friends with love. They are simple offerings but good enough, right?
I love your honesty and acceptance of yourself and others!
Thank you! I wrote that as dawn was breaking here and it just sort of fell off the fingertips. I didn't want to be negative but I also am envious of those who can love preparing food.
I think moving past envy into something else is inspiring. I have so much to be grateful for and yet envy still seeps in sometimes.
My two teenagers firmly believe it's not a proper birthday without overnight blueberry cream cheese stuffed French toast. Decadence! An extra measure of blueberries burst in a saucepan of maple syrup heated on the stove then dumped over the whole thing. Deliciousness. All things in moderation... including moderation!
What a special celebration! Wish I had some right now to accompany my morning coffee.
Thank-you, Pádraig, for the wheaten bread recipe - an equally literary and culinary delight. I'm adding this recipe to my collection and will get the fixings with today's grocery to make this - pronto. I have a century old cookbook from my grandmother that has recipes I'm still trying to decode. Small handwriting in acadian french is challenging. There are some delightful treasures i've saved: my grandfather's blueberry wine and my grandmother's pet de soeur (nun's farts) sweet rolls. But the recipe that i treasure the most is her banana bread which she used to make in old food tins (from beans or tomato juice cans). A simple and unfancy recipe but it always tastes like love: 1/2 cp soft butter; 1 cp sugar; 2 eggs; 3 large mashed bananas (the riper the better); 2 cp flour; 1 tsp baking soda; 1/4 tsp salt (only if using unsalted butter); 1/4 cp chopped walnuts (optional). Grease breadpan (1 lrg or 3 small). Mix wet then add mashed bananas then mix dry then combine all but don't over-mix. Bake 35 to 45 minutes (check at 35) at 350F. Add poems and/or prayers liberally (also blown kisses of love).
Beautiful! I have all the ingredients so I'll make this today!!
I'd love to hear how it turns out <3
Banana bread done! Beautiful texture and just enough sweetness! (I doubled the nuts because we love walnuts). Thanks for sharing! Now we have a little bit of your grandma's wisdom with us!❤️
truly awesome. I am so pleased and touched. And, of course, happy for you that you are enjoying our beloved family recipe. I've yet to get around to my baking today.
I loved my grandmother’s banana bread too and her zucchini bread. I make both, but I think her recipe called for two cups of sugar so I have cut that in half. I miss her. Just this week, I bought a garage sale dish set that makes me think of her, especially the tea towel that buttons on the oven handle.
This is the best place. We come for poetry, and leave with recipes (and a lot more besides). Mmm…Some of the more besides I’m currently experiencing includes a hankering for a local restaurant’s “Sunrise French Toast”, which is French toast using banana bread in place of plain bread, then dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon. You don’t need any maple syrup, but I always add a touch, just for the flavor. My most decadent addiction.
oh my! French toast with banana bread. I'd never imagined such. And it sounds decadent, indeed. Will have to give it a go. Bananas are ripening, as we speak.
"Pet de soeur (nun's farts)"? There must be a story there!
Not much of a story, i'm afraid. First, it was just what they were called and i didn't know the meaning. And while my mother and her sisters and, i suppose, my grandparents, were all schooled by nuns, i was not and so had some distance from the playful irreverence of this dessert's name. Nonetheless, it was fun to say this mildly scandalous (sacrilegious?) phrase. And I do seem to recall delighting in asking my me-mere to make this dessert just to be able to use the phrase. What kid doesn't like to say "fart" in any language?
“MaMere was how my husband called his grandmother and what our children called his mother. And even if irreverent, “pet de soeur” is surely not a sacrilege, in my view.
Together we eat this earth.
Your recipe, and the comments from others, are making this recovering anorexic soul catch a glimmer of the deliciousness of these moments...and grow hungry.
Homemade ice cream was served on the summer Sundays my family visited my uncle’s farm. It was a communal production with eggs and cream supplied by the chickens and cows, my aunt’s tender nurturing of cooking the pudding, and my uncle breaking up the ice and snuggling it down between the metal cylinder and the sides of the old White Mountain ice cream maker. Of course the arm strength of several uncles and male cousins was contested as we took turns churning until the handle could not be budged till cousin Jennifer, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, came along to give the benediction, and move the handle one more rotation. It is finished and tasted heavenly!
Thank you for reminding me of the wonder that is hand-cranked ice cream!!
Wow, how delicious your words always are, Pádraig. A sweet bread that they sell in French bakeries ~ the baguette-shaped 'Viennois' ~ always symbolizes abundance & good fortune for me. When I lived in Paris, I'd savo(u)r one while ogling the Eiffel Tower from any part of the city. It gave me a feeling of having 'arrived' in life, & a taste of true gratitude.
A wonderful pairing!
My grandmother’s cucumber sandwiches made with buttered bread and served with cambric tea which is mostly milk with a splash of tea. The tea was poured into beautiful (very fragile) tea cups collected over the years. We were careful to hold them properly - pinky finger up. I shared the tradition with my children and now they do the same with theirs. The tea cups survived and have been passed down imbued with lovely memories of afternoons spent together.
Mine would have to be my great-grandmother’s family recipe for a dish called pastere. It is basically a mixture of several cheeses, pasta, ham, and eggs that is cooked in a casserole dish and sliced up to be eaten by hand. My sister makes it in a large pan that belonged to my great-grandmother as well (I’m not sure anyone else in my family uses the phrase “casserole dish” but me, come to think of it).
I have almost no memory of my great-grandmother, and our grandparents and parents have all passed on, so what this recipe holds for me is that it’s one of our few traditions, and being a family from Boston (originally, though I am now in New York), it is always a good laugh hearing guests and family friends try to pronounce its name correctly in their Boston accents. It’s never quite right, but then again, very little is. But the food itself is good, and everyone always looks forward to it. Happy Sunday, all. Make something delicious today.
Lovely. "Make something delicious today." I loved that.
We eat the earth. I savor this image and see it alive in Padraig’s photo of his bread baked on the road and ingested wherever he might find himself with poetry coming out his mouth. A human of the cloth, of the road, of the earth. With a language of ancestral nourishment. What a bountiful feast you offer us, Padraig!
Meantime, I go to my garden early morning to pick fresh mint for tea. And lavender to put in the tiny porcelain vase from my grandmother that blesses the sink below where the garbage disposals grinds the waste that did not make it into the compost.
Simple this morning ritual mirroring generations of tea drinkers from the Isle of Man. Where they got their tea, I do not know. I am just grateful to wander out to the garden in bare feet in the misty moisture of morning to find that steady over abundant mint waiting to be picked.
A blessing to all and to this good earth. 🌱
Chris, first time to follow a “like” back to your AHA! posting What a wondrous wealth of writings! Only time for a short meander but resonated with this:
I return to that tricky Armenian saying: “Three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for the listener, and one for the one who heard.”
So, just who might be “the one who heard”
Perhaps the one who listens may hear in one ear and out the other whereas the one who hears holds the gift of listening, carrying it forward as a new seed of wisdom.
Love these brief shared moments!
Wishing you well 🌱
love this. Thanks...
Your beautiful words! And well said about Padraig here: “I savor this image and see it alive in Padraig’s photo of his bread baked on the road and ingested wherever he might find himself with poetry coming out his mouth.”
Thanks Shelly. Yes, I often have the sense that Padraig's words are like the sieving together of his Gluten Morgen Baby bread’s basic ingredients that help “rise” the creative muse in all of us.
🥯 🍞 🥖
Oh I too gather my mint from right outside the door...summer pleasure and that you use a generational vessel for it inspires me to do the same!
Sweet pleasures 🌿
Lovely, a poem in itself. I love picking mint from my garden and I love how lavender stays.