It is not so hot for August, but it's the kind of mid-grade muggy heat that creeps up on you from your armpits and backbone. You don't remember feeling hot until you are damp in every inconvenient place.
Too hot, regardless, for the oven to be on these few hours, but on it is--dessert now resting patiently on the stove, and the last breadcrumbs on the macaroni and cheese twinkling from white to golden to brown. It is too hot for these comfort foods--better a quickly-snagged jar of salsa or takeout.
But when I offer to care for someone--offer to make life just-so-slightly better--this is how it is done: not with a coupon for takeout or a salad bar, but by constantly stirring the roux in a hot pan, pouring in the milk slowly to smooth out the lumps, watching for the first bubbles before blending cheese and pouring over waiting pasta and braised chicken.
And now I sit in a darkening living room, the fan oscillating its light breeze across those armpits and backbone, happy. I haven't read that love languages book because I don't need to--this is how I love. Through sweat, through twirling of wooden spoons, through the crunch and steam and sigh of newly-made food.
Drafter's Note: I started trying to push this, to make it longer--and realized that, were I doing a Five-Minute Friday or a Slice of Life, I'd be very pleased with this, and call it finished. So we're calling it... And maybe writing something else later...
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