and suddenly there was mud...

Before I post my new blog with the news of the last month, I would like to share a story with you. An outcome of creative writing, my shopping and cooking experiences here in Vancouver and the appearance of mud seemingly everywhere...

MUD

Suddenly... Maybe not as suddenly as she would like to make herself believe. She deliberately bought the ingredients, without caring for the proportions. Attracted by the colors and the prospect of tasteful delight. Especially the 'organic' and 'vegan' labels attracted her. Sometimes she thinks to know what she wants, especially in the chaos of overwhelming, flashing supermarkets.


She overloaded her shopping bags until a point that everybody would describe as ‘a state in which the bag is going to burst’. You don't know when or how, but you know suddenly you won't be able to carry all the things you brought into existence by buying them. There is no way back once you added them in the planning of your dish.

You will put it all together. Of course. it`s natural, you guess. That`s life... mix it up. It`s just one life, so multi and poly and extra is more. If she had a blender, she would have used it, but in her case she had to rely on the residence materials: a from- neighbour-borrowed pot in a messy kitchen. She didn`t want to bother her housemates with it. Kept it silent, even when she already occupied the whole kitchen with her thoughts and the sound of bubbling water.


No, it didn't take long for the water to cook. She even didn't expect it to happen at all. She almost forgot she had put the pot with water on the stove. She had set aside the idea of cooking, at least not all these ingredients at the same time. She would avoid the cooking point, in order to leave the veggies more or less raw. Of course she would flirt with the boiling point, knowing she would exceed the by-herself-agreed temperature. If she never exceeded the boiling point the mud would never have occurred, both the intentional as the unintentional one.

But suddenly there was mud... It smelled nice at first. A mix of sweet and spicy. `Hot in a certain way, but from a distance it wouldn`t look attractive at all. Time to switch off the fire``, common sense would exclaim. `It`s to late, so don`t make it worse`. But she didn`t. She kept staring, fascinated by the way the veggies mixed. How you couldn`t tell after a while where they originally started. She even couldn`t remember what she put in the pot. It must have been everything... Everything she had in her fridge, even the things which were not meant to be ever mixed.

Can mud be messy? Can it be disgustingly brown and swampy, but tasteful at the same time? Can it be totally 'flat', will it leave you smooth? Can it not evoke anything anymore because it just on cooking way too long? Or is that impossible? Will the mud burn anyway, even when you decrease the heat to a lower temperature to make the outlook acceptable? “Will it burn?” she asks. And if it burns, who or what will be hurt? Will she hurt herself by touching the pot? Will the mud smell like an extinguished camp fire or will the old borrowed pot have to live with inerasable scratches? Or will it catch fire? Spread the flame and burn the house and all the people connected to it? Will the mash form a flood? Will they call it ‘the invasion of the stew’ and will everybody who smells it be swept away by the flow of sludge? And she? Will she sink up to her knees in the mud? Will the world sling mud at her? Will they drag her through the mire?

She just doesn’t know and stirs the mud, unintentionally and innocent.
Stirring well, till the brownness blinds her sight... and she can only sightlessly guess how well the mud once tasted.