Sporadically addressing good books, vegetarian/vegan food and cooking, equity and justice, public policy and a touch of politics, family, work, movies, words, life, coffee, chocolate, and social media in no particular order. More bikey blogging (also sporadic) at BikeStyleLife.com
The more I read poetry, the more I find common elements between poems by very different writers. I find myself reading a poem about something simple, like soup, and thinking, "I've read at least four poems about soup in the last year, maybe more." That's enough to start a collection.
What's so special about soup? It's magic, for one thing. You know the Stone Soup story, how everyone bringing one ingredient can create deliciousness when they work together.
My mom used to make something she called "Garbage Soup" in much the same way. When we finished dinner, a leftover tablespoon or two of corn, a boiled potato, a few beans all went into the freezer to wait until the time came to make their contributions to a pot of soup. I do this with scraps that I'll cook into vegetable broth: The tough ends of celery stalks, carrot peels, onion tops, mushroom stems if they're woody enough that I don't want to put them in whatever I'm making all wait in the freezer. It varies seasonally; this time of year the ends of asparagus stalks join the bag.
When we work with whatever life brings us, no two batches of soup are the same, just as no two poems about soup will leave you with the same flavors.
I'm not the only one who has this impulse. Thanks to a recommendation in an online community I'm now reading Eat this Poem: A Literary Feast of Recipes Inspired by Poetry, by Nicole Gulotta. It's a delightful collection for people who, like me, love to cook and love to read poetry. She writes with an understanding of both literary analysis and simple, tasty cooking.
This list isn't drawn from that book. It's drawn from my morning routine of reading poetry while I drink coffee—two ways of waking my brain up without asking too much of it first thing.
Sometimes the poem truly is about soup in all its deliciousness, sometimes the soup is a metaphor. I'm not reproducing entire poems here, simply a few lines to give you a taste.
I made soup tonight, with cabbage, chard and thyme picked outside our back door. For this moment the room is warm and light, and I can presume you safe somewhere.
And let me just add that I could not have made it without the marrow bone, that blood— brother to the broth, and the tomatoes who opened up their hearts, and the self-effacing limas, the blonde sorority of corn, the cayenne and oregano who dashed in in the nick of time.
remember who I am, a woman learning to praise something as small as dandelion petals floating on the steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup, my happy, savoring tongue.
I set up my computer and webcam in the kitchen so I can ask my mother’s and aunt’s advice as I cook soup for the first time alone. My mother is in Utah. My aunt is in Hungary.
Related reading: Your suggestions invited
Have a favorite soup or cooking-related poem to share in the comments? Soup recipes welcome too!
Poetry round-ups over on my bikey/transportation blog and other soup-related posts:
May brought very urban walking thanks to a conference in downtown Seattle. My trip from Olympia to Seattle: Dropped off by car at the Amtrak station with my bike, train to King Street Station, bike to the hotel on the 2nd Avenue protected bike lane for an appropriately multimodal start to the spring meeting of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
When we first moved to Seattle in 2012 we lived in the heart of downtown and I walked those streets to try out new restaurants, get groceries, go to Pike Place Market, and catch transit for longer trips. At the time Seattle had more cranes on its skyline than any other city in the US, changing all the time.
The changes continue and more cranes hover over the city. By all accounts downtown was hollowed out by the pandemic, which I didn't witness directly since I stopped going to my Pioneer Square office March 10, 2020, and we moved to Olympia that fall. It's coming back from what I could see. Plenty of people walking around, eating at restaurants, biking and catching transit, rolling down the bike lane on foot scooters, Solowheels, and other little wheeled devices.
The first night of the conference I walked from the hotel, not quite sure where I might go for dinner. I'd started to look on the map to see what was open that would have good vegetarian/vegan options, then realized I could just head out and read menus at the doors. The luxury of a downtown: so many choices! I followed my usual urban strategy of taking whichever leg of the intersection gives me the walk signal first, tacking my way downhill.
This brought me to the Virginia Inn by the market. My brother Don had taken me there with his wife Lisa at some point and told me this was one of his favorites as a fixture of downtown, so when I saw it I decided this was the spot. I sat at a small table outside with a view straight down to the water. The sunset, a Washington State Ferries vessel moving gracefully over the calm water, a light breeze all made it enjoyable. The man who repeatedly circled several blocks blasting music from his motorcycle, passing our corner again and again? Not so much.
It felt funny to have to navigate my way back to the hotel. Did I really have to, or have I become overly dependent on the magic box in my hand? Granted, Seattle has a really weird street system derived from conflicting grids imposed by competing batches of settler colonizers on a steep and challenging topography bounded by bodies of water. I put my phone down and counted on my memory to take me back most of the way, then checked to confirm I was doing okay.
The conference included a great riding tour of Seattle's bike infrastructure, a little over 11 miles. I got to ride places that brought back memories of the early days living in the city and finding my way to different neighborhoods, and on new infrastructure I hadn't had the occasion to use before we moved away. I remember the feeling a few years ago of going on a study tour to Vancouver, BC, and riding on a network that varied in facility types but kept connecting from trail to bike lane to bike boulevard. This felt like that.
Conference organizers held an evening reception at MoPOP, the Museum of Pop Culture (formerly the Experience Music Project). They suggested people might want to ride the monorail there. Given that the walk to catch the monorail wasn't that much shorter than just walking to the museum, I set off to use foot power the whole way, collecting a few others as I left the lobby. Along the way we all commented on sidewalk maintenance, signal timing, and everything else you'd expect from transportation professionals. This time I did rely on navigation; since I worked for the host agency I got nominated by the others as the de facto guide in this group of folks from other states. As we got closer to the museum, though, it emerged that one of the people with me had worked at the EMP back in the day running a ride called Funk Blast and he knew where he was going. Sorry I missed that phase of the museum's programmng!
I made up for it when the DJ started, though. There's always that moment at an event with dancing when someone has to be the first one out on the floor. A bunch of professionals standing around the edge of the open space, bopping in place just a bit to the beat, feels a lot like a high school gym, to be honest. Having moved on from my high school awkwardness, I've realized the sooner I start the more I get to dance, and if I get out there the ones who are holding back don't have to be first.
The DJ kept us moving with plenty of funk, disco, and other numbers that communicated they knew a big chunk of the attendees are from my generation. Watching the videos on the huge screen as we all sang along took me back to seeing some of those videos when they first ran on MTV (once upon a time, when that actually stood for Music TV and they showed, y'know, music videos). A young Madonna. A young Prince. A young Michael Jackson. A young Donna Summer. They were all so young, pivoting and strutting and jutting out a provocative hip. Fast forward 30—wait, make that 40?—years since some of those songs came out and we're all a lot older. I was struck by the thought that just as I was dancing in my older, softer body, those singers who are still alive may look at those videos and remember when their bodies could do those things. (We can't all be Tina Turner, may she rock on in the next world the way she did in this one.)
After a second reception at another venue I walked back through the city streets, humming a bit and walking in time to the songs in my head.
Over the years my work has given me the opportunity to get to Washington, DC, every so often. These trips started with a "DC Fly-In" sponsored by Greater Spokane Incorporated for congressional office meetings back when I led communications and public affairs at WSU Spokane, through attendance at the National Bike Summit as executive director at Washington Bikes, and now I go for events like the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting and participation on research oversight panels for the National Cooperative Highway Research Program.
Given the distance, time zone differences and flight schedules, even a one-day meeting in DC involves three days: one to get there, one to be there, one to get back. And so it was that on a Sunday I started my multimodal trip for an NCHRP panel I'm chairing.
Multimodal went like this:
Leave at 9:30 a.m. Pacific time to ride as passenger in car to the Olympia Amtrak Centennial Station (thanks for the ride, Sweetie!).
Train to Tukwila.
King County Metro Rapid Ride F to Tukwila light rail (insert commentary here about how nicely logical it would have been to have Amtrak and light rail connect directly the way DC Metro and Amtrak do at Union Station in DC, but also yay for my Orca card working seamlessly for bus and light rail trips).
Light rail to SeaTac Airport.
Walk-walk-walk because the light rail station is a ways from the terminals (insert more commentary here about the time and labor cost imposed on nondrivers in order to provide storage for personal belongings close to the terminal, and also a bit of gritching about how the TSA Pre-Check security is always clear at the far end, hence a bunch more walking).
Fly to DC.
Catch DC Metro to a stop about 15 minutes from my hotel, feeling grateful for transit frequency so I didn't have a long wait to leave the airport. I could have transferred to get a tiny bit closer but the time difference was minimal and by this time I really needed to move my legs!
Walk to hotel. Arrive at last around 11 p.m. Eastern time. Sure, that's only 8 p.m. home time, but that's a loooong day.
Monday held a bit of walking to and from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine building where we met, and a walk at lunch to pick up takeout from Shouk, my absolute favorite DC restaurant for both its outstandingly delicious 100% plant-based food and its sense of purpose and mission. Thanks to the time zone difference I worked into the evening for meetings that were in the afternoon for folks back home and took a whack at the email undergrowth. I took myself out to dinner at the nearby Busboys and Poets (a Langston Hughes reference), got a couple of books of poetry by Rita Dove and Nikki Giovanni, and enjoyed a delicious vegan red curry risotto.
Tuesday—ah, Tuesday! More email whackage to start the day. My plane didn't leave until 5:35 p.m. Eastern and I'd be getting home around 9:30 p.m. Pacific. I didn't have meetings so part of Tuesday became my Sunday as a form of schedule adjustment. I left my heavier backpack at my hotel and started racking up the steps.
When I have time in DC I try to get to one place I haven't visited before and get back to a favorite. I visited:
The new-to-me Art Museum of the Americas, housed in the original residence of the Organization of American States Secretary General. Not too far from the White House, this includes a stunning tiled wall influenced by Aztec art and displays of work by artists from Latin America and the Caribbean.
From there I headed to the Lincoln Memorial. Packed with people reading the words of the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Speech carved on the side walls, it never fails to move me as I wonder how things could have gone differently in Reconstruction.
Next stop, the memorial for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A giant rock cleaved in half leads to a statue and several of his powerful statements carved on walls at a location alongside the Tidal Basin. The water sparkled in the sunshine, tourists thronged the walkways and wobbled past on bikeshare and rental bikes, a light breeze moved the leaves on the trees. Peak cherry blossom season had passed, but petals still drifted about.
April is #30DaysOfBiking month and I had thought I might make use of a bikeshare bike to get in some pedaling, but it kept being easier to just keep walking rather than find a bike, install the app, and ride a relatively short bike distance to places I wanted to stop. As I trudged along to my next planned stop, the National Museum of the American Indian, I regretted this decision but that was at a point with no bikes nearby, so hoof it I did.
Which was fine! Beautiful sparkling day, after all. Along the way I stopped at the National Museum of Asian Art (the Freer and Sackler galleries) and spent time with the gorgeous Peacock Room, the metalworking of Iran, Chinese and Korean porcelain, and more.
I love looking and learning. And yet, all museums now make me think of the theft and exploitation that underpins the acquisition of items on display (even more so since recently watching What Was Ours, about Shoshone and Arapaho people seeking to reclaim sacred artifacts from museums). The scene in "Black Panther" when Eric Killmonger talks to the museum curator about the theft of the items in those cases comes to mind. I simultaneously mourn the way these beautiful items came to be in those cases, and appreciate what I learn about their cultures, uses, and peoples.
Thinking about this, I also recognized that some of the people I saw visiting the exhibits were discussing how their own cultural history and the works of their ancestors were in these rooms. We weren't all going to take a trip around the world to experience these cultures and places directly; a bit of the world comes to us in museums.
The day was warm and I had long since stuffed my jacket and scarf into my small backpack. Arriving at the American Indian museum, I paused outside to appreciate the running water cascading down, just as people coming upon water in a dry landscape have done for eons.
I've been to this museum on a past trip and the clock was ticking toward my departure time so I wasn't there to look at exhibits. This time I had my heart set on having lunch in the Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe, rated one of the best museum cafes by more than one reviewer. I wish I'd grabbed a photo of the display that showed how many foods native to North and South America have made their way around the globe. I had no idea peanuts originated in Peru, for example.
After a delicious lunch—wild rice with cranberries, a Brussels sprout salad, and of course fry bread with honey and cinnamon—I headed back to my hotel. At this point I really would have switched to a bikeshare bike, but the Capital Bikeshare kiosk I stopped at was having some kind of problem with the app. I watched others try to grab a bike and shake their heads in failure, and kept walking. When all other modes have issues, if you're able to walk you count on your feet.
Back at my hotel I wondered briefly why I had gone to museums that were about as far away as I could have chosen. I did a bit more email, swung my heavy pack onto my back, and headed to that closer Metro station. This time I was more than willing to make a transfer to spare myself a few steps! Metro to the airport, long walk through the terminal to my gate, and then hours of sitting before the final steps from gate to baggage claim to the car my sweetie brought to pick me up since there are no feasible late-night transit options from SeaTac to Olympia.
Total steps for the day: 19,035, or 8.48 miles as calculated by my phone app. For comparison my Sunday and Monday steps hit a bit over 7,800, and a typical Saturday walk downtown with a bus trip back gets me around 10,000-11,000. As the saying goes, my dogs were barkin'.
My February walk in the rain forest at Lake Quinault involved soaring trees, mosses, quiet trails, and the sound of water. And guess what—I have all those within a 15-minute walk from my front door.
Well, technically not the rain forest label. But we're fortunate to have found a house very near Squaxin Park, which offers up over 300 acres of woods, a mile of shoreline, and trails that wind through and connect to offer any number of ways to wander.
Back up over two years ago to when we still lived in Seattle, in a corner of the Top Hat neighborhood with no sidewalks, no big natural park within an easy walking distance.
In those early days as we pivoted to the online work world we needed to figure out ways to stay connected and stay up to date on the unfolding emergency. Our leadership instituted a weekly call for senior managers. Each call ended with encouragement to make sure we were taking care of ourselves and our coworkers while we continued to serve the people of Washington under enormous strains and shifts. The call often ended with the words, "Be kind. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others."
One of the ways I found to do this was to make that particular meeting a walking meeting. Now, usually a walking meeting involves walking and talking with other people. I had those other people with me via the headset I wore as I walked laps around the outside of our house, carrying my phone so it could count my steps.
This got me moving if I'd been sitting or standing too long in one place, staring at the screen and typing typing typing. It also made me a much better meeting participant. Why? Because while I was walking and listening I was only walking and listening. I wasn't reading and answering email with half an ear attuned to the meeting. I wasn't trying to multitask, which isn't even a real capability of the human brain. I was being kind to myself.
[Side note on my various forms of privilege that show up in this story, including my ability to buy these homes: I fully recognized then and know that my ability to stay home, warm, fed, and powered relied on the work of thousands of people who kept going into workplaces, being exposed to a virus we didn't understand for which we had no vaccine, and dying at higher rates than those of in these white-collar desk jobs. It still does, they still are, they still do, and I don't forget that.]
Just over three years later teleworking is still my daily reality. Our agency goal is to maintain a high percentage of teleworking so those of us whose jobs lend themselves to that format continue to reduce those vehicle miles traveled by not traveling them at all. I could go into the office occasionally if I wanted to, but the building is mostly empty; it doesn't have the "juice" of those chance hallway conversations that enrich our work by giving us a new idea or an insight into a different way of thinking about what we do.
Walking meetings are also still part of my work life. I select a meeting that doesn't require me to view a lot of slides on screen, although I can actually look at those on my phone if I need to. I put on that headset and head out the door. Within a few blocks I'm in the woods, listening with focused attention to the meeting content and resting my screen-worn eyes with the trees overhead, the water below the little footbridge, the offerings people leave at the Telephone of the Winds in memory of loved ones who have died.
Another way I make walking part of my work life while being kind to myself: Occasionally on a lunch break I put on a podcast and head for those woods. Listening to smart people interviewing interesting guests on a variety of topics yields some of those insights, those new ways of approaching a topic or a scenario that I might have gained from a hallway conversation. I listen to some that are quite obviously "about" work, in that they focus on transportation. Others that aren't transportation-focused stimulate my brain with new knowledge. I'm stepping away from that direct task focus and giving myself permission to let an idea or a question simmer a while before coming back to pin it down.
This time of stepping away is a critical part of brain work. Einstein is famously said to have come up with the Theory of Relativity while riding his bicycle.* The movement of my body through space and my brain coming along for the ride may not yield world-changing science, but it makes me feel better, think better, live better. I'm balanced between woods and work.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
— Albert Einstein
Related listening
Don't tell the hosts, but I don't listen to every episode of every podcast I'm subscribed to. This list is a sampling; over the years I've subscribed to others and the list is ever-evolving. What am I missing that you think is a must-listen, and why do you think that? What makes it a good companion for a walk?
Contra* from Critical Design Lab (stopped producing episodes in 2020 though)
*Snopes says there's no attribution for this Einstein statement about coming up with the Theory of Relativity while riding his bicycle. But the American Museum of Natural History included it in their Einstein exhibit so I'm going with them. Their description of how the insight ties to riding a bike makes sense to me: "No matter how fast Einstein rides his bike, the light coming from his headlight always moves at the same speed." Snopes says the statement about how life is like riding a bicycle is a paraphrase of something he wrote in a letter to his son Eduard dated Feb. 5, 1940.
