Can you be homesick for love?

Can you crawl through particles of dust and the webbing of spiders to extract moments of love? Like the time your grandmother showed you how to braid slender strands of pie dough, dipping them in puddles of butter and rolling them in cinnamon sugar. True, those braids, which sat beside the towering apple pie in the oven, aroma of love.

Or the pillowy loaves of bread rising under tea towels on the countertop. Never tedious, this labor of love. And what about the arms of your aunt wrapped around that tiny frame, laughing in the shade of a giant Hemlock? Those arms. That tree.

How about the weekends with your father at the Columbia Market? The taste of olives soaked in lemon brine. Or the dandelion wine your grandfather made in the basement of the house on 10^th Street? How he added something sweet to a table filled with platters of savory meatballs, spareribs, sausage, braciole. All the meat they couldn’t eat during The Great Depression.

And it’s winter, and you recreate that love in a flaky pie crust or a heap of cinnamon-soaked apples. You create it in a batch of chocolate cookies or cuccidati filling made with weeping orange and dried figs. The kitchen. The cuccidati. The figs.

Don’t forget. My next soul-inspired writing circle begins Thursday, Jan. 9. Are you on the wait list?