I have been feeling badly about not protesting for Black Lives Matter. I worry about my health issues, my twelve years’ older partner and her health issues.  Dan Halterman, my neighbor, is a protest parade of one which seems fairly safe. He passes by my house and I’m not there to join him because I’ve been in class for my expressive arts therapy designation or babysitting Anthony.  I guess the grateful Little Caesar’s employee gave him and his new friend a pizza on Cleveland Avenue. My two younger children did go downtown bringing supplies, putting their white bodies to the front. 

I tried to comfort myself with the words from the Bible, “Children are arrows in my liver.”  It doesn’t say that.  That’s what my pastor father said. He was an only child with seven children.  When he died, we put seven arrows in his coffin and buried him with those arrows in his liver. I mean quiver. Because everything seems dangerous in this pandemic time, I have been thinking of legacy, what would I leave besides children who protest and vote.

While Noah and my youngest, Joe, brewed beer, I told them I needed to pop the three blocks back home and do more telehealth sessions. Joe said, “Wait, I think you want these spent grains.”  To which I said, “What?” He told me I would need to research but he had seen on the interwebs; that they are all the rage in pandemic cookery, breadmaking in particular.  Noah put the messy, soggy grains in three trash bags in my car.

I remembered my middle son, Nicholas, saying to me when a fancy ceramic bowl broke many years ago, “Oooh what will you turn it into now?” When the first spent grains loaf turned out inedible, I told Noah whose response was, “Well, we gave you 45 pounds.”   I have since been able to make a number of the most delicious and fragrant sourdough loaves with Joe saying, “Mom, I think you are really onto something.”

Legacy musings continue. I turned trash into treasure and had some part in turning three boy babies into protestors. I used a broken bowl to make an angel Christmas ornament, spent beer mash to bake sourdough. Then I recycled all these thoughts, prayers for making good things, gratitude, spun into a mandala during my expressive arts class.  The arrow, the baby, the steaming hot bread all showed up so I can look at it and think on these things some more.