Making the daily grind feel less grindy
Getting meals can be a grind. Yes?
Dad always cooked us breakfast growing up. Fish fingers, eggs, bacon and offal that he had prepared from a recent kill of a sheep.
“Do you want kidneys or liver or brains?” he’d ask.
He would crumb the brains.
We had to choose. Kidneys was always my least favourite. He couldn’t understand why we didn’t love it.
Anyway, we ate it. It always tasted better with an egg and toast.
I liked his scrambled eggs the best.
We had a wood stove so it was slow cooked.
It was that lovely runny deep yellow scramble with flecks of parsley and mint through it that he had picked from outside the kitchen door.
We had such a tiny kitchen growing up so you couldn’t help oversee preparations.
When mum would come out she would perch herself on a wooden stool with a thinly cushioned orange vinyl top. There wasn’t room for a chair at the end of the table. We would all eat together — mum, dad and my two younger brothers.
Dad was born in 1932. It was only in the last 10 years, not long before he passed away I asked him why he got us breakfast every morning and not mum.
“Because with three kids under three she was busy getting you all ready for the day.”
That is how it started and how it continued for most of our lives.
I was making scrambled eggs for my family this morning.
Without thought I went to our little pot of mint and parsley sitting outside our kitchen.
Cutting it up on the board I had this memory come flooding back to me.
It made this simple breakfast feel so much more special.
When we connect our #creativity to our story (yes even our scrambled eggs) it is truly original because it is truly ours.
And the daily grind feels less grindy.
When Jane Harbison isn’t teaching creativity, or writing about creativity here and on Instagram she is being creative, designing fabrics as a surface pattern designer.
