if you find yourself stirring a pot of chocolate and mosh
and cinnamon, slow, on a Saturday morning, it means all the American
anxiousness over wasted time has finally filtered out of your body. it means
you no longer care about morning efficiency, about THINGS you surely have to do
and are instead mandando a la mierda by scraping, over and over again (slowly
always slowly), the lumps of almost disintegrated cocoa out of the bottom of
the pot. it means the dark, 24-year-long era of cereal and instant oats is
over.
it means: you are not just eating in the morning because you’re
hungry, because that’s what was in the house, because you have to eat because
it’s “time.” (it also means: the fact that you can consider any of these things
is because you’re on vacation.) it means you woke up and saw that it was grey
and drizzling outside and this focused your hunger down to a desire for
something warm and sweet. and this made you think of the wide world of atoles
that exist, at once hearty and delicately textured, cinnamon-accented, hot. and
something with crunch a la par, a hunk of good bread.
it means you have to eat pan tostado, and drink atol de
chocolate con mosh. it means this deliberateness is not extravagant, not
wasteful, but honoring the fact that you’re even awake, that you can be hungry,
that on one of the last mornings in your home of the past two and a half years,
it’s worth it to make something good.
