Living with Poetry is an occasional series where we explore how poetry infuses our everyday lives. Catch up with past features here. Interested in sharing your own story about how poetry inspires you (in the kitchen or otherwise)? Contact me.
Are you a morning person or a night person? I'm not sure why we rush to identify ourselves with one of these categories. I tend to be a hybrid, anyway. If by night person, you mean someone who goes to bed past 10 pm or can stay away until 1 am watching a movie or exercising or drinking, then no, I am not a night person. If by morning person you mean I rise fresh-faced and alert at 5:15 am, ready to take on the day, then no, I am not a morning person either. But I do lean more on the morning side, I always have.
When my first job required me to be at the office by 7:30 to start combing through the newspapers, I woke up five minutes before my alarm went off almost every day. I was born with a strong internal body clock, and I'm one of those people that needs 8 hours of sleep. Now, almost 10 years later, I find myself getting up at 6 am most days to trek to work 35 miles away. (Many of those days find me waking up at 5:45 or 5:50, whether I like it or not.) Come the weekend, it's almost impossible for me to sleep in. 6:15 Saturday morning I'm wide awake thinking about the pancakes I want to make for breakfast. The movie we watched last night? I may have fallen asleep on the couch for a few minutes. Once 9 pm rolls around, my body doesn't care what day it is, it tells me bed is calling.
Early Saturday morning, bleary eyed, I opened my Facebook app and saw the new post from The Vanilla Bean Blog. On Fridays, Sarah has taken to sharing favorite links, pictures from her week, and some inspiring bits of poetry or prose that always turn my head. This week, it was Walt Whitman.
