Dear Baking,
For Emily Dickenson's birthday today, bake this cake:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/emily-dickinsons-black-cake
a fruitcake.
If you don't want to mix 22 eggs (and why not? Will you go to your grave a 'small batch only' kind of baker??!) then you can read this poem by Ms. Dickinson instead:
How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn't care about careers,
And exigencies never fears:
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.
In choosing this particular poem, I read a great many from my big Collected volume of Dickinson, and every first line is stellar, and some of the second lines are too. I loved the first lines clipped from their remainders, and strung together randomly. I like them this way so much I typed them up on thin, translucent paper, and then sewed them onto vaporous dollops of ink
I love very much the idea of Emily Dickinson; so much that I visited her house, the place she spent her 'recluse' days. It was a fine pilgrimage. I object somewhat to the word recluse which is always associated with her- It smacks of a belittling tendency towards female poets of any age.
Still, I love the idea of her holing up and writing from her windowsill, and I will revere that notion of her for a while longer. I expect Emily Dickinson's lack of interest in certain things would come under this writer's definition of resistance (explicated in this excellent article) which she calls 'just not.'
