When Mark and I married, I knew very little about cooking. I was the one who ruined a pot of spaghetti while babysitting. {Who knew the water had to be boiling before adding the spaghetti?!} One day within the first few weeks of marriage, I screamed at Mark to get out of the shower because I’d set something on fire atop the stove. Another time, I forgot about boiling water, and scorched a pot.

In the early days, Mark taught me how to make macaroni-and-cheese {the boxed kind}, spaghetti, and baked chicken, among some of his other favorite foods.

I’m still not a great cook, nor do I particularly enjoy cooking. I cook because my family has to eat, and well, eating out gets expensive! What I do enjoy is eating. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with food since my early twenties. I love to eat, but the kinds of food I enjoy most aren’t kind to my body.

Regardless of the facts that I don’t enjoy cooking, and I sometimes hate food, I’ve found that the table is where people most often come together. It’s over food that conversations happen in which laughter and/or tears are shared. While it really has nothing to do with the food, eating together bonds people because that’s when we stop moving and talking long enough to focus on the people sharing the table with us.

It’s in the breaking and the blessing and the giving and receiving of bread that we learn from and about one another. When our hearts and our stomachs are full, we linger at the table, grateful for the food that has fed our souls.

Linking with Emily for Imperfect Prose. Word prompt: Food