Yesterday I saw the first sailboat of the season. From a distance, the white triangle of its sail appeared against the bright blue of the sky; I stood watching, my heart picking up its happy rhythm, as the polished hull emerged into the mouth of the bay, moving slowly through the channel where the land narrows at the entrance to the town marina. The white sail looked so jaunty and cheerful: waving and flapping lightly as the ropes clanked and thwacked against the mast. After the dark, cold winter (METAPHORICALLY AND LITERALLY OBVIOUSLY), it seemed to be beckoning to us, calling out “Hello bright things! Picnics ahead! Sunny days and mint lemonade and bike rides in the warm evenings!”.
Read moreRYE WAFFLES
I’ve never been much of a breakfast eater—not historically, at least. By this, I’m referring to “eating a meal first thing in the morning”, not breakfast foods themselves. Breakfast foods I can absolutely get behind. Breakfast foods I love. (Tell me you, too, don’t swoon at the sight of a thick buttered slice of sourdough toast topped with an egg, its canary-yellow yolk running in sticky rivulets into the crevasses of the bread.)
Read moreGRAPEFRUIT CARDAMOM OLIVE OIL CAKE
Heavy rainfall three days ago melted the heaps of snow that had piled up against the boxwoods in front of the house. Once the clouds cleared, the sun appeared against a sky painted all lustrous, sheer blue—ice on the roof dripped in slow, languid trickles down the kitchen windows. The intervening days have been cold but sunny: they feel like spring, like I’m stepping outside into the words green and fresh.
Read moreMAPLE PARSNIP SCONES
Much of what makes life life—something about which people want to write songs and pen novels; something full of joy and shivers of unexpected (and expected) pleasure—lies in watching how easily you can transform ordinary things into more.
Taking disparate elements and making them more than the sum of their parts happens all over the place. Take, for example, poetry. How many times have you said or used the words “vacuum cleaner” or “UPS driver” or “house” or “thief” — but then someone (in this case the poet Ron Carlson) puts them next to each other in this very specific order and suddenly they mean something bigger and so sweeping that you read them again and again, saving them in your notes to remember to write about right here, to all of you:
Read moreGOOEY CHEESE ROLLS
My sisters and I all went to summer camp in Vermont in the little town of Fairlee. The camp—on the shore of Lake Morey—was all shades of green and white: white buildings with green roofs and green trim; uniforms of green cotton shorts and white shirts; green pine trees and the jaunty white triangular sails of Sunfish skimming the surface of the water. Clusters of open-air tents—nothing more than wooden platforms with khaki-colored canvas sides that we rolled up during the day and dropped at night—were half-hidden among the verdant hills that sloped down to the main camp buildings and, across a small road, the lake itself.
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