Yesterday, a friend wrote me to say he was moving back to the east coast after a few years in Los Angeles. I asked why, and he responded: “Loneliness? And I miss the seasons.” I can easily imagine feeling both emotions keenly if I moved somewhere far-away and warm. I know he meant them as separate items (loneliness for a happy clan of close friends who live back east and dreaming of the physical passing of seasons)—but to me, they’d be one and the same.
Read moreBLUEBERRY ALMOND CRUMB BARS
She cranes her neck, stopping so abruptly in front of a Barnes & Noble that a man in a sharply tailored navy suit and camel coat walking briskly behind her almost steps on the heels of her ballet flats (cerise suede from J.Crew, a pair she ogled for weeks in the window of the Fifth Avenue store before finally buying).
“Anna!” she hisses, grabbing her sister by the arm. “Stop, stop!” Her sister stops and looks around. “What? We’re still two blocks away, I just checked.”
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She doesn’t lose control of the car so much as gives herself over to it—instead of driving it, it drives her, like she’s a nameless passenger in a nameless cab, too polite to speak up while the driver takes a turn too fast, her knuckles white from gripping the edges of the seat.
She keeps her hands on the wheel, one foot pressing the brake as far down as it will go, the other foot pushed up against the floor, bracing her body for impact.
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The grass looks so much greener in the morning, she thinks, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes with her closed fists. She’s standing on the upper porch of the log cabin-style building that’s perched so close to the edge of the lake it looks, from certain angles if you’re driving past, like it’s about to tip slowly over and sink gracefully into the reedy marsh.
She wipes half-heartedly at an apple with the tail end of her t-shirt: a white short-sleeved cotton shirt with TOWSON LACROSSE emblazoned across the front in bumblebee yellow. The shirt is one of her most prized pieces of clothing right now because, after three years of constant wearing and washing, it’s reached a nearly threadbare texture that makes it fall loosely, like silk, against her shoulders. The only other shirts she has that are this thin—holes threatening to rip in the most worn areas under the armpits and near the top seams—are her mom’s: a Boston Marathon finisher t-shirt from the 70s, an old green shirt from the Burpee Seed catalog that reads “Because a Rind is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” and a faded marine blue Lacoste polo with a white collar.
Read moreTAHINI CHOCOLATE CHUNK SHORTBREAD COOKIES
At my first real job just out of college, I’d pass the time between meetings looking at lifestyle and design blogs, which I’d never encountered until then. My desk was a nondescript study in beige with a utilitarian wheeled chair, a double-screen PC, and a putty-colored faux wall divider—there I’d sit, scrolling through the pages.
The office was in a 40-story high-rise right in the middle of Times Square. The closest you could get to nature was snagging a metal bistro chair on the rectangular lawn of Bryant Park, which on a nice day would be mobbed with New Yorkers. Walking outside on a coffee break meant encountering a sea of concrete and pigeons and so many tourists lining up in front of the M&M store that you’d have to step off the sidewalks and navigate the steam grates in heels. Lunch was usually leftovers from last night’s dinner, stashed in a Tupperware in the office mini fridge. The coffee was lukewarm and the entire building felt like one long trip to Office Depot: fluorescent lighting and piles of ballpoint pens that never wrote smoothly and stacks of thin computer paper and clunky phones with tightly coiled plastic cords.
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