Sharing stories of food stories we love.
Things that make me feel more like myself:
The smell of wood smoke in early fall
Thinking about books I loved when I was little (the Betsy-Tacy series, the Mennyms, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, The Hobbit)
Arguments (the right kind)
Music I listened to in high school and still do (Indigo Girls, Simon & Garfunkel, The Beach Boys)
On very foggy mornings, he rolls over and murmurs sleepily to her, “We’re inside a cloud!” before closing his eyes again. Fog rolls in often on the coastline, blanketing the ocean and horizon beyond, leaving the clapboard houses to the left and right of theirs awash in a delicate mist. Humid mornings, especially before or after rain, are a study in grays: dove gray clouds, silvery gray drizzle, curtains of pewter condensation obscuring the hydrangea bushes that have been aching to burst into bloom all spring and are now reveling in their seasonal riot of color.
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Before dinner but after my shower the other night, when the sun hadn’t begun to set but the heat outside was starting to loosen its grip on the day, I put on pajamas and lay flat on my back on the bedroom floor. I didn’t move for minutes. I just stared up through the picture windows and noticed a plane—its tiny wings looking toy-like from a distance.
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Let’s talk about frosting for a minute. While it’s not as controversial a hot-button topic as, say, the student debt crisis or universal health care, it does seem to elicit strong opinions. And look, I like frosting! A lot! I also attempt to maintain a modicum of restraint when faced with it, because unlike when you’re a kid, it turns out that it’s not entirely appropriate for a self-respecting adult to come to blows over the piece of cake with the most frosting. (I think this is in the “How to Comport Yourself Maturely and Act Your Age Handbook” which I cannot place for the life of me! I’m sure it’s on my bookshelf somewhere. Pretty sure. It must be.)
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A year and three days ago, almost to the hour, I stood in the kitchen of our New York City apartment and thought about lunch. It was sunny outside, but cold, and I didn’t want to try and stretch the zipper of my down jacket over my very pregnant stomach. My husband typed away at his hastily built standing desk on the marble island. He’d been planning to start two weeks of paternity leave once I gave birth, but of course life loves a good PLOT TWIST, and here’s a good one for you: Five days earlier, he came home from work complaining of a stomachache that increased rapidly in severity, until he swore he had to go to the ER. I stayed home, heavily pregnant and silently (okay not so silently) cursing him for taking the risk of walking into a hospital waiting room with this confusing, nebulous threat of a virus hanging over us. People were just starting to throw around the words pandemic and quarantine.
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