Alison Roman said something in her most recent newsletter that made me feel better:

I don’t believe in a fear-based messaging strategy, but I will say there are only three-ish weeks of summer left, which is prime “eat food on the beach” season (though I would also argue that the best month for that is September).

She said this eleven days ago, so there is just over a week left to her “messaging strategy,” or there would be if school didn’t start tomorrow. But September is still ahead! We are entering county fair season. There is still so much corn growing all around us, we have weeks left to become sick of it. And the dahlias are strutting around the garden like they’re trying out for A Chorus Line.

We got home from five days in the Catskills late Sunday afternoon and it felt like we’d been gone for two weeks. Hard landing, with school starting in three days and absolutely zero done in preparation.

Actually, that’s not true. I took out a handful of picture books about the first day of school, First Grade This or That, and we read them and talked about school afterwards. That’s pretty much the extent of the school prep I’ve done for my child; mentally, I am not prepared to pack and clean out a lunchbox twice a day starting this Wednesday. But I am trying.

Sunday night I set my weekday alarm so that we can try to get our body clocks back on a school schedule. I say we, but I really just mean me. My child has woken up at 5:30 (or earlier) since he was an infant. So my “bell tower” alarm sounded at 5:30 and Gil, who was already awake, ran to the living room and turned on the TV. The whistle-y theme song of Big City Greens drifted in and after a few more minutes of listening to Val snore at the end of the bed, I got up.

Val’s dog-walker picked her up around 8 and gave me a pair of striped socks that she’s been knitting for me all summer! I plan to wear them to opening weekend of Practical Magic 2.1 Gil and I got our have-to’s out of the way first thing, picking up curbside groceries at Stop & Shop and then swinging through Aldi for the lunch box snacks. On our way home, we saw a bobcat cross the street between two mill buildings, cutting up from the river. I slowed down when we got closer and she was waiting at the edge of the trees, so small and nervous-seeming, just like this:

After errands, I tried to convince him to go to the river for one last swim before the beach closes (aka the lifeguards go back to school), but he was not interested. He wouldn’t go to the library. He wouldn’t go to the playground—and then I remembered that there was a First Grade Meetup at his school playground at 5 o’clock. I told him about it and he got “excited and a little nervous,” so I knew he wouldn’t let me forget about it and miss it, something I was genuinely worried about.2

After lunch, we picked up Val and then drove across the Big River to Dick’s Sporting Goods to buy the backpack of Gil’s dreams: a black Minecraft-themed backpack that is so understated, you can barely see the brick motif. He is so in love with it, he treats it like an artifact from the actual game, which he has yet to actually play!

We took a detour to my favorite ice cream stand on the way home. It’s called Creamy Delights and it is the size of a magazine kiosk, only big enough for one employee and a soft-serve machine and a tower of cones. They have the best soft-serve AND sprinkles I have ever tasted. I don’t know their secret, but I fixate on it often.

As we were getting back in the car with our precariously enormous small ice creams, a young Gen Z gentleman got out of the car closest to us and I heard him say, “Shit, it is cash only.” While trying to buckle Gil into his car set, manage his cone-in-a-cup, and prevent Val from getting a free sample, I heard, “Excuse me, miss?”

Gen Z was standing in between our cars with a very Oliver Twisty look on his face. “Do you happen to have Venmo by any chance? Could I Venmo you for some cash?”

Of course I said yes and then immediately betrayed my elder Millennial status by speaking my Venmo user name out loud. He just tapped the screen and scanned the QR code and I was shamed back to my cash-carrying bag to count out $10 for his snack like the dweeb that I am.

My love of fall and winter has been well documented and I don’t think I’ve gone as far as to say that I hate summer, but. Draw your own conclusions.

Sustained heat makes me feel panicky and then tired. My nervous system, much like any aging OS, goes on the fritz and I can’t cool myself properly. I don’t even really sweat anymore! (That is less convenient than my mid-puberty self might have thought.)

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Gardening has actually done a lot to improve summer’s reputation in my book. Instead of dreading the first warm day of spring, feeling like it’s only downhill from there, I get excited that my plant babies are waking up. Summer feels like a long, lovely visit with them.

I try so hard to find things that bring me comfort in the summer, and I mostly come up short. In winter, forget it. There are warm drinks to hold with two hands, soft socks, candles for the early evenings, warm food, spiced things, and on and on. Comfort city. Summer hygge is harder to come by. But I am looking for it.

Libraries are my ultimate comfort
Summer cover art is nice, too

I like doing things as early in the day as possible, when it’s cooler and quieter and you see secret things you might have missed, like a huge bundle of balloons walking out of Stop and Shop at 8 a.m. on a Sunday, or the deep green shade on the road under the trees before the sun can really break through

A mid-morning popsicle is nice
So is a mid-afternoon popsicle

Art projects galore in summer

Choose your own adventure dinners—in other words, anything cold: salami, mozzarella, roasted red peppers, pickles, cut up veggies with ranch dressing on the side, maybe a hardboiled egg, maybe leftover pizza, usually a hotdog

Fresh fruit
Frozen mango smoothies
Iced decaf coffee1

Closing the curtains to the afternoon sun and playing cards in the semi-dark living room while the window a/c hums

Bird feeder shenanigans, especially now that there are baby birds visiting who don’t know their table manners yet

Late afternoon showers to cool off before dinner and rinse off sunscreen stickiness

Opening all the windows as soon as I get up to breathe in that hint of freshness and, as Jeanette Winterson says, “clear out the night-lungs.”

Jeanette Winterson: Mind Over Matter

Spring Equinox

On March 20th, in the northern hemisphere, spring begins. Day and night are of equal length, and then, the days start getting longer…

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4 years ago · 387 likes · 28 comments · jeanette winterson

Meaghan O’Connell had a great post last week that was also called “Summer reading,” but with the subtitle: “the thing no one tells you about going to the library.”

What The Living Do

Summer reading

I’m really going through something, reading-wise. It feels by turns manic, obsessive, concerning, expansive, and deeply soothing. It also feels like the only constant, the main thing I’m doing, the only thing I know how to do right…

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2 months ago · 47 likes · 25 comments · Meaghan O'Connell

Meaghan wrote, “I go to the library and check out too many books and feel, briefly, like I scratched the buying-something itch. Reading, also, feels kind of like consuming? Shopping FOR THE MIND. Kill me, I know, but it kind of works.”

It does work and I check out too many books all the time, not just in the summer, and I encourage everyone, all the time, to do it, too. I’m sure it gets annoying sometimes. I’m not sorry.

The borrowing limit on a library card in these parts is 50 items (books, DVDs, board games, etc.). I have never hit 50 exactly, but I very often have 40-something items checked out.1 It would be easy to blame my borrowing history on my six year-old, whom I’ve signed up for not one but three different libraries’ summer reading challenges, but that wouldn’t be fair to him. Or to me! For one thing, I’m usually the one reading all those picture books to him and racking up those fifteen-minute reading blocks, and for another thing, he would be entirely happy paging through the Lego Star Wars Character Encyclopedia for the next five weeks, so Richard’s Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? is definitely for me.

The other day he threw his head back with exhaustion and said, “Summer reading is KILLING ME.” And I said, “Are you kidding? I’m doing the reading and you’re getting the prizes.”2

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And then the song ended and Green Day “Time of Your Life” came on, I KID YOU NOT, and I was like, Is my subconscious a radio disc jockey now, wtf?

Last year I felt much more Green Day about the school year ending, for a number of reasons. We were saying goodbye to a pre-school that we loved and hello to kindergarten, which felt daunting. I was saying goodbye to a job that I loved, with no sense of if or when I’d be back and I felt kind of desperate to hang onto it. Plus my birthday was the last day of school, yadda yadda, it was a lot of Big Feelings.

This year was much more clear-cut. I needed a break. It was so hot and schools in New England famously do not have air conditioning.

During the last week of school, one of my fifth grade students casually asked, “Do you think you could fit into a backpack?” We were playing a card game and it was the kind of non-math-related hypothetical that came up in conversation all the time, so I genuinely thought about it and then said, “Probably not, unless it was a really big rolly backpack.” And she said, “Yeah, I just wish there was a way I could bring you to middle school with me.” Cool as ever, I replied, “Awwww!”

Honestly, working at an elementary school, more than anything else, has made me feel better about the future of the world.

When I was in elementary school, I cried on the last day every year. I loved school, and all my teachers, and seeing friends every day. It felt so sad to leave behind our little class ecosystem that we’d worked on all year long and would never be able to replicate.

As an adult, I see the purpose and value of a summer break much more vividly.

In Math Club, this basically means we’ve moved into the card games portion of our program. We play Multiples Trash, or Fractions War (place a pencil between two cards and you’ve got yourself a fraction), or 99, or Heads Up, my personal favorite.1 Nothing beats looking silly with a card on your forehead, and all the kids with glasses have a sudden advantage.2

The best thing I heard this week, said very gently from one first-grader to another: “Ten plus ten equals twenty, brah.”

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The garden is mostly little bitty seedlings right now—zinnias and coneflowers and sunflowers, as long as the chipmunks stop eating the microgreens—so there’s not too much to show you. Every weekend I’ve been planting dahlias and giving them away, and still I somehow had a dozen left when I went to tidy up my bench on Sunday. I sent some to my sister, gave a couple to my dad, and stuffed the last of them into a narrow garden bed along the edge of the backyard fence, along with a dianthus and lemon balm that I still had in pots from last summer.

It seemed random at the time, but you know what? I love having a secret little garden spot behind the house where there is just a slice of direct sun and where I can enjoy it from the window over the kitchen sink. Why have I never done this before???

I just ate a popsicle and watered some baby plants with the hose and thought about snow. When you’re that hot just standing still, snow seems like the most insane thing in the world.

Tuesday

Val usually gets picked up by her dog-walker, but her back legs were hurting, so I had to find somewhere else for her to be while our once-monthly cleaners cleaned. I packed her up, packed Gil up, packed myself up, had the forethought to order an iced coffee from the bagel place to be picked up at 8 o’clock, in between dropping one child at school and the other child at her grandparents’ and patted myself on the back.

I got to school with ample time to sip my coffee and check email, which is what I was doing when my supervisor stuck her head in and said, “The first- and second-grades finished their math assessments last week. You don’t have to be here today.”

Wednesday

Our lovely and amazing babysitter was on the cal, so I went to the far library to dispute a missing book. Somehow, two of the books I borrowed for Harry Potter Club are listed as missing in the library system, even though I returned everything at the same time and I have NEVER IN MY LIFE misplaced a library book.1

My account had been locked and I could either return the book or pay for it. So really, I went to pay the ransom, but when I said that I swore I returned it, the librarian, who recognized me from all the Wednesdays that I’ve been there, told me not to worry about it for now. I think the for now was kind of a wink-wink, like, we got you, girl. But now I’m worried about when for now is up—what then?

Thursday

I made it to school and I was meant to be there. So far so good, until mid-morning when I remembered that the science fair was happening in the cafeteria at 12:30. No biggie, I thought, I’ll just combine my two first-grade math clubs into one ultimate mega math club and then we can ALL go to the science fair.

So I gathered the three students from two classrooms, and walked as fast as I could to keep up with their skipping/jogging/wiggling down the hall. One student found a toy animal on the way. (Where? How?) He called it his lobster and treated it like it was a nugget of pure gold he had panned from the waters of the High Sierras. It was a scorpion.

The only moment the three students were quiet for the next twenty-five minutes was after I sneezed and I took off my KN95 to blow my nose. All three of them froze.

“I’ve never seen you without your mouth covered.”

“Why do you always cover your face?”

“THAT’S WHAT YOUR MOUTH LOOKS LIKE?!”

“Your teeth are like a vampire!”

“You look like a vampire!”

“Is THAT why you cover your mouth all the time?”

Later, I received the thoughtful question, “How many children do you have? Five?”

The science fair was outstanding, as expected. I learned about making batteries from fruit, that spending time Outside is better for your Health than spending time Inside, I learned about B I R D S ! and YEAST. And one precocious first grader taught me that there are non-Newtonian fluids! I mean, what even ARE Newtonian fluids in the first place!

I am writing to you from the other side of for now because my account remained frozen over the weekend and I couldn’t take it, so I paid for The Unofficial Harry Potter Spellbook or whatever it was. The Central and Western Massachusetts Automated Resource Sharing consortium really had me over a barrel.

When I lived in NY, someone (I can’t remember who) told me they had seen (my secret, unknowing BFF) Gwyneth Paltrow at a deli in the Hamptons earlier that year. She was ordering lunch and the person told me, “I knew it was her because she said to her daughter, ‘Apple, make a decision.’”

I think about this picture a lot:

Last summer I skimmed the biography by Amy Odell, cleverly titled, Gwyneth: The Biography. It was very…well researched. There were…so many facts. It was like a book report on a famous person. I wondered, at the time, if they’d had to crash it because Gwyneth didn’t want it to happen and had circled the wagons in terms of telling people not to participate in interviews and/or was limbering up for some lawsuits. The other clue was the first page of the photo insert, where a pic of her as a teen in New York City was captioned “New Yok City.”

Ugh, don’t insult me, Gwyneth: The Biography.

***

Gil and I went to Hancock Shaker Village to see the baby lambs over spring break. Despite agreeing to go on the adventure, Gil was extremely grumpy after our hour-long drive and demanded to go home immediately. He also needed to pee and refused to go in the fancy port-a-potty near the ticket booth, so instead, we walked a quarter of a mile to the complete other end of the farm to use a real bathroom with plumbing. The entire time he scowled, “This place is sus. This place is sus.”

On our way to the bathroom, we passed what I thought was a beautiful shed, like one you’d see at Martha’s house, but I was mistaken. It was a six-seater outhouse. And like everything Shaker, beautifully made with carved wooden lids over each hole, even the little one that was ten inches off the ground—a potty seat. I tried to imagine the logic of a six-seater outhouse and I just…couldn’t. I began to think that maybe Gil was right. This place was sus.

I am so happy to be back with my ten-sided dice and 0-100 flash cards and multiplication bingo. Yesterday, a fourth-grader told me, “You’re FORTY?! I thought you were like, twenty-seven.” Which I’m sure to her is still middle-aged, but I’ll take the compliment.

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Leading a club was much, much more work than I expected, which is to say, much more tiring. Mostly because I had to schlep things around the school, and the elevator is at one end, so I constantly had to decide between walking farther and taking the elevator, or risking it on the stairs with a backpack full of heavy books and photocopies, and arms full of paper bags containing wands and ongoing craft projects. And this was after working part of the school day already.

I decided to make Smitten K’s rice crispy treats for the “party” on the last day (after checking with the school nurse to be sure there weren’t any allergies; there was only one: spaghetti-o’s). As I sat on my kitchen counter next to the stove, stirring and stirring to brown the butter for a double batch, I listed to the Everything Happens episode where Kate interviews a sociologist, Mark Rank, in Stockholm before a live audience. It was a random episode, I just picked it because I needed a voice in my head that wasn’t my own anxiety.

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Last night the frogs woke up. We heard the spring peepers in the nature preserve across the street for the first time this year and I opened all the windows to let it in. It sounds like fifty thousand crickets, but softer, more like singing than chirping. It sounds like SPRING.

Val came home from a walk with a wide smudge of manure down her back. That’s how I know they’ve fertilized the corn fields. She rolled right in it while it was still fresshhhhh.

I planted several dozen tulip bulbs in the fall and promptly forgot—not only where, but that I’d done it at all. Now there are all these little two-toned, purple-green As poking up amongst the irises’ pale green Vs and I am so surprised and happy!

The lupine seeds (from Emily!) that I planted over a year ago, and that grew into little baby plants with six-pointed star leaves last summer, are back! I may get some flowers this year. I’m trying not to get my hopes too high. I love lupines so much and they bloom around my birthday.

Speaking of birthday. I read this book on a whim because I like Helen Russell’s writing about being a Brit living in Denmark and I love Denmark.

At the end there were some little summaries that have nothing to do with parenting, such as:

I also happened to get out a bunch of cookbooks from the library around this time, and I was flipping through Scandinavian from Scratch when I found:

And now for some long past sell-by date commentary on the Oscars from someone who neither watched the ceremony, nor saw any of the nominated movies. Ahem.

And speaking of my (secret, unknowing) BFF, did you see that she’s going to star in that memoir about a very rich woman finding out her husband cheated? I’m forgetting the name, please hold.

Strangers! By Belle Burden. Cup of Jo broke the news (to me) and she called it “iconic movie casting” and I agree. I have been waiting for Gwyneth to star in more movies and she is FINALLY listening to me. I wasn’t going to read this book, but Gwyneth has forced my hand. Ugh, classic.

Sometimes people ask me how it’s been selling, which I tell myself comes from a place of interest and caring about me and my work, but it is so incredibly difficult for me not to reply, “Why? Have you seen it on the bestseller list? Did my editor just forget to tell me that I’m a New York Times bestselling author? Maybe I missed the email!”1

But that seems mean, so usually I just shrug and change the subject.

So annnnnywayyyyyyyy, Harry Potter Club is almost at an end. We have two more meetings, the last of which will be a party. I hope to play pin the lightning bolt scar on Harry, and then maybe light as a feather, stiff as a board so I can lie down and shut my eyes for a little while.

Last week I brought in my bluetooth speaker so we could listen to Harry and the Potters while we crafted. First it was too loud, so I turned it down, then two girls stood in front of the speaker giggling like they were listening to their sister’s phone convo on the extension and I had to tell them to sit down. Then two boys thought it was funny to hold the speaker over their heads and dance around with it, to which I was like, Are you KIDDING me right now?

Not that I said that, I just yelled at them to put it down, and then I put it next to my backpack on top of a library shelf and then eventually I just turned it off.

That is a neat little nutshell example of how the club has been each week. Things that I think are straightforward and simple turn out to be real trouble-tempters, and then things that I think are not so exciting turn out to be do-or-die. Also, there is an enormous difference in the students by grade level. I almost wish the fourth graders could be with only the second graders—they seem more on the same wavelength. Maybe it’s just these particular students, maybe it’s a developmental age thing, I dunno. But having a mixture of second, third and fourth graders is a little combustible.

This week it was seventy degrees outside, so I gave them all their wands and let them run around in the front circle of the school yelling killing curses at each other. That only lasted a little while, though. They found an enormous, ankle-deep puddle and proceeded to fill it with snow and get soaked in the process. Mischief managed?

I love winter, especially if it’s snowy. It feels like permission to rest and read and bake a cake on a Friday afternoon just because you feel like it. I haven’t done much this winter and I’m onnnnnnly just now starting to get a little bored. Here’s some of the excitement of February, in reverse chronological order.

So many students were interested in HP Club that we made two sections, one of second, third and fourth graders, and one of just second graders. I already knew most of the kids from last year’s Math Club and I was both flattered that they still liked me after all the math I put them through, and excited to see them again. I knew a few of them had been reading Harry Potter last year (you’d be surprised how often Harry Potter comes up in conversation in an elementary school), so I really went into it with a false sense of confidence.

Here I stand before you, chastened, to tell you what I have learned after four weeks.

• First of all, it’s challenging to engage with Harry Potter enthusiasts who haven’t gotten past Book One and don’t know how the story ends. I just keep hearing Nick from New Girl in my head: “They don’t know what Saved by the Bell is and they’ve never felt pain!” Except in this case, Saved by the Bell is more like, the horrible deaths that befall many, many of the characters.

• Being sorted into a house is every bit as meaningful when you are simply picking house names out of hat as it is when an actual enchanted hat sits on your head and reads your deepest dreams and desires.

• Very few people have read or watched up through Book Four, which is when the Unforgivable Curses are introduced. HOWEVER, they are all familiar with those three curses and use them almost more than any others, with glee.

• When I explained that they were actually unforgivable—morally and legally—and they’d end up in Azkaban for using them, some students stopped. Many did not.

• We missed one HP Club because of a snow day. Later that week, one of my club members stopped me in the hall to tell me, in character as Ron, in a pretty bad/pretty okay British accent, that another club member had used an Unforgivable Curse that day at lunch, which he pronounced “loo-unch.” It was more of a Percy move than a Ron move, but I kept that to myself.

«I’m putting the rest behind a paywall for the illusion of privacy on the internet. Thank you so much for reading and subscribing! Kisses.»

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Anyway. Since Christmas I’ve just been puttering around, and then getting tired, and then reading a few pages of Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir, or watching gardening videos on YouTube, except today I have to actually do something.

It’s the first meeting of the Harry Potter Club! A new after-school club for second- and third-graders that I proposed for the Winter Session and that so many kids signed up for, I’m going to have two sections of it!

This is me right now:

I’m extremely excited. And still also extremely tired. This week we make wands out of paper. Next week we get sorted into our houses, minus Slytherin, because no one really wants to be in Slytherin, and if you do, that’s problematic and I don’t have the capacity to engage in ethical debates in Harry Potter Club.

I also hate end-of-the-year lists—Best Whatever, Books Read, Spotify Wrapped, etc. Obviously, if one of my books were on a Best of the Year list, I would freak out and drop dead. But in general, I never read them and I don’t care.

I didn’t use to be like this! I used to live much more on the internet and all this Content at the end of the year felt like a feast. Plus, I liked looking back and looking forward and summing up and reflecting and hoping and setting goals, even if they were like, sit up straight, ffs. I guess most of those year-end lists make me feel out of touch, now. Or maybe just old. The only one I read (and genuinely enjoyed) was Wesley Morris’s list of Best Performances for the New York Times (gift link for you, darlinks) because he’s such a good writer and also I had no idea what movies came out this year, so I was like, Tell me, Wesley Morris.

I want to tell you to watch the Christmas special of With Love, Meghan because it’s an over-the-top delight, exactly right for this season. If she had just made her whole show holiday-themed, she would’ve knocked it out of the park. I want to see Meghan on a Bake-Off holiday special, facing off against Christine McConnell. Speaking of which, rewatch the Derry Girls episode of Bake-Off and I promise you will still laugh so hard that you cry.

If you’re looking for something more…gripping, I guess? The New Yorker at 100 on Netflix is really good.1 And you can’t go wrong with When Harry Met Sally, a non-holiday Holiday Movie that’s perfect every year, but even more so this one.

Twenty years ago this week, I was coming to the end of my semester in Bath and everything felt like a party. There’s this dividing line in my memory: before Halloween and after. Before Halloween, things still felt new and the semester felt like a huge expanse of time. We cared about our classwork; we went on a wide variety of field trips with those classes and our professors. Then we had a week-long break at the end of October and suddenly it was almost time to go.

The days got shorter really fast after daylight savings time ended, so by November I’d walk to class in the pre-eight-a.m. dark and walk home from class in the mid-afternoon dusk. I remember one afternoon, walking home with my housemates, a firework shot off from the tiny walled garden of a house in our neighborhood. We all jumped out of our skin, and laughed, and kept talking about whatever nonsense had happened earlier that day in Irish lit or wherever. I had recently signed up for Facebook, which was still a new thing, because I missed my friends in the States. I was itching to check my profile on Cara’s laptop when I got home. Then another firework went up, we all jumped again, and when we stopped and looked up, like actually tried to figure out what was happening, we found a fair lighting up the sky above a park near our house.

We went straight there and walked around with our backpacks on, all of us thinking, Where did this come from? It was a weeknight, and pretty chilly. Not a holiday—we’d all just had class. It was like the entire fair had materialized out of thin air. Then someone realized: it was November 5. Guy Fawkes Night! V for Vendetta had not come out yet; we were unprepared and had not been warned.

From what I remember, Thanksgiving in Bath was generally hilarious. First of all, we were in England, which was backwards. Second of all, the staff of the study abroad program (and our professors, and the handful of British boyfriends/girlfriends that had sprung up) treated it like a fascinating rite that they’d heard of, but never before seen with their own eyes. It was very sweet, really, how delicately they handled it and how much they tried to make it a “real Thanksgiving” for us. They were worried that we’d be homesick, but we were just stoked to drink free wine at dinner.

There was a terribly mediocre catered meal in a private event room at a pub, I think, and three long tables were set up in a huge horseshoe facing the buffet, kind of like the buffet was the staff table in the Hogwarts great hall. It felt like the exact opposite of Thanksgiving. Where were all the appetizers stuffed with cream cheese? Where was the kitchen window opened wide to bring the temperature down from sweltering to barely tolerable? Thanksgiving in England was just a party. We all got dressed up!

I remember standing in line with my plate, looking for my favorite Thanksgiving foods, but was that cranberry sauce? Or chutney? And were those sweet potatoes, or random cubes of cooked pumpkin?1 Possibly there was some kind of corn in a big bowl with mint. The British love putting mint on vegetables. I will never understand it, or enjoy it.

The other thing I remember from standing in the buffet line was my roommate’s British boyfriend asking me quietly, and very seriously, “I just want to make sure: there’s no gift-giving at Thanksgiving, yeah?”

He seemed so earnest, and worried. So I told him, “Oh, well, not really. It’s sort of like a little preview of what your Christmas gifts will be. Like, just something small.”

His face went completely white and I immediately told him I was kidding, but I didn’t feel bad for teasing him. Being in England was that feeling of unsureness every single day—not all day, but at least a few times a week. Every time I felt like I’d leveled up to a new comfort zone, I’d encounter a situation that left me feeling like I’d missed the last step on a staircase that I’d used hundreds of times before. It was sort of nice to see all the British folk treading carefully for a change.

The Great British Baking Show has done a lot to improve the cultural literacy of Americans with regard to British food, at least in the dessert department (and even still, fifty percent of the things they make in that tent are huge question marks to me). I had to work out a lot of it for myself as a twenty-year-old baby adult in the pre-smartphone age, when googling something was about as easy and accessible as going to the library to look something up in the card catalog.

Here are some things I learned the hard way, aka through Living Life:

Pudding is the word for dessert, and it’s usually a steamed cake. Sort of eggy. To make things more complicated, many puddings have particular names, like Yorkshire pudding, or spotted dick. What we would call cakes are sponges, which first of all, ew, and second of all, sponges seem closer to angel food cake than Betty Crocker box mix. They don’t usually have frosting, they have custard, which IS like pudding, and cream, which is just whipped cream, but also usually a fruit component.

Now, it’s not like we were running around buying cakes left and right, worried that we’d make a mistake and buy a sponge when a pudding was called for.2 I was living in a house with eight other people and learning to cook entirely for myself for the first time in my life. Grocery shopping was a challenge. We used American recipes that we had printed out while at school, and then wandered around the grocery store looking for ingredients that were called different things, in different measurements. Bicarbonate of soda, or paracetamol, or courgettes? Okay!

Our house of nine people held family dinners Monday through Thursday, which meant that in pairs, we took one night a week and cooked dinner for everyone.3 That is how I learned to cook: making dinners for eight, in a 19th C. kitchen, whose floor was sinking into the steep hill the house was built on, so the stove was completely tilted and anything you tried to bake was almost certainly burnt on the shallow end and uncooked on the deeper end.

Can you imagine if we had tried to make a Thanksgiving dinner on our own?

Twenty years later, I can’t believe that we actually stuck to our family dinner routine week after week. It was my favorite thing. The cooking part was my least favorite thing, but the eating part was the absolute best. It felt like an American Thanksgiving every night, even when it was just spaghetti with a jar of red sauce poured on top, which was often. Bless.

Last November, a few days after the election, I was in a bookstore in my town, shopping for a baby gift. It was busy and bustling and it made me feel good to see so many people at a place I like so much. The owner (I think), who vaguely resembles early 90s Frasier, was chatting to someone as he rang them up and I heard him say, “Oh, yeah, we’ve sold a lot of this one since Tuesday. It might be our bestseller this week.”

The bookstore is small and overstuffed and I had to shuffle past two rotating racks of letterpress cards to get a clear view of the counter, but I really wanted to see what book he meant. I assumed it was a new title because Tuesdays are pub days. But when I casually, purposefully glanced at the paperback in his hand, I was a little stunned and slightly grossed out to see that it was 1984.

Sometime over the summer, a friend sent a newsletter—which I cannot for the LIFE of me find right now, I just spend twelve minutes searching my gmail—where she casually mentioned that she had read Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses when she was in a post-election funk and it helped somehow. I’m fuzzy on the details, which is why I was looking for the post, but anyway, I love Rebecca Solnit and trust my friend’s taste and so I immediately put it on hold at the library. Halfway through reading it, I bought it from Thriftbooks.com because I knew I wanted to write all over it and reread it in the future and maybe underline some sentences when I did.

I’ve been thinking about George Orwell for the last two months or so in a way I never have before. Other than 1984, the only book of his I’ve read is Down and Out in Paris and London, and to call it “reading” is a stretch. I was working as an assistant to a writer who was writing a review of the Michelin-starred restaurant Per Se, and part of his research was drawing from Orwell’s descriptions of working in restaurants in late 1920s Paris.

*Actually,* I just googled the review, and it was a book review, not a restaurant review,1 of a memoir written by a former server at Per Se.2 The first sentence is: “Reading ‘Service Included,’ Phoebe Damrosch’s memoir about waiting tables at the acclaimed Manhattan restaurant Per Se, I was reminded of George Orwell.” He quotes a few lines from Down and Out, and which I had transcribed from his underlined paperback into a Word doc, along with scores of other underlined sections. He’d taken so many notes in the book that I basically read the entire thing as I was transcribing. The same goes for Service Included, come to think of it.

But anyway, George Orwell. When I read 1984 in high school, I thought of him as a Dead Author, someone who lived in the great past that stretched out behind me. All the Important Books had been written ages and ages ago, by people (mainly men) who were mostly English and long dead. He wrote the novel at a time when 1984, the year before I was born, seemed like the distant future. How cute! So I wasn’t too curious about George himself. Like, at all. Even when I heard that Rebecca Solnit had written about his garden, I still was mostly interested in what Rebecca Solnit had to say, not necessarily in her subject.

Like everything that Rebecca Solnit writes, it includes much more than I can adequately summarize: the history of rose cultivation, its link to eugenics, the Spanish Civil War, Stalin growing lemon trees in Crimea, the coal mining industry of Northern England, the modern flower-growing industry in Colombia, a history of the enclosure acts in England, and it all seems random and disconnected when I pile it up like this, but it’s not. It’s the opposite. It surprised me all the way through.

For instance, on page 179, at the end of a chapter about Ralph Lauren’s use of the calico rose print, Solnit introduces Jamaica Kincaid: “She wrote like no one else as an avid and expert gardener with a genuine love of plants and aesthetics and a scathing perspective on all the issues that garden walls do not shut out.” Such as the fact that after Cortez invaded Mexico, the cocoxochitl plant was taken “back to Europe and was named after a Mr. Dahl of Sweden and hybridized into innumerable showy varieties of dahlia, its origins forgotten.”

I! Did not! Know! This!

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Gil and I got really into watching the Halloween special of Is It Cake? We were inspired.

I dug up all the dahlia tubers over the weekend and now the garden looks so empty.

I can’t really believe I’m saying this, but I have become an apologist for And Just Like That…, which until recently I thought was almost as much of a silly money-grab as the two Sex and the City movies were. The final season has gotten so much bad press. I fully expected to get tired of watching it, but suddenly I’m three episodes away from the finale and I’m sad.

It’s been a slow burn for me. The first season was medium-to-terrible, I thought—more in the vein of the movies than the actual show.1 Season two, after a dumb start, was good! All the funniest episodes were written by Samantha Irby, no surprise there. But Rosemarie DeWitt as Aidan’s ex-wife? Surprise!2

I loved that Carrie’s apartment became the fully fledged character it always has been. I loved that she had a farewell dinner there to honor it and all her friends. The show became downright poetic in those last two episodes. Like Lisa and Herbert, having a heart-to-heart in Carrie’s candlelit bathroom3 on the edge of the tub, which had two shower curtains, one on either side, like a damn stage curtain? Gorgeous. Moving. Subtle. The show always did small-scale stuff best.

I’m still behind on season three, but here are my main thoughts: Carrie in a HOUSE? A huge, empty HOUSE? Oh Mylanta. I could write a whole term paper on the symbolism and significance of our widowed heroine, buying a 19th Century HOUSE in one of the oldest preserved neighborhoods in Manhattan,4 and then living there with a CAT and NO FURNITURE except for several enormous mirrors propped up against various walls. That is straight-up gothic lit, bro. I was so ready for her to hear creaks on the stairs at night, or for her familiar—I mean, her cat—to save her from a falling chandelier or something.

And then! As if out of a dream, a downstairs neighbor appears that Carrie had no knowledge of, despite owning the building. And Seema is like, Yo, I totally told you about him, he lives in London half the year, and Miranda is like, Omg, I loved his last book on Henry VIII! And still, Carrie is just: whaa? Who?

So what I’m getting is, she’s been spending all this time alone, seemingly with no TV or other screens except her trusty word processor, and suddenly a best-selling (high-brow, literary) writer of historical subjects appears in her subconscious—I mean, the basement: Duncan something-or-other, who smokes a cranky pipe and cares only about working all night in perfect silence and sleeping all day, also in perfect silence. What is Carrie’s house trying to tell her???5

Several annoying days/weeks later, we get a perfect bon-bon moment of delight: Carrie busts in and saves Duncan from being burned alive by his gross English stew, which he forgot on the stove. She stomps out the flaming kitchen towel with her heels and the whole thing is a backwards, upside-down, woman in the attic/man in the basement reversal of Jane Eyre, minus the racism and misogyny (kind of).6

The fire thaws relations and Duncan goes from nightmare neighbor to frenemy to colleague. I LOVE the scenes of them hunched in his poorly lit, smokey basement flat looking at printed pages of each other’s work. Yes, please, SATC! Take Carrie seriously as a writer!7

It turns out that And Just Like That… is setting up the gals in their intended careers and broadening their friendship safety nets, letting them find meaning outside the home/relationship sphere. Refreshing!

A few minor quibbles:
- New York City is not a character anymore. It KILLS me that Carrie is living on Gramercy with a key to the legendary park and we never see her there. Carrie of yesteryear would have absolutely called it “the one place in Manhattan she’s never been” and invited her friends to join her for a turn about the square.
- Carrie’s garden is so obviously a set, it looks like cardboard with plants nestled in.
- Duncan’s feedback for Carrie is to read her own work out loud to her. That is not feedback. And his gushing praise tells me that he has never taken a workshop in his entire life. Or read anything about a woman, or anything written by a woman. It’s like he’s just surprised she can do it at all. Okay, I’m ruining it for myself, I’ll stop.
-Where is Nya? I assume she’s happily shacked up with that Michelin-starred chef, so I guess, bye?

Now that it’s the weekend and my housemates are around, I probably won’t be able to watch the rest of the episodes until next week. I’ll just be sitting at my laptop, wondering what I’ve gotten myself into.

So as you know, I turned forty this summer, and the universe has replied by bringing me otherwise impossible occasions—things I love but never expected to experience in person. For instance, there is a Dawson’s Creek reunion in New York later this month, which I am not attending, but I’m still delighted by the fact that it is happening at all. In a few weeks I will see (and meet?) Samin Nosrat at a mall in New Jersey, which is almost as unlikely as the Capeside class reunion.

But the biggest special occasion was this past Monday when I saw Rilo Kiley play in a park approximately one mile from my house.

My favorite band from high school and college, who broke up twenty-ish years ago, got back together and decided to tour and my little town was the third stop on their east coast leg.

This still makes me laugh maniacally. I bought the tour poster so I can look at it and laugh maniacally for the rest of my days.

My sister drove up just to go with me and I joked the whole time that I had manifested it.1 I love living where I live, but it is about two hours from Boston, the closest major city, and so going to concerts or baseball games or an international airport is way more of a project than it ever was when I was growing up in central New Jersey.2 Had Rilo Kiley only made a stop in Boston, I probably wouldn’t have gone. I would’ve regretted it, just like I regret not seeing the Postal Service last year or whenever, but I’m pretty certain I would’ve learned nothing from that earlier regret. Boston is a slog and the public transportation is whack and I get lost driving there one hundred percent of the time. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.

As it was, we drove to the park (five minutes), paid $15 (which is like ten minutes in a Boston parking garage), flashed my handicapped parking tag (the golden ticket) and breezed right by all the jabronis parking on the soccer field. They saved handicapped parking for a slightly closer lot that then required being golf-carted to and fro, but I kept telling Amy to ignore the signs and keep going. We scooted into a parking spot directly across from the outdoor theater thingy like a couple of queens. I have never been so happy to be disabled.

Please accept this grainy video of the opening song as a token of my deepest affection and know that my ancient iPhone works totally fine, get off my case, god.

I had my cane with me for a stage prop, but I didn’t really need it. Amy kindly toted our lawn chairs and we drew them right up to the tape for the standing-only section. It was only much later that I saw a sign for “ADA ONLY” that was in front of the standing-only section. We could’ve sat on folding chairs and seen our own faces in Jenny Lewis’s patent leather Mary Janes, but oh well. Next time.3

It was so, so good. So much fun, every bit of it. Perfect weather, “temperate,” as Blake noted. They played songs mostly from the first two albums and everyone danced and sang along. When they played “Spectacular Views,” I shouted, “SO FUCKIN’ BEAUTIFUL!” along with several hundred other people and goosebumps did the wave on my forearms. The last song of the encore was “Pictures of Success,” my favorite, which I remember hearing for the first time in Mr. V’s sculpture class in high school when Jared Jones brought in Take Offs and Landings and played it every day for like a month. I ran into a couple of friends and ate some delicious falafel from a food truck and saw the owner of my favorite bookshop, all delightful. At the end of the night, when we were back in our car, watching the able-bodied hoards trudging back to the fields to find their cars, I saw the parents of one of my Math Club members from last year. I always secretly thought they were cool, because their daughter is, but when I saw them they were giddy and laughing and unlocking their bikes like a couple of teenagers. It was so cute. I was like, Yeah. Same.

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*~*~*~*~Garden Update~*~*~*~*

Speaking of hungry, when Amy was here, I was telling her how composting is easy, we never have problems with animals getting into it, blah blah blah. And then THAT VERY NIGHT, a bear came and casually ripped the anchors out of the ground like she was opening a picnic basket.

I manifested it.