This summer has not been the succession of feral outbursts that I expected it to be, that I’m used to it being. This season has, instead, shown a different side of itself. Yes, there are the typical talking points of summer, the things I can always count on: the deep red of a tomato, the tartness of a raspberry, the incomparable feeling of biking around town on a warm summer night. But this summer hasn’t involved lustful make outs or late-night dancing. It’s been more like: laying naked by the river and reading for hours, quiet 1:1 dinners with friends, long ambling walks towards the lake after said dinners, long drives to visit family, camping alone, visiting one of my best friends and swimming in the ocean each day.

This summer is showing up with all of its usual, giddy vibrancy and sweetness, yet, internally, it has felt more like winter inside of me. More like honey dripping slowly than water spilling effusively. Lots of reflection, time alone, burrowing into my solitary habits that fix me to the ground, which is to say, my soft, non-urgent body.

Soft summer, we promised, professed to each other as we sat around the kitchen table scooping melting ice cream out of our friend’s handmade ceramic bowls. It was that time of spring that’s marked by the fleetingness of magnolias. The scent so strong it snaps you back into the present, says don’t miss this! available while supplies last.

The friend who came up with our new mantra, soft summer, would surely fulfill it. I knew they’d practice that softness because they had been practicing it. I listened to them share what’s been on their mind, not a trace of urgency in their telling. I looked on with admiration, noting the moments they paused in recognition of themselves. For a moment I felt we were on stage with an audience watching on, as they recited this monologue about how they’ve grown and how much more is inside of them. Eventually I realized I was the audience, I was in awe.

I stand next to you under the E-Z up tent. We are encircled in tall grass surely teeming with ticks. The leftover body of the deer you processed earlier today, limbless and headless, lays under a tree in the distance. Its exposed intestines look exactly like thick, tangled tree roots. I aerate the wool, pulling it quickly between my fingers, getting it ready for you to feed through the drum carder.

The sun is setting and the mosquitoes are starting to bite. “Why are they only biting me?” I whine. “Because you’re our new blood,” you joke in a menacing voice, widening your eyes. It is utterly quiet, in the way that you know your voice is carrying far into the forest. Eventually, my fingers turn greasy. The cut on my middle finger stings from whatever is transferring from the wool onto my skin. You tell me it’s lanolin, a waxy secretion that makes the wool waterproof.

You crank the machine until the wool, now detangled and clean, glides evenly along the bristles and comes out as one even sheet. We joke that it looks like you just ripped a full head of hair off an old lady. You free the wool from the bristles with a moose bone, hold the cloud-like sheets gently between your hands, and stack them on top of one another. A rare and soft breeze moves through the property. A tree creaks like a door hinge. The leaves do jazz hands. We lower our voices to a whisper as the darkness settles in. I catch you up on what’s been going on at home. We joke, do bits. We eventually get to talking in depth about the nature of relationships, like we always do.

I’ve missed your voice, the way it immediately fixes me to the ground. Being around you is one of the easiest things in the world, and true ease is a rare gift. We make our trek back to your tent, flop onto our sleeping pads, and fall into a delirium of laughter. Eventually, I read out loud to you until I hear your breathing get slower, heavier, more even. I keep reading out loud, even though I know you’re asleep.

xo,

Sarah

I was returning to an old part of myself in a new place.

My friend beckoned me into the church. There was a service going on. A long line of people waiting to be blessed wrapped around the pews. A sculpture of Jesus — who looked fabulous and made over with long flowing black hair — towered and glowed at the front of the church. I skirted my friend’s invitation to step inside. My shoulders were bare and I thought going in with that much skin might be sacrilege. So I craned my head and tilted my torso to try and get a better look inside. It was like me to not want to intrude. My friend was better at inserting himself, at believing he belonged.

I wandered into every church store I could find and, as if I were in a museum, stood and studied the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I became enamored with her during my time in Mexico. I loved the story behind her: a man trying to prove her presence, a field of roses surviving during an unlikely time. To me, it is a story of perseverance, of breaking through what is expected (or not expected) of you. I was drawn to her downturned gaze, the look of humility amidst the orb of her own shining light.

Our trip coincided with Semana Santa, or Holy Week. There were showy processions and lively dances in the streets. Mexican women twirled in traditional dress, carrying staffs made of woven maíz. While my friend was suffering from Montezuma’s revenge, I wandered the streets, returning to my sense of awe as the dry heat enrobed my winter-drained skin. I walked as quietly and respectfully as I could through the churches, hyperaware of my gringo status. I tried to blend in with soft, calculated movements. I paused to take in the different depictions of Jesus, the rows of lit candles honoring loved ones.

I silently slipped into a pew, watching everyone sign the father, son, and holy spirit, paying their respects as they came and left. Some knelt and prayed. It was the first time, since going to church as a young girl, that I had been surrounded by this much religion. I didn’t really register it as religion, though. I read it as belief. My trip to Oaxaca coincided with a lull in my own conviction. I was believing in myself less. I was doubting I could fall in love again, or fall in love the way I really wanted to for the first time. I started to believe I was too old to pick up new things or go new places. I was starting to absorb society’s deranged views of aging, feeling like an alien against the backdrop of the you should be married with kids by now script.

And then, I landed. In a place that prays and chants and goes to church regularly. In a place where people celebrate, just because. Just because they woke up to live another day, and that’s reason enough. A place that is abundant in color and dancing and music. A place where people congregate and charlar for hours over coffee and street food. A place where church isn’t just a cathedral with celestial aesthetic but a hole-in-the-wall comedor where corn is another version of God. Sin maíz, no hay país.

Here, I was returning. Returning to memories of dragging my feet down the aisle next to my mom to receive communion; to gathering with people from our church after service to share a meal and catch up on each other’s lives. I was starting to believe, again, in my ability to connect regardless of age and region and mother tongue. I was returning to the feeling of kneeling, humbly, in front of something that is both in me and greater than me. I was returning to the affirmation that believing in myself only gets stronger when I lean in, with conviction, to who and what’s around me.

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Even though I’ve lived through 36 springs, it is still a surprise each time. One of nature’s greatest tricks, to make us think we’ll never get out of the dark depths of winter and then aha! the magnolia tree blooms and the sun rises early and the birds become your alarm. Everything is new again. I seem to have a fresh pair of eyes and ears.

I look up at the magnolia tree. Some of the flowers are more closed, tight and pointed like beaks. Others are unabashedly open, white leaves like fingers stretching from a soft pink palm. There is so much to note within just a few feet.

Soon, the quiet is intercepted by a parking attendant stopping in front of my apartment to check license plates on my permit-only street. She opens the door and rock music spills out of the car, the kind of rock music my dad always played. SiriusXM Hair Nation station. There’s a strip of bright pink kinesthetic tape on the back of her ankle. She is tiny, maybe in her 70’s, hobbling towards a car to check if it’s supposed to live there or not.

I hear the sound before I see the person walk by — the rhythmic shuffling of ice inside a jar of coffee that is stowed away in the side pocket of a backpack. Footfall and icy liquid crashing against glass sync up.

There is the labored whirring of an old Honda CRV driving down my street. I hear it as a 4-beat measure, the fourth beat punchier than the first three.

There is something beeping. There is always something beeping, it seems. It sounds like a truck backing up. A trash truck barrels down my street and it reminds me of being in Oaxaca. When we were there, we’d heard this furious bell from time to time and couldn’t figure out what it was. There were church bells ringing constantly, of course, but this was closer, it was moving through the streets, and it was clear that it was being rung my hand. An ice cream truck?

Then one day, as we walked to a coffee shop in the early morning, I saw a man hanging off the back of a truck as he furiously rang a bell to alert the residents that it was last call for trash removal. An older man scurried along the street to catch up to them. They stopped and the man hurled his trash bag into the back of the truck. Mystery solved.

One time I went to a yoga class in the city. The slow-flowing, melodic class was punctuated by abrupt car horns and the static sound of bustling city streets. During savasana, the teacher invited us to see the sounds as part of the experience, rather than a distraction. It allowed me to be more receptive, to let it all in. I felt the threat of rigidity soften, the expectations around what a “peaceful” class should be like.

Here, on my stoop, I don’t feel agitated when the manmade noises chime in on the natural ones. I try and let it all be part of the experience, all part of waking up.

“They’re not afraid of color here,” you declare as your eyes dart between your journal and the palo de rosa flowers you’re drawing. It is early spring in Oaxaca, one of our first days here, and we are on a rooftop drinking coffee and drawing and taking in the new city. The muros (walls) are covered in the most vibrant colors of azure blue and carmine red and sunny orange. I learned, during a walking tour of the city, that the building owners in the old town must follow a color palette to maintain the city's UNESCO-protected aesthetic.

The city is a feast for the eyes, color and art everywhere you look. We stop to marvel at the street art. Some of it is political — muerte al fascismo — and others are a nod to the tenets of their culture — an older Mexican woman clutching a bottle, the phrase “para todo mal, mezcal” haloed over her head.

We are giddy for the street food, craning our heads to eat tacos that were just pulled from the comal, our teeth pulling long strands of quesillo (Oaxaca cheese). I’ve been calling it mummy cheese, the way the wide white ribbons are wound into a ball like mummy garb. It tastes like a saltier string cheese. We eat memelas and tlayudas and tamales smothered in mole sauce.

I joke that I’m horny for the avocados. I can’t get enough of them. You can never pick a bad one here. They are the most buttery. I am ruined after this trip. We vow to never eat another one back home, only use them for face masks. The mangoes are a pigment of orange I have never seen before. They are bright and sweet and smooth. They are so supple, you can peel the skin with your fingers. I slice the cheeks off and hand you the core to polish off. You get every last glistening bit, just like you do when you eat a chicken leg or a short rib, but this time, instead of a bone, you are nibbling around a woody pit.

We play cards and drink cheap, cold beer that’s more refreshing than water. As I sit across from you, sticky from the humid heat, I watch tiny beads of sweat collect on your nose. They look like sun blisters at first. We come back to our place midday since it’s too hot to be outside. We immediately strip off all our clothes and either sit at the table to devour a couple of mangoes or lay in the bed we’re sharing and spread our limbs. We leave our casita door wide open because we are winter-worn Vermonters starved of sun.

You get Montezuma’s revenge for two days and we watch Little Miss Sunshine when the sun is at its strongest. Usually I’d feel guilty being inside when the sun is out, but here, when there is the promise of sunshine and heat every day, it feels necessary to take breaks from it. You rest the laptop on your bent legs and I rest my head on your shoulder. From time to time, a breeze wafts through the open window and totally arrests me, the way it cuts through the stagnant, dry heat. It forces me to close my eyes, to really feel it. I never told you this, but I adopted a kind of mantra on our trip. I found myself saying it might not be like this again, in my head. It didn’t feel fatalistic, more a way to cherish this time with you. I say it to myself as the breeze caresses my naked skin and the movie plays on and I feel your shoulder gently lift and lower my head as your tired, queasy body breathes.

When you feel better, we bike to and from a tiny town outside of the city that is known for its handmade tapetes (rugs). There are no bike lanes in Oaxaca and it is stressful maneuvering traffic. You lead the way and there is a moment where we are bombarded by buses but I look ahead and there you are, passing under a jacaranda tree, being showered by its purple leaves. This is the snapshot I will etch into my brain with a heavy hand because it perfectly encapsulates the juxtaposition of chaos and beauty I felt so many times on this trip.

There were the easy, carefree moments, like laughing open-mouthed on a scooter or dancing around a pool or basking in the feeling of sun on our salty skin. There were the silent agreements, the moments when we knew, without debate or negotiation, when it was time to cut into a mango or what we each should grab at the market for our dinner or when it was time to mosey back for a siesta. There were the challenging times, when we got in tiffs, when we had to work through growing pains, when we had to be honest about what hurts and what we need in those moments of hurt, when we realized how stubborn we both are but also how much we love each other, which means we won’t stop working at it.

In Mexico, they say bienvenidos both when you arrive and when you leave a place. You are always welcome, whether you’re coming or going. I think that’s what true friendship, true love is — feeling welcome in each other’s hearts, whether you’re at your best or you’re stuck and trying.

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Sunday March 22nd

7am: I can’t seem to sleep in past 7am these days. I immediately make a matcha (I make the best one in town) and crawl back into bed to read Grub Street Diet. My stomach is relentless. It won’t stop growling. But I don’t want to make food yet. I have a new job that starts at 7am, which means I get up at 5:30am and pretty much launch myself into the day, so I like to savor these precious, languishing weekend mornings.

I try not to drink caffeine during the week (I know, crazy) so I like to have my matcha stand alone, not sullied by food. But my stomach is like a child throwing a tantrum, it won’t quit. So I pry myself out of bed and start a pot of water for some soft-boiled eggs. In the meantime, I gobble down a few bites of some cottage cheese “cake” (can you call it cake?) thing I was fed on Youtube. I’ve been off Instagram for a while so I resort to YouTube to disassociate and I looked up a cottage cheese thing once and now my feed is made up of the same four ingredients— eggs, cottage cheese, almond flour, protein powder— in different forms. Bark, cake, scones, protein cookie dough. Can you bake protein powder? I don’t know. I don’t really eat it. My physical therapist told me that a lot of them are loaded with heavy metals so now I’m scared of them.

Anyway, I made one of those stupid cakes the other night cause I had a sweet tooth but I can’t really eat sugar right now. I shouldn’t take my sugar-free life resentment out on the cake but it’s still stupid. It had cottage cheese in it and eggs and cacao powder. I added some coconut sugar and almond flour and baking powder for texture and puff. I smother it in almond butter and yogurt and then immediately run to the toilet because I think I am newly lactose intolerant. I think I’ve officially inherited my mother’s stomach. I text my mom and ask her when she got off the big D (dairy). In my late thirties, she texts back. Awesome, right on time.

I reheat my match in my frother for the umpteenth time. I am bogarting my beverage because it will be my only cup of the day because I’m sensitive to caffeine (and a lot of other things).

8:30am: I set a timer for 6 min 45sec for the perfect jammy egg. Then I get back in bed. I have a little cutting board next to me that I put my mug of matcha on. I’m left-handed but my nightstand is on the right side of my bed so having the cutting board to the left of me just feels more natural. I am known for being precarious with my matchas, like resting it on a cutting board on my bed or on the ledge of my couch.

I eat the jammy eggs with a mashed potato medley I made the night before with spinach, cilantro, heavy cream, a little homemade bone broth, and lots of New Zealand grass-fed butter that I buy in hoards from Costco. I hate how protein rules my life, or as Chloe Fineman refers to it, the P word. Can’t I just enjoy my breakfast instead of wondering if there is enough of the P word in it? Fuck it. Let my aging hormones run amok.

I save the ice bath from the soft-boiled eggs to dunk my face in (cold therapy! de-puff!). It’s a really good thing I live alone. I eat my egg and potato mash in bed because #sunday and realize halfway through eating it that I put a healthy amount of heavy cream in the potatoes last night. Oh well, back to the bathroom. Again, good thing I live alone.

9:30a,: My friend texts me and asks if I want to go to the gym around 10. I still feel a little cracked out from the matcha (sensitive girlie) so I snack on an apple with peanut butter to try and soak up the jittery energy. I’ll get the rest out at the gym. Today I’ll go for a run (I don’t really run but I’ve really been trying for a 2 mile walk/jog situation).

12pm: After a luxurious gym and sauna sesh, I come back home to shower. I notice a new wrinkle on my face and, to be completely honest, it gets to me. My immediate reaction is to gua sha the shit out of it, treat my face like a slab of clay, but then I remind myself to be gentle with my aging body. I remember a podcast I listened to once with adrienne maree brown about aging gracefully. It’s what’s on the inside, I tell myself. I mostly believe it but there is a little part of me that wants to vom. I am a mix of spiritual / self-loving and a product of my mother’s cynical, self-deprecating Long Island ancestry. Maybe the vom feeling is from all the cottage cheese, actually.

12:30pm: I’m craving ketchup. This doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it comes on like a tropical downpour. I make a deconstructed burger bowl (after saying that, I have to tell you that I swear I’m not a YouTube or Tik Tok food influencer). I make fries with the potatoes from my CSA and cook ground beef I got at the farmer’s market. I add pickled carrots I made last week that almost got lost forever in the back of my fridge but I saved them in an effort to use up more of my food. I mix it with pickles and shredded cabbage (though I would have preferred iceberg lettuce). I shred the cabbage on a mandolin. My friends look away when I use it cause I go fast and don’t use that protective shield thing. I haven’t sliced my finger off…yet.

I make homemade mayo. I am a mayo addict and though my family has bought so much Hellman’s over my lifetime that they should have stock in the company, I don’t buy the stuff anymore because making it is easier, cheaper, and way more delicious. It’s magic, the way one egg yolk and a little bit of mustard and lemon and oil can emulsify into something so viscously cloud-like. I douse the bowl with mayo and ketchup. The ketchup is very unsatisfying because I bought the one without sugar and it’s bland and makes me realize how crucial sugar is in ketchup. I put even more mayo on to make up for it.

2pm: I make a carrot cake for my friend’s mom because she’s driving us to the airport for our upcoming trip. I must be some sort of masochist because I love making desserts but I can’t have sugar so I don’t eat them. I like the process of baking. It feels romantic. I use a recipe from Will This Make You Happy, which I gobbled up and highly recommend. A memoir-style baking cookbook with sweet illustrations. The recipe calls for a cream cheese mousse, which is a dream (I still take licks and nibbles when I bake these days). It’s a classic cream cheese frosting with whipped cream folded in, which gives it a lighter, airier texture.

The cake is also delicious and incredibly moist from all the blitzed carrots but it’s a little too sweet, maybe because I ran out of granulated sugar and had to supplement with some turbinado sugar (is that shameful? I don’t know, I’m an amateur baker). I take pleasure in frosting the cake, spreading and swirling it around with an offset spatula. I daydream about making a pavlova with a lemon or passionfruit curd and fresh summer berries. I imagine sitting at a long table in the backyard with all of my friends, cowering around candlelight and sweaty bottles of crisp orange wine. Making a show of it, I thwack the dried, brittle pavlova with the back of a spoon to reveal its marshmallow-like center. This is the kind of romance I live for.

Food I’ve made / eaten recently:

I have a soft spot for packaged foods, particularly the ultra-processed kind. I was raised on Velveeta, Toaster Strudels, and Bagel Bites (yes, they all deserve to be capitalized for how formative they were). You might be aghast at hearing this, especially if you know the current me, which is someone who rarely touches processed foods, makes bone broth weekly, and prides herself on her vegetable intake. But if you knew the younger me, you’d know that my blood is now mostly made up of emulsifiers and pasteurized milk.

My dad was a stoner, which meant he stayed up late most nights snacking in front of the TV. I’d sneak down from my room and join him on the couch, the glow of Beavis & Butthead washing over us as we reached for the same paper plate. The paper plate was the main event, crowded with my dad’s specialties: pb&j sandwiches with the crusts cut off and Lay’s potato chips wedged in the middle; bananas cut on a diagonal, their oblong slices uniformly fanned out and sprinkled with white sugar; toaster strudels who’s flaky pastry was preciously decorated with thin, equally spaced icing strings. The plate was a work of art and my dad was the artist.

Because of his years in restaurants and culinary school, presentation was important to my dad. It didn’t matter if it was a steak served in a shallow pool of butter and garnished with parsley or an Entenmann’s danish cut into perfect squares and stacked on top of one another like jenga. My dad has always been a firm believer in you eat with your eyes first.

A friend once pulled at my heart strings when he meticulously smoothed aluminum foil onto a sheet pan—no crease in sight—and then unloaded frozen tater tots on top, spraying them with duck fat before popping them into the oven. I appreciated how, like my dad, he could even make gas station food special.

That same night, he made us a lox bagel and, because he’s smart, he set the capers on the cream cheese so they wouldn’t roll off, then draped the smoked salmon on top like a blanket, tucking them all in. Everything was neatly contained in the bagel and he cut it down the middle with such precision that it pierced me with nostalgia. I felt that warm, familiar feeling of being cared for through attention to detail.

My dad’s background has made him a mixed bag of refined and trashy when it comes to food. He ran away from his family when he was young. They eventually found him, and then shipped him off to a juvenile detention center on the coast of Washington where he was sequestered for two years. When he got out, he found his estranged mother in Idaho and became her rodeo clown. He slept in his car for a year while he worked on a potato farm. Somewhere along the way, he saved up money working in restaurants and then went to culinary school. He met my mom and started a family and a landscaping business at the same time. He came into some money around when I was 5. He was barely 30—still a young, excitable kid who wanted to flaunt his new earnings through fine dining.

On a Friday night he’d take us to a fancy French restaurant. I’d fall asleep on his lap, comforted by the feeling of his cashmere sweater, and then be woken up to him telling me to try the escargot. “You’ll love it kiddo,” he’d say, mopping a piece of crusty bread in the hot, bubbly, garlic-laced butter. I loved the taste of it but I loved the pewter pans they were served in even more. They looked like cupcake tins for regal munchkins.

That following Sunday, he would go back to being a blue collar guy. He’d take me to the diner down the street where you could get a full breakfast plate for $5. He’d be dressed in his landscaping gear, hands flecked with dirt, mulch lodged under his fingernails. Everyone who worked at the diner was always excited to see him. Everyone around town adored my dad. He had a way with people, a genuine way, taking time to chat and ask about their lives. When I got older and I’d go to the mechanic or the hardware store, they’d give me preferential treatment because I was “Arty’s kid”.

As soon as we walked into the diner, I’d beeline for the dessert case—a tall tower of rotating cakes and pies encased in glass and illuminated by a fluorescent light. It reminded me of an arcade, like a claw would suddenly drop down and I could try and snatch a slice of carrot cake or mini custard pie.

I loved how it glowed, how dignified the desserts were under the bright light. I’d press my face against the glass and watch them all spin around like they were dancers at a confectionary cabaret. My dad would eventually beckon me over and I’d slide into the booth across from him, immediately reaching for the porcelain bowl full of single-serve half and half cups. I’d peel the lid off slowly, taking in the shiny, aluminum underside, and knock it back like a shot. My dad would cut me off after a few. “Save some for my coffee, for crying out loud,” he’d exclaim in a half serious, half joking tone.

Aluminum: a staple of my childhood, a symbol of my processed food past. I loved peeling apart the seam of the aluminum packaging that surrounded a brick of cold Philadelphia cream cheese. I loved doing the same thing to Velveeta cheese before my dad cubed it and melted it in the microwave. I loved the tinsely sound the foil made when my mom tore it from its box and wrapped it around a baking tray full of hot, steaming lasagna.

I loved watching my dad wrap whole potatoes in aluminum, molding and crimping the foil around them to create a cozy nest. He’d pop them in the oven and get our baked potato buffet ready. Of course my favorite was the sour cream. I was a glutton for goopy, white foods like sour cream and cream cheese and mayonnaise. My dad used to make me cheese and mayo sandwiches on white bread. I remember walking across the lawn, the prickle of grass under my bare feet, and pulling the slice of cheese out, dropping it onto the ground, and proceeding to eat just the bread and mayo.

You can imagine how excited this younger version of me was when, a few weeks ago, my friend suggested we make a jello mold for a party we were going to. I got giddy just thinking about our trip to the grocery store, anticipating that brief moment when, as I stood in front of the shelves marveling at the wide array of colorful Jello boxes, I’d feel like I was at an art museum.

We decided on a painkiller-inspired jello. Three layers. One layer of pineapple and lime, one layer of orange and rum, and one layer of coconut. Nutmeg in there somewhere. Our pineapple layer wasn’t setting, which led us to discover that there’s an enzyme in pineapple juice called bromelain that prevents gelatin from setting. We were down to two layers, which just barely set, which my friend zhuzhed up by adding shaved coconut and orange slices on top.

It jiggled on his dashboard all the way to the party. We set it on the table next to the other snacks. No one touched it. I don’t blame them. We didn’t slice it or bring anything to eat it with. Did we think they’d just paw at it like apes? At one point I snuck over and grabbed a hunk of the slippery thing. It tasted like ass. I honestly didn’t care, though, because I had so much fun taking the entire day to make it, to relive the magic of transforming boxed food into something memorable.

Jackie Freeman and I meet at Barrio on a quintessential fall day, when you can smell the leaves turning and everyone carries layers, just in case. Inside, we are sweating, the heat of the sun beaming through the big picture windows. The door creaks and boots clomp as people shuffle in and out of the coffee shop, holding both iced and hot drinks in their hands. Jackie orders a pumpkin spice latte. “I had to,” she says, unapologetically. I get a chai latte.

We each sit in a plush leather chair, facing each other, me with my pen and paper ready to write down whatever she wants to tell me about her life as a baker. She cups the white coffee mug in her hands, her delicate fingers donning chunky silver rings.

She dives into her origin story around baking, crediting Seylou Bakery in Washington DC for much of her background and knowledge. Freeman was studying sustainability and climate policy but didn’t want to do the desk job thing. She stumbled upon an article about Seylou bakery.

“They milled all their own flour and only used local grains. They were talking about grains as an entry point to the sustainable food system.” She knew she wanted to work with her hands and thought the bakery would be the perfect way to do that while staying connected to her sustainability roots.

“The head owner and baker was extremely Zen, like real hippy shit,” she tells me. At Seylou, everything was done in a very intuitive way, and you learned to listen for when the dough was ready. “I’ve been told that I’m very patient and calm in a kitchen setting,” which, if we were to go off the honeyed texture of her voice, makes complete sense. I press her about the whole intuition piece because I’ve never really heard someone describe it that way, maybe because I’ve had the classic baking tagline it’s a science etched into my perception.

She brings up the invisible factors of baking. “Temperature, the time of year and the humidity, the weather, the temperature in the kitchen. Time. Things like that. People don’t realize that those are the most important factors. You can make the same loaf of bread every single day. This is why people are addicted to making bread because you make the same thing every day and it’s different every single day and at that point you can stop following a recipe. Every single tool and ingredient I’m using is a different temperature and that affects the baking process. When I do something every day, I can feel the changes in the environment.” Intuition develops as the baker becomes more familiar with all of these invisible factors; becomes attuned to the nature of minute elemental shifts.

We transition into the logistics of making croissants and I get giddy telling her about the Claire Saffitz croissant video, which of course she knows about. Andy Shauf plays in the background, swirling around the din of friends catching up over tea cakes and coffee as she tells me that there are 27 layers of lamination.

“Making a croissant is such a laborious process. There are all of these specific time frames where certain things need to happen and it’s all about the butter and the dough meeting at this very specific temperature. If they don’t meet at this specific point, you’re fucked.” Her voice is relentlessly soothing. I imagine all the years of mixing and folding and shaping dough in the early, quiet hours of the morning imprinting on her nervous system, smoothing out pockets of stress.

“If you do it enough, you don’t need to use a recipe. You just know the elements that go in it. You can eyeball it. You can’t be afraid.”

“Of having fuck ups” I interrupt.

“Yeah,” she validates.

Her advice to other bakers is to not be too precious with it. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the process and crucial for developing that finesse for feeling. “If you were to teach me one thing to bake right now, what would it be?” I ask her.

“Knowing how to make a good pie is really important.” I ask her about a standout pie she’s made. “I poached quince–which are hard to find–in a chamomile syrup and then I put them in a pie so they were double baked. Quince is kind of like a lemony apple but it’s really hard so you have to poach it in syrup and it really absorbs whatever syrup it’s in. You poach it for a couple of hours and it gets really soft and takes on the flavor of whatever it’s poached in.” In this case, it was the chamomile syrup.

Jackie is a baker at Vergennes Laundry, a wood-fired bakery with a French background. I ask her what she’s been working on lately and she grabs her phone to show me photos of the canelé recipe they’ve been working on for almost a year. I lean in to look at photos of halved canelés on dark brown parchment paper that is perfectly smoothed out and cut exactly to the size of the baking sheet. Next to each halved canelé are time stamps and recipe sources written down with sharpie.

“They’re really finicky,” she explains. “You have to bake them in a copper mold that is lined with beeswax. Every single time you have to clean it out and dip it in the beeswax. It’s a very traditional French thing that’s so hard to nail.” The copper molds allow the canelé to caramelize on the outside while keeping the inside custardy. It’s all the same custard rum batter but they form this beautiful brown outer shell from the caramelization process.

As we finish the last sips of our drinks, Jackie comes back to the idea of patience. “You can’t rush the process. The bread will be ready when it’s ready.”

“So the bread is boss?” I more confirm than ask.

“Exactly,” she says, flashing a smirk.

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It’s day 4, Vipassana day, which means they’ve upped the ante. You’ve been instructed to try and not move your body the entire hour-long meditation. No fidgeting. No opening your legs or adjusting your posture. It’s one of the hardest and most rewarding days. You are determined to get through it without moving. Towards the end, when your hips hurt and your knees ache, you mentally coach yourself through it. You got this, bitch. You can do this. You call yourself bitch in the most loving, empowering way.

You do it. You get through the entire sit without moving. You feel like you’ve turned a corner. Proved something to yourself. You smile as you shuffle out of the meditation hall because you haven’t been this proud of yourself in a while. You can sense that this is a metaphor for something deeper. That this seat is not just a seat, but a practice of staying with discomfort instead of running away; trying not to react so abruptly at the first sign of restlessness or aversion or stickiness. If you slow down and stay a little longer, you can get a sense of whether it’s actually pain or if it’s just your mind playing out a story of pain.

You thought your body would be a wreck as the 10 days went on. All the sitting. But your body is healing. The aches and pains you came in with are fading. Your body feels stronger, lighter, less bunched up. You realize how much your mind influences the state of your body. As you get a better hold over your mind by not immediately following its lead, by keeping your awareness on the sensations of your body, you realize that some of those aches are fleeting because they are just byproducts of your mental discomfort. As the mind starts to become more comfortable with things it’s not used to — boredom, lack of distractions, sitting with its own patterns — your body follows suit and becomes more comfortable as well.

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You’re excited about how healthy your poops are. Must be all the roughage and oatmeal with stewed prunes. You get agitated with the woman in front of you who is picking tortilla chips out of the communal bowl one at a time with tongs. You squeeze the sides of your cobalt blue plastic lunch tray a little harder and then think, wow Sarah, you’ve got your work cut out for you here. What are you in a rush for anyway? Another meditation?

You replay almost an entire episode of The Sopranos in your head during lunch, the one where Paulie and Christopher get stuck in the woods in the snow and resort to eating frozen ketchup packets in an abandoned van they stumble upon. You giggle to yourself while you eat your chilaquiles, which in reality are pretty mid, but seem like the tastiest thing after days and days of salads and beans and lentil soup.

During recess, when you get outside time, you play this game where you walk along the gravel path with your eyes closed until you don’t hear the crunch under your feet so you know you’ve veered off onto the grass. You situate yourself back on the gravel and go again.

You talk to yourself out loud. You walk the designated women’s walking path and make your way into the woods where you see a stream of sunlight slicing between the trees. You stand in it’s line of warmth and close your eyes. You sing Way Over Yonder by Carole King and cry because you like the sound of your own voice. You’re learning to love yourself more here. You realize you’re so used to defaulting to others, to minding others to a point where your own self-adulation becomes starved.

You, again, wonder what AJ is doing. He’s so close but so far. You wonder if he’s actually meditating or if he’s stretching or staring out the window. You laugh thinking about the day you two drove down here, when you stopped at the Big Y down the road to get a few last minute things. How you both stood in the entryway of the grocery store you both grew up on, admiring the bakery section while people strode by with their freshly-plucked shopping carts. You both started laughing when you realized you were just standing there with your arms crossed admiring the bakery section. You were buying time, trying to soak up the last moments of consumerism before going renunciate for 10 days. You popped into the Dollar Store and bought some trashy sunglasses that make you feel young and cunty.

On day 8 you start to wonder if you’ve gone off the rails when you start talking to a napkin. It’s the napkin that has your illegal afternoon pb&j wrapped up in it. It’s sitting on the windowsill and part of it is being lifted and lowered by the wind wafting through the window. Each time it lifts up you imagine a ghost and start going oooooOOOOoOoOOOOOoooo spOOoooOOooOOky! out loud. This is how bored you are.

You cry during morning meditation after putting a hand over your lung to try and soothe the pesky cough that’s lingering. You cry thinking about how good your body is, how much it’s gotten you through, all of the knots it has tied over the years to protect you, how you’re here to finally untie some of those knots. As your mind starts to siphon off some of the gripping thoughts and patterns it’s held onto for years, you feel your body follow suit. You feel the aches and pains fade, you sense a lightness. You cry thinking about your friends, how much you love them, how there’s no better gift than being completely yourself around people, where you don’t feel like you have to put on a costume or wonder where you stand.

You cry, too, because you’re finally being honest with yourself, about the relationships that have dissolved in your life and how you contributed to that dissolution. The ways you contort your personality in intimate relationships because you’ve been taught that your happiness is derivative of a man’s approval. You’re tired of folding in the face of a man’s desire, tired of muffling your own emotional vulnerability because you’re concerned that they won’t be able to handle it. You realize the deeper fear that drives that behavior: your open-heartedness will scare people away. But it’s one of the things you love most about yourself and so it’s time to nurture that part of you again.

You pack certain clothes away to create the illusion that you’re leaving soon, even though it’s only day 4. You pull out enough Qtips for the rest of your time here and then pack the rest away. In the back of your mind you know you’ll probably pull all these things out again but whatever works to trip the wires a bit. You’re finding the humor in more things. Feeling light-hearted. Realizing that you know how to have fun with yourself, keep yourself entertained. There’s a guy who always burps during your group meditations and, because it’s so silent in there, the sudden expression jolts your system. You call him the belcher. The first few days you were annoyed with him and now you find yourself smirking every time you hear his low grumble from the back of the room.

There are no clocks in the meditation hall, or really anywhere. You live by the sound of the gong that’s rung 15 minutes before meditation sessions and at the start of meal times. You start figuring out ways to loosely tell time, or estimate where you might be in the hour-long meditation window. You pop a cough drop into your mouth right before it starts, rolling it across your tongue and depositing it into your cheek. You squirrel it away for a bit before rolling it back over to burrow it in your other cheek. Then you pin it between your tongue and the roof of your mouth. You figure if you don’t suck on it the whole time it should take a good 45 minutes for it to fully disintegrate. You can also tell by the activity in the room. Things start off mostly quiet, and as time goes by and mental stamina starts to fade, you hear more exasperated sighs and coughs and squirming around on meditation cushions. You repeat the phrases you’ve been hearing every day to help you get through the hour: work patiently and persistently. Patiently and persistently.

Your emotions aren’t as scary as you thought they’d be. You notice insights sprouting up spontaneously from the new fertile soil you’re laying down in your mind. Let yourself be messy. You don’t have to always rehearse for life, always be presentable. You don’t have to have everything tied in a neat little bow before expressing it. You watch your mind take a few more steps back each day, settling into a wider perspective. You feel it become less grippy, less fixated on specific people or situations. You start becoming less pointed and ask bigger questions like what do I rely on out of fear & scarcity versus joy & abundance? You feel yourself letting go of the neurotic tendency to attach a story or meaning to every little thing.

It feels like the sky is opening up above you, right where you’re standing. And, for once, you didn’t have to chase it. It just arrived. Not out of nowhere. Out of your discipline, out of your efforts to stay. You realize that what’s harder than seeking is staying. Accepting. You feel high when you leave the meditation hall, lighter as you pad your way across the carpeted hallway and then slide down the tiled corridor in your socks towards your room.

You pocket a Korean jelly cleanser that seems innocent and translucent enough but then goes on like toothpaste and reeks of perfume. You silently shuffle to group meditation and remember that you not only have a sensitive heart but sensitive skin and the remnants of the face wash starts to make your face burn slightly. But you’ve been instructed to not move your posture for the entire hour of meditation and all you can focus on the whole time is the slight tingling sensation on your skin and how you smell like a mixture of Bath & Body works and the memory of going to the perfume section of the department store with your mom when you were young. You start to worry you’re breaking out in a rash.

The days are long. Gruelingly long. You have never been so bored. Oh god, there are so many days left. So you try and break up the days by doing exciting, novel things. Like rearranging your supplements on your nightstand once again! Or doing things you’d never do at home, like wash your feet in the sink. Or get on your knees and sweep your floor with the handheld dust pan and broom they’ve provided. Or refold your clothes and plan your outfits for the coming days even though you only bought five shirts and three pairs of pants, even though they all fall under the sweats/pajama category.

You start glimpsing at what it’s really like to console yourself. You have to. You can’t outsource your comfort to others. You don’t have your phone to reach out to anyone. You can’t talk, you have to honor noble silence. You can’t verbally process the big lonely feelings that are coming up. So you cry quietly during meditation next to someone you don’t know but feel inextricably linked to because your bodies have been breathing and working through things next to each other for hours and hours. You hold your posture and let the tears stream down your face while you remember what your teacher said: everything is impermanent. You try and remember that, just like any sensation, this too will rise and fall.

You make the day feel special by “pampering” yourself, which means (because you didn’t bring any fancy skin care or face masks) you slyly make a body scrub at the tail end of lunch (which is the last meal of the day and the last chance to access anything from the dining hall). You feel like everyone is watching you intently (they have no other distractions/nothing else to do) while you scoop spoonfuls of salt into a tiny dixie cup you found in the Student Use closet and then grab the ReaLemon bottle and shake some lemon juice in, then spray it with some olive oil because they put all the condiments in spray bottles. But you don’t really care if people are watching because they can’t question you or say anything about it. While you’re at it, you make an open-faced pb&j and wrap it in a napkin, sneaking it into your room so you can eat it later and not starve to death because they don’t serve dinner.

Your favorite part of the day is recess time, after lunch, when you get to sit in a lawn chair in the sun with your new geriatric/Y2k sunglasses from the Dollar Store (your last purchase before starting the course) and let the warmth and light of the sun enrobe your face. You think to yourself, this is one of my favorite feelings in the whole world. The reliability of that soothes you.

You’re here with your best friend but he’s a he and they separate genders so you won’t really see him the entire time. But you are in same big hall during group meditations. He’s all the way on the other side (there’s about 160 people) and the lights are low but you try and catch his eye. He’s not looking your way so you curse him. You talk to him in your head for a few minutes during meditation, just to test if your friendship has reached telepathic levels yet. Maybe it will by the end of these ten days.

It alighted me, the way he knew his way around a kitchen so well. How quickly he could improvise. How swiftly he pivoted back and forth between the prep table and the stove, grabbing tools as if it were his own kitchen. I never had to tell him where anything lived.

I was on drinks and dessert that evening. Our dinner had taken on an Italian theme – Italian beef stew, pistachio ricotta cake – so I decided to do two takes on a Negroni. Earlier in the day I had rummaged through Reddit, seeing how people lauded the cocktail’s versatility, reading about their favorite liquors to use in place of the classic gin: rum, whiskey, mezcal. I thought of two spots I had been to — both in Montreal — that had their own spin on a Negroni. One was an Italian restaurant with a Cafe Negroni on the menu, so I infused vermouth with coffee beans, letting it sit on the counter all afternoon.

The other spot was a specialty cocktail bar in Chinatown, sandwiched between a dumpling house and a Korean skincare store. It was perfectly cramped and dimly-lit with faux-Zafferano lamps on the center of each table. I wanted to recreate the rum Negroni I had there, the one with the coconut fat wash, so I mixed Campari with coconut oil, let it infuse for a while, and then stuck it in the freezer so the oil would separate.

I mixed both versions, using a barrel-aged gin, which made it feel like we had gin and whiskey and dark rum all in one. He used a paring knife to cut off a swath of orange peel and we lit it before rubbing it around the rim of each glass.

I moved on to making the pistachio ricotta cake while he tended to the stew. I used a food processor to blend the batter — softened butter, ricotta, sugar, eggs, vanilla — and watched it swirl around until something like the smoothest pancake batter started to take shape. I lifted my heels to peer through the hole at the top of the machine.

What if I shrunk myself, I said out loud, and dove headfirst into the batter. I imagined what it would feel like to plunge into the sweet, cloud-like mix.

That would eventually turn really bad, he replied, referring to getting obliterated by the blade.

Yeah, but it might be fun at first. And not a bad way to die.

I scraped out the batter and used the same food processor to make a pistachio paste to swirl into the cake. Don’t even bother cleaning the food processor out, the recipe said. The taste of pistachio and sugar transported me back to a trip to Sicily, when my sister and I had their version of an ice cream sandwich: soft, buttery brioche buns stuffed with heaping scoops of pistachio ice cream. It was melting fast under the hot Mediterranean sun and pale milky green started to drip down my arm. The brioche bun was so stuffed with ice cream that the top bun was lifted and tilted back. It looked like a wide-open mouth with buck teeth.

I assembled the cake and we both bent over the open oven so he could pull out the bubbling stew and I could replace it with the cake. I bumped up the oven temp 15 more degrees.

We decided to make polenta last minute and didn’t really know what we were doing. It cooked too fast and we disagreed on whether to keep the heat on or not. We both took turns spreading the globby mass on the bottom of each plate. He added the finesse, like he always did, making a kind of crater in the center to hold the stew. He could even turn gas station food into something special, like the time he sprayed duck fat on frozen tater tots before popping them into the oven.

I used to get upset when eating a meal took way less time than making it. But now that I get to cook so often with people who get excited about the whole process, who view dinner as an event, the making of the meal is often the most memorable part.

The berries are tart and bright, packed with vitamin C (up to 10 times more than oranges) and one of the only fruits that contains all four omegas. I read that they are the only known fruit source of Omega 7, which is particularly rare, which is housed inside their oils. I feel like I’m unlocking the secret to vitality when I get my hands on them.

My friend and I drove an hour and a half to get the berries, from one of the only farmers in the state who grows them. When we get there, he pulls out a few gallon-sized bags of seaberries from the chest freezer, lamenting that he doesn’t have much left for himself. My friend and I shoot each other a look like he said we could have some; we drove an hour and a half to get them; should we feel guilty? but then grab the bags like we’ve finally gotten our hands on the dirty money and we better hightail it back to the getaway car.

On the way home we stop at Gaylord Farm to pick up beef. Every time we go I ask if they’re ever going to make merch. Missed opportunity. It’s a dark and dusty barn filled with freezers of different cuts of meat. It’s an honor system, as most stands are here. Cash only. There’s a calculator and invoice paper. A list of meat prices per pound. I write down each item, then punch the numbers in the calculator before counting my cash and putting it in the designated box. I pause to revel in the nostalgia of it all. It reminds me of opening a library book and seeing a due date slip glued to the inside, the last ink stamp dating back too many years. I arrange all of my newly-purchased frozen meat in a box and nod to the guy on the tractor as we head to the car.

While I make the oxymel, I listen to a podcast that shares different banana recipes. They mention maduros con queso, banana fritters with yogurt and honey. I nearly salivate. I fantasize about making banana vinegar. I learn about sal prieta, the peanuty condiment, which is made with salt and cumin and corn and annatto seed oil. I lick oxymel off my pointer finger and tap my phone, typing annatto seed into the search bar. The first photo I land on looks like a cartoonish mouth with voluptuous lips. It reminds me of Oblina from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.

The mouth is parted and smirking in a way that gives jester. The seeds are like red teeth, jutting out in all different directions, crookedly jolly. I feel like it’s playing a prank on me, like it just popped in a set of gag teeth and now it’s standing there, still as a statue, waiting for me to notice, to guffaw, to spit out whatever it is I’m chewing on. Hopefully banana fritters.

Concord

It was the summer of juice,

the backyard lined with vines

of too-sweet grapes that turned

the days a tawny mauve. Nights

I slept with the windows wide,

mosquitoes needling my legs.

Everything turned me on:

mulberry-mottled stoop,

smell of purple fermenting,

every fig on the tree. Every

stranger on the train until

I had them and began wanting

the next. You don’t understand love,

said my love when I told him.

I could only open my mouth

and then close it, mimicking

the morning glories. He left

and I wanted him again, in fall

I wanted summer, and now I want

for everything to remain as ripe

as before the first bite. I thought

I would grow into a different kind

of person. I really thought

those grapes would become wine.

this part:

I want

for everything to remain as ripe

as before the first bite.

made me think of preserving novelty in relationship — to people, to place, to hobbies and routines. How, once we sink our teeth into something, imbue ourself with its taste, a fading process can commence. The moment you break the skin, the rotting begins. It made me think of the fleeting nature of a summer fruit, how it begs to be eaten soon, versus the heartier nature of a fall fruit, something like an apple that can wait longer.

Is there anything more symbolic of desire, of wanting, of being unrestrained, than the devouring of a ready summer fruit? Cavorting at its ripeness? Trying to mouth all of its juices? Letting yourself be messy as it runs down your chin or trails along your forearm?

We talked a lot about fruit during book club, particularly the inherent danger that comes with some fruit. Mango is part of the poison ivy family, hence mango mouth, or the rash that some people get around their mouth when they eat the fruit. We talked about poisonous rhurbarb leaves and cyanide in cherry pits. I learned that you can only eat the fruit of monstera deliciosa when it’s ripe, otherwise, it can cause burning or irritation due to the fiberglass-like crystals it contains.

Fruit represents pleasure and risk. There can be a gleaming, seductive sweetness and an undercurrent of danger. I’ve been thinking about fruit as a symbol of “unconventional” pleasure. Unconventional only in the sense that dominant culture deems it that way. Unconventional in the sense that pleasure and risk can be inextricably linked. It makes me think of Gayle Rubin’s Charmed Circle, which illustrates how kinky sex falls outside of social convention.

In kink, there is freedom to unleash parts of ourselves that would be too dark or unusual for conventional society, for everyday life. I listened to a podcast about durian and how the odorous reputation, the disgust, is part of its allure. It made me think of being messy during sex, being drawn to primal urges, to things that are typically off-limits or dirty or taboo.

There’s much more to be said there, especially when it comes to kink, which is a complex and vast world, but I’m mulling over this forbidden fruit thing, this propensity towards pain and pleasure, sweetness and risk. If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them ‧₊ 🍒 ⋅ ˚✮

The other night my friend and I went on a sunset walk after dinner. We meandered around the perimeter of the park and he showed me a paw paw tree he discovered a few weeks before. Darkness was settling in quick and, as we arrived at the tree, we could barely make out the fruit so we reached our hands in and felt around, confiscating one of the softer paw paws. I turned it around in my hands as we walked, thinking about how close to a mango it felt.

I had never had one before. When we got home, I ran a knife around the perimeter of it and swiftly twisted it between my hands, felt for a second like I was in an action movie, snapping someone’s neck. I expected juice to dribble out, just like a mango, but it didn’t. Inside were a bunch of seeds, black but shaped and sized like fava beans, their narrow heads sticking out from the custardy, whitish-yellow flesh. I popped one seed at a time in my mouth, running my teeth around it to scrape off the flesh. It was reminiscent of banana and mango and pineapple. A bit savory. I don’t think it was as ripe as it could have been but it was still tasty, and I think the novelty of a new fruit made it taste even better.

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We start scavenging through the wooden crates together. Palpating. Plucking potential candidates. Asking what do you think? Passing them off to each other to reach a consensus.

Thank you so much for helping me.

Oh, you’re welcome, she says giddily. I’m happy to be here. I’m usually with the veggies but I love being with the fruit.

Her choice to use the word with strikes me. She could have said I love being on fruit. But to be on the same level as the fruit, to be with them, is to have a rightful reverence for them, to appreciate the way they breathe life and joy into us for a short and piercingly bright season.

She tells me good luck with the pudding and I don’t tell her this but I hope, secretly, that I see her again and I can update her on how it turned out, thank her again for being a part of the process.

I head home to make the pudding. I only have an hour or so before my date gets here, but luckily it bakes fast, and luckily we’ll be able to eat it as fresh and warm as possible. I crowd the peaches in the baking dish. It calls for plums but I prefer the lucent crescent moon of peach slices, all piled on top of one other like college students lounging in the sun on a university green. I pour the buttery batter around them. They become sutured by the mixture of flour and milk and eggs.

He eventually shows up at my place and we drive 20 minutes out of town to a farm overlooking the lake. We head for the on-site bakery first, picking up a loaf of olive bread to add to our picnic.

This bread has six types of olives! I guffaw. Can you even name six types?

Oh, easy, he spits back, and without skipping a beat, starts reciting them while tearing off pieces of bread. There are the usual suspects – kalamata, castelvetrano – but then he lists a handful I haven’t heard of and won’t remember.

We drive to the water, bread and cheese and peachy pudding in tow, amble through the woods and emerge onto a rocky beach. He gives me a refresher on how to skip rocks and while I practice, he sets up our picnic. It’s one of those days when the temperature is confusing, when the sun is shrouded in clouds that look like gauzy fabric, its light trying to break through haziness. I ask him about a dessert they have on the menu at his work right now.

How do you make the peach compote thing on top? I ask.

It’s a peach gastrique so you use sugar and vinegar, he says, and I’m suddenly rosied by his use of the word, nodding along as if it doesn’t ring exotic to me.

I look it up later and one recipe says to caramelize the sugar first for a richer, more complex flavor, then deglaze it by carefully adding vinegar and water. Toss in the peaches and simmer until the fruit is tender. You can puree it and strain it through a sieve to make a smoother sauce.

We talk about food and family. We look out at the lake and wonder what that island in the distance is called. I tell him about the sample snack plates my dad made us when I was a kid, when I’d sneak down from my bedroom and sit on the couch next to him, the glow of the TV washing over us as we reached for the same paper plate. I remember banana slices sprinkled with sugar, PB & J’s with the crusts cut off and Lays potato chips wedged in the middle, toaster strudels cut up into perfect tiny squares and ribboned with glaze.

I pick up a piece of the pudding and squish it between my fingers. The top is slightly crunchy from the caramelized brown sugar and the inside is custardy, reminiscent of bread pudding. It’s confusing, like the weather, sliceable and scoopable at once. I like how it holds its shape but leaves my fingers glossy. The peaches could be jammier. I think about making it again and, next time, putting the peaches in a brown paper bag with a banana to soften them, to more easily pierce through their fuzzy skin. I imagine them in the oven, turning thick and syrupy, slices losing their shape to a more honeyed state.

SEX ED BOOK CLUB : SEPT 24th

Next Sex Ed Book Club is in one week! Wednesday Sept 24th at 7pm. We’re reading Sexy Cake by Cake Zine. If you’d like to join / read along, reply to this email and I’ll send you a link with event details + a PDF of the zine.

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I get home around 9pm and head straight to the living room, splaying my body out on the carpet. I look up at the ceiling and note the spots where it’s warped. I feel comforted by the soft pink glow of my heart string lights. I laugh each time I hear the thud of tiny, hard crab apples falling onto the tops of cars on my street.

I ate one earlier that day, expecting it to be jarringly tart, surprised at how sweet it was. I imagined myself climbing the big tree in front of my apartment and collecting as many as I could to make jam. That desire died quickly. I’d rather lay here instead and listen for another plummet, for the warbling roll across a car roof, for the eventual splat onto the sidewalk. The sidewalk is covered in red splotches. I’ve stepped on so many apples, tracked their bloody remains into my entryway.

I’m doing this new thing where I write down 10 observations each day. Something to hopefully help with my creative constipation. You write 10 observations from your immediate environment, just as you see them, just as they are. Don’t embellish them with metaphors or interpretations. A few from the last week:

• oversized binder clips holding down a poster, clapping on the wall when the wind picks up

• the slender, claw-like bud of a gladiolus

• cloud shapes in the sky: a lobster, ribs with wings, a dragon, giant skulls

• late summer sunflowers are top-heavy, their centers remind me of sponges. I poke at one gently and it barely bobs

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SEX ED BOOK CLUB IS BACK!

We took a summer break but we’re back baby! And I’m very excited to be reading the first issue of Cake Zine, one of my favorite publications. Their first volume is called Sexy Cake and it’s all about sex and dessert. From the editor’s letter:

In our modern imagination, cake is inexorably linked to indulgence and celebration. But begin to probe its rich history and you’ll find ritual and scandal, social stratification and plenty of sexualization.

Society might dismiss “a piece of cake” as something easily accomplished, but the reality of cake is as delicately layered as sexuality itself.

📚 What’s inside this issue: seductive chocolate mousse, cake sitting, recipe for a nude, an indulgent photo spread of cakes (like vanilla cake with Fiori di Sicilia icing and cherry jam), essays about lovers and tres leches cake, erotic bakeries, the saccharine spectacle of jumping out of a cake. Here is a PDF copy of the issue. You can also buy the PDF and pre-order their upcoming issue, Forbidden Fruit, here.

📅 We’ll meet on Wednesday, Sept 24th at 7pm to talk about Sexy Cake. Reply to this email if you’re interested in joining and I’ll send you more details.

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SIGNS OF NOURISHMENT ZINE: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

I’m starting a zine with my pal Katy Hellman called Signs of Nourishment. It’s a community-centered zine that marries food and astrology. I’m verrrrry excited for this new project. Our first volume will be focusing on the signs of Libra, Scorpio, and Sagittarius + the themes these signs embody: finding balance through food, processing grief through food, and cultivating joy through food.

We’re now accepting submissions for our first issue. Submissions are due SEPT 19th. Send us a recipe, art, a short story, an interview, poem, essay — whatever your creative heart is craving! If you’re interested, you can read more about themes and submission guidelines here.

Subscribe now

• “Let me tell you, when it's fresh, like half a bayleaf is all you need. They're super strong. That McCormack shit that has probably sat on a shelf for ten years? You might as well use corn flakes for all the flavor and aroma you'll get from it.”

• “I am not a Bay-Leaf-Bot. I am human, and I like bay leaves.”

• “I get sad when Bay Leaves”

To test for yourself, make one pot of rice without bay leaves and another pot of rice with bay leaves tucked in there. Taste both and see what you find.

Also, this:

• “Yes, the strong scent of bay leaves can help deter weevils from infesting flour and other stored grains. While there isn't much scientific research specifically on bay leaves and weevils, many people find that placing bay leaves in flour and other grain containers helps keep these pests away. The eucalyptol in bay leaves is thought to be the reason for this repellent effect.”

Weevils?! Did you know that they’re called weevils?!?! Are they named that because they are wee little evils, infiltrating and ruining our food stashes? That reaaally tickled my brain.

Okay, so that was my research for the morning. Please feel free to reply to this email and weigh in on the bay leaf debate. Do you think they add anything? Are they viable or is this just something we do because we’ve been told to do it in every recipe and we’ve never stopped to ask ourselves if it’s actually working, like being told that penetrative sex is at the top of the sexual staircase but when you stop and really challenge it you’re like wait, no, making out is waaaaaay hotter and waaaaay more intimate and I’m definitely putting that at the top of my own sexual staircase.

On another note (but still in the same vein) I’ve been thinking about moments when I feel really hot and confident in a culinary context. I remember when someone I was dating came over for dinner and I was making my signature vinaigrette: lemon, olive oil, mustard, apple cider vinegar, and honey. I squeezed the half a lemon over my cupped palm, using my hand as a strainer, strategically opening the space between my fingers just enough to catch the seeds but still let the lemon juice dribble through into the bowl beneath me. They saw me doing it and said woah, I’ve never seen that before. That’s smart. I gloated to myself. Other moments I feel hot in food world:

• Any time I throw a towel over my shoulder and keep it there while I toss roasting potatoes around a sizzling sheet pan or serve full, colorful plates of food to my friends.

• When I whack an avocado pit with a knife with utter (and reckless?) confidence.

• When I slice a loaf of bread and rest it, cut side down, on the kitchen counter so air doesn’t enter the crumb and turn it stale.

• When I order a martini (which I got from my friend Anna, which made my jaw drop when she ordered it, because of the order itself but also because of the sheer precision and mastery with which she ordered it): extra dry, extra dirty, extra cold, blue cheese-stuffed olives. Extra baby.

• Peeling ginger with a spoon so it stays close to the skin, so you don’t sacrifice any of the flesh.

Another tip I just learned:

When do you feel hot in the kitchen? What little hacks do you have that would expand someone’s gastronomic skillset? I want to know!! Make me even hotter in the kitchen please 👩🏻‍🍳

I hope you have a sweet week with yummy food and even yummier company <3 Please share this post with your food-loving friends. As you have probably surmised by now, I love combining food and pleasure. If you have any food/pleasure-related topics you’d love to read about, let me know! I love getting ideas from my community.

p.s. - I just started reading Bitter in the Mouth and am hooked.

okay bye! talk to you soon!

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* * *

We are driving home from our performance, tired from days of practicing and then being under the hot sun all day. One of us is in the front seat, pointing out tree species and praising the growth they’ve had this year. We are in the back seat, fucking around, coming up with silly questions like if you were a hose pattern, which one would you be? First we have to refresh our memories, so we count the patterns on our hands. Jet, mist, shower, center, angle, cone, full, flat.

You both brainstorm out loud which one I would be. The jet, you both agree, and I’m surprised, would have never guessed I was the jet. The jet is pointed, direct. I don’t see myself that way. You explain that I do this thing sometimes with my mouth, a flirty smirk, something about how my eyebrow lifts and I angle my body in a certain way. Like you’re about to jet at any moment, one of you says. What am I about to jet? I ask. Your pussy, the other one blurts out. We laugh, in that unadulterated, cackling way. In that way where we don’t care how contorted our faces are.

I am gliding on the rising columns of your words, of the ways you see me. You rest your head on my shoulder and we clasp each other’s forearms. We fall asleep, interlocked in this way, but I am rocked awake by the bumps in the road. You are still asleep. I can tell by the way your hand keeps squeezing my forearm in sudden bursts. I smile, comforted by your body’s uncontrolled murmurings.

BLIND PORTRAITS

I’ve been doing these blind-ish portrait drawings for my friends since February and I just recently did them for The Ramble. My first time doing them in a public setting! It was so sweet to get to know new folks while sitting with them and drawing them. It was also the first time I did group drawings — friends, partners, siblings, roommates. I loved getting to gab and ask questions and comment on what I was admiring about people as I drew them.

What an intimate and vulnerable thing to see a stranger so up close and personal. To be perceived! But it filled me with a very special type of joy. And I’d love to do more. Let me know if you ever want to gather up a group of people and do portraits together. It’s such a fun, whimsical, connecting activity.

ZINES!

I made a zine! With six of my sweet little essays! And original art! Let me know if you want one (by replying to this email) and I can mail it to you or drop it in your mailbox if you’re local. By donation (suggested $5-$15) but please have one for free if you don’t have the means to donate right now.

That’s what I’ve got for now :)) I’ve been noodling on new essays to write around love, relationships, eroticism, and intimacy. If there’s a certain topic you’d love to read about in personal essay form, I’d love suggestions. A writing prompt, of sorts <3

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I eat at least a pint a day and I can feel my body building a tolerance for their acid. The more time I spend with blueberries, the more confounding it is that they’re blue. It feels sci-fi. Maybe I’m eating too many blueberries. You have to check the tops of the blueberries because tiny spiders will make their homes in them. Maybe they are attracted to the blueberries because they look like little flowers, or actually a belly button with flower petals outlining it. Sometimes I come across the spiders with their legs lifted over the petals and I imagine them lounging at the pool, their wet arms draped over the hot concrete while the rest of their body soaks in the vulgarly chlorinated water.

Most of the people I work with are in college. They ask me about some show I’ve never heard of because it’s passed my time. They guffaw: wait, you’ve never seen that show?! They don’t know my age and I don’t reveal the number but convey it this way: while you were still in diapers I was losing my virginity in the back of a car in the Stop & Shop parking lot. A man who is closer to my age laughs out that’s a good way to put it. The college kids laugh in unison and still don’t ask my age.

There are moments of gabbing gabbing gabbing and moments of silence. I pop my earbuds in and listen to Hemlock’s June album, smile at the rawness of it, voices in the background, clear that they are recording among a group of friends, unplanned, which elicits such an intimate invitation into the realness of their life. In these moments between gabbing gabbing gabbing I meditate on how novel turns familiar under the touch of time.

My first week of harvesting I took my time, marveling at each blueberry, savoring how easily they slip off their tiny stems. Just a few weeks in and now I’m grabbing them by the handful, pawing at the bushes like a hungry animal. I’m thinking about how novelty wears off and how the work of my entire life seems to be re-infusing a sense of newness into familiar routines.

I am also learning the joy of repetitive motion, of sinking your teeth into the same action, over and over again. There’s something to it, like watching someone wrap a piece of meat in brown paper and tie it with string, so swiftly, so methodically, clear they’ve done it countless times before. It feels like you’ve been let into a secret, makes you wonder if there’s a script running through their head as they do it. Maybe something like: fold, sides, roll, tie. I don’t know because I haven’t done it.

Similar to wrapping a burrito or constructing a take out container, in record time, from flat to pre-cut tabs slotted into pre-cut slits or swirling a mass of hair into a top bun in one fell swoop. You do it and then it’s done, onto the next, nothing lingering. Your job is done once you leave. You can move on with your life until the next day.

It’s completely refreshing as someone who can carry a thought to the ends of the earth, who’s other work can mean endless workshopping. I am freed from the constant this could go on and on—that infinite horizon. There is a cap, whether it is the hours I work in one day or the end of the growing season. There is no escalator, so to speak, no goal to work towards except picking and sorting and packing, then rinse and repeat. It is serious, in the sense that it is worthy work, in the sense that there will be many mouths that happily feed on it. But then it’s not serious, in a way I so badly need: I’m just a monkey picking and picking at the bushes and eating blueberries until my tummy hurts.

Thank you for being here and reading my work. Another faaabulous way to support my work is to share this post and encourage your pals to subscribe so I can grow this lil old newsletter :’)

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I stopped short the other day to laugh at the thoughts that were running through my head and the following piece came out of it. I spun it into fiction, a genre I don’t often touch. But it’s been fun to access different parts of my creativity, stretch my imagination, play with voice, and veer from my typical style and tone:

You eat your yogurt with a fork, which means you have too many dishes in the sink and you’re too lazy to wash one god damn spoon. That’s the thing about moving through heartbreak when you live alone–some days it sends you into a creative frenzy where you’re writing writing writing about the hot sex you two used to have and the wedge that eventually pussyfooted its way in and breaking up after admitting that the wedge was, in fact, unwedgeable. You cry through the writing writing writing but feel proud of yourself for channeling your mess of feelings in a healthy way.

Other days it means leaving a pile of dirty dishes in the sink and tip-toeing around your apartment, like you’re dodging land mines, because your shit is scattered all over the floor but you can’t clean it up. Not yet. You convince yourself that it’s too hot to do anything and sit on your living room floor right in front of the AC and let it blast you. You think about brushing your teeth but why does that feel like the hardest and longest task in the world? and I don’t feel like being dommed by the smart timer on my Sonicare that follows the dentist-recommended brush time of two minutes then run your tongue along your top front teeth and tell yourself they aren’t that grimy, it can wait.

You get up after a few minutes to slice a radish (yes, don’t worry, local & organic) right on the kitchen counter–why bother getting out a cutting board?–hoping the fresh crunch of each bite will provide some sort of contrast to the current mush of your body and brain.

You shop online, hoping it will fill a void. You buy new wire-rimmed glasses that match your silver jewelry aesthetic, and think, oh shit, yeah, that will help, and it does for a while, until it doesn’t. Until they fall off your bed and one of the lenses pops out of the frame and you curse the cheap pieces of shit that just yesterday were the centerpiece of your rebrand.

You’ll consider getting a tooth gem and fringe bangs and doing something completely chaotic–not telling your friends about it–because you know they’ll give you sound advice and tell you they support the tooth gem idea but definitely not the fringe bangs because how many times have you told us that bangs don’t work on you and you explicitly told us to remind you of that when you toyed with the idea of getting bangs again but you’re feeling rebellious and slightly fatalistic so you tell your friends’ voices in your head that you’re going to do it anyway. Okay, I know, fatalistic is a strong word. It’s just hair, but you know they’re right, you always regret the bangs. Why are your friends so perfectly annoying?

You keep an exhausting amount of tabs on your chrome window so you don’t forget about all of your grand plans that will probably be snuffed out by newer grand plans (#gemini). Some of the tabs include: fringe bangs pinterest, zenni optical, signs of avoidant attachment style, signs of insecure attachment style, how to play a barre chord when you have small hands, 100% organic hand-dyed god-awfully expensive jeans.

You open yet another tab and ask ChatGPT to help you formulate a text to your ex about returning their ice cream maker. You go back and forth, polishing it so it doesn’t sound too overbearing but also not too flippant. To the point, friendly but unattached. Once you’ve landed on something that feels right, it types back it sounds like you’re in a really good place with it all! and you feel eerily comforted for a few seconds but then immediately get the ick like THANK YOU, I NEEDED TO HEAR THAT but WAIT YOU’RE NOT MY FRIEND.

Your computer starts stalling and you get pissed at it, which is ridiculous, because what do you expect when you have 5 million tabs and counting?

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• I’m thinking about the thrill of the unfinished, the allure of process, the seductive nature of something you can’t fully grasp. I once heard desire described as that which we can never fully touch, something we pine for. How can desire exist without pining, without actively seeking? Exist while sitting back in a chair, completely settled in self, happily wading in the pool of our own singular experience?

• I love when words surprise me, when they jump from their usual context, venture outside of their allocated spaces. I read “a landscape dolloped with patches of sunny orange” and imagine some giant in the sky squeezing whipped sunlight out of a pastry bag, dolloping swirly shapes onto the land. My mind has expanded, my imagination has distorted itself into a delightful place.

• I write in the garden. I watch a bird dry itself off, listen to the purr of its flapping wings. Then, the coquettish call of another bird in a neighboring tree. There is endless awe out here. A cardinal warbles for a while…to a friend? A mate? There is something so achingly resonant about its search. I feel like we share the same primary desire.

• From milk fed: is the pursuit of intellectual intimacy ever truly about the other person, or is it about how we see ourselves in their gaze? do we desire to know, or do we desire to be known?

from one of my essays! Working title: Cherry Pie Crumble—

The day we ended things, we sat out in my garden, obscured by budding rose bushes and lemon trees. We both kicked off our shoes and tried to get comfortable in the wrought iron chairs. I instinctively did what I am not used to–I turned my body away from his and slung my legs over one of the arm rests. He eventually reached out to me, extending one leg towards my chair and I turned around, clamping my shins around his. Even then, when we knew this was taking a turn, we couldn’t help but touch each other. Each time we saw each other, it was always that moment we first touched that made us settle, that marked our arrival.

I set down our offerings in the grassy patch between us: lemon ginger water, iced coffee, a bowl of fruit, the two hardboiled eggs he brought over in a stout take-out container. Our thighs were pockmarked by sunlight, little dollops of heat that were welcomed and not yet bemoaned since it was only the end of May.

He launched into a whole thing about caddisfly larvae, about how they spit waterproof tape out of their mouths, securing twigs and small stones and other debris to their bodies to create a protective casing. I looked up a photo and marveled at the perfectly constructed mosaic of tiny colorful stones on the insect. As he kept telling me about them, I felt a wave of relief wash over me. Being unhooked from romance—from all the racking questions and what if’s that come with the prospect—allowed a veil to drop.

I felt like I could more lucidly appreciate him, appreciate what was right in front of me. It felt like, for at least a moment, we were at the very beginning, on the precipice of a growing connection. That I was at the threshold of his bedroom the first time I came over, marveling at the plastic tubs brimming with stubby crayons, the racket of wires along the wall. That moment when I felt nothing but open curiosity for his wacky, brilliant brain.

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