The Chickens Wake At Five

Dear Diary, The chickens wake at five.

I swing open the creaky door of their coop and they dart out into the yard. They high-step through the garden, bobbing through basil, pecking at tomato plants. Sometimes they scratch up a cloud of dust then sink their bellies into the dirt.

The chickens are named Himalaya and Buddha. They are both thick and strong, but Buddha is a little smaller and more docile than Himalaya. Their glossy feathers are red and black and they shine like oil slicks in the sunlight.

I don’t know much about chickens. I assumed the eggs would come in the morning. But when I open the lid to the hay filled box where they sleep, all I find are two chicken shaped indentations. It’s not until late afternoon that they appear, those two pastel ovals in the yellow straw.

I collect the two eggs in the afternoon. Each egg is smooth, warm, and oblong. Holding them in my palm I’m reminded of the symbol for infinity. Like the symbol, the eggs are matched halves---shells containing, curves repeating.

I blame Alice Walker for thinking like this about chickens, for trying to see the universe in a bird, for trying to see poetry in poultry. Around this time last year I was reading Walker's  “The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories.” I found myself enchanted with Walker’s meditative and philosophical writing, and entertained that her observations where drawn from contemplating the behavior and being of her flock of chickens.

I should probably explain how I came to have chickens in the first place. I’m housesitting in Brooklyn in exchange for chicken keeping, dehumidifier emptying, and acting as liaison to a visiting French family who will be staying in the upstairs portion of the house.

The place is stunning. A classic Brooklyn brownstone on a quiet tree lined block. I’m here with my dog and my computer and not much else. We’ve retreated here so I’ll have time and mental space to complete my documentary project and to apply to grants. At home my attention dissolved into chores, work, television, more chores, more television. Here I get up early for the chickens and the dog, work on editing and writing and transcribing, walk to get a coffee, loll in the park.

This is not my real life, I remind myself.

This is a single six-week escape. It’s a special time for working and writing.

It's time I’ve come to understand I need in order to actually make progress on creative projects. I hardly leave the apartment. I walk the same loop to the grocery store, the coffee shop, the park, the apartment. Oddly enough, if I were to trace my daily walking routines on a map they would take the shape of an ellipse. An oblong, egg-like trajectory. Contained, repeating.

One Big Awesome Tide Pool.

Dear Diary, Last week I started working on my first podcast. It’s a new sub-project of my documentary film Stories From The Green Cabin. The podcast is a little silly, really. It asks people to talk about their work as if it were a wilderness. Say, for example, that someone is an essayist. The podcast asks them: What would essay writing look like as a physical place? Is it like a lush rain forrest, a freezing tundra, or a beautiful, peaceful field?

Then more questions along those lines: What is in an essayists backpack? Do you need a map, or is there a clearly marked path? Is it lonesome or are there lots of others like you?

What is the most dangerous animal to an essayist? (The Internet? An empty coffee cup? Self-doubt?)

What’s in your canteen? (Tea? Coffee? Whiskey?)

What’s your advice to a newly exploring essayist? How important is it to go to school or have a guide before venturing into this wilderness?

What would a Girl/Boy Scout style badge for your work look like?

I’ve had this podcast idea for a long time. I had been listening to shows online about writing, pop culture, science, international news, cooking , etc. Eventually I started using the Sticher app on my phone, which helped me burn through even more podcasts while walking my dog, sitting in traffic, or riding the train. Most of the shows were great. I loved them. Two of my favorites were The Dinner Party and Hash Hags. I liked the content and the hosting of Hash Hags, the theme and the structure of The Dinner Party. I wanted to listen to a show that combined the two, but couldn’t find one.

So I bought a bunch of audio equipment and told a few close friends about my idea.

Then I let the audio equipment sit unused on my bookshelf for almost six months.

Then I emailed Elisabeth and Miya and said “Hey, I have this idea for a podcast, can I share it on Equals?” They said yes.

Then the audio gear sat on my bookshelf for another month.

Something was wrong.

My desire to produce a podcast was there but wasn’t strong enough to justify a stand-alone project. The podcast didn’t have a home within Stories From the Green Cabin at that point. Would I really want to create a new website and media presence to support this podcast? I wondered. Would I really want to bother my friends about having them as guests on a silly little side project without knowing where it was all headed? There were so many people I wanted to talk to about their work but there was little reason for me to set aside the time in my schedule to record, edit, and promote this quirky program.  It seemed to me, at that point in time, that the podcast idea was just a distraction.

It wasn’t until recently, when I was halfway though an application for a summer media program*, that I realized how the film and podcast were linked. Applying for something always has this clarifying affect on my work. Regardless of whether or not I secure the grant or get accepted into the residency program, the structure of an application always demands a simple, straightforward explanation about the project in question.

The boundaries an application presents in format and word count always leave me with a better understanding of what I’m really up to. This time around I came to see how both the podcast and the film satisfy this intense curiosity I have about identity, creativity, and work. It seems so obvious now, but just months ago I couldn’t make that connection.

When I was little I was obsessed with tide pools. They felt like mini-oceans suddenly and perfectly contained for observation. Every once in a while a big wave would come and wash all of the little tide pools into one big awesome tide pool. I felt the same sense of wonder and excitement when connecting the film and podcast. For a long time I was just waiting for the next big idea wave, I guess, when all it really took was filling out that application to change the tide.

*The program I applied to (and have since enrolled in) is hosted by AIR (Association of Independents in Radio) and Uniondocs in Brooklyn. It’s called the Full Spectrum Storytelling Intensive. For any freelance radio or film producers out there, check it out---there are still a few spots available!

The Diary of a First Time Filmmaker

Dear Diary, I am making a film. Does that make me a filmmaker? I'm not sure how this all started.

I guess it began back in August last year when I traveled from Virginia to New York to go to that blogging conference. I wasn’t much of a blogger, really. I was mostly unemployed, living in a dank hunting cabin that was infested with stink bugs and a rowdy squirrel family, and feeling mixed up about my next step in life.

I had hoped the cabin would help me make progress towards my goals. I hoped blogging would magically make me more dillegent in my writing practice. I hoped I would find a way to get out of coffee shop and retail jobs for good. The blogging conference was my first real step towards what I wanted to be doing with my time.

Don’t get me wrong, Diary. There’s nothing wrong with working in retail or pulling shots of espresso to get by. I still work in the service industry to pay rent. It was just that I didn’t know how to balance that work with the work I wanted to be doing in writing and filmmaking. The cabin gave me time to apply to writing residencies. It gave me the safe feeling I needed to share my work with someone other than my writing partner.

My time at the cabin also gave me some perspective on other work I had done that hadn’t been a good fit. I had worked as a production assistant on commercials, documentary films, industrials, and reality shows. But I think it was a safety net to work those kinds of jobs. I wanted to be close to filmmaking, but I never actually made any films. I was close to something I loved, but not actually embracing it full on. I enjoyed working in production but I wasn’t sure it was helping me find my voice. It wasn't much different than working at a coffee shop or in retail.

At the blogging conference, just like when I had worked on production gigs, I struggled to explain my story. I was a complete failure at “branding” myself in a way that made any sense or felt honest. Freelance production assistant/barista/salesperson? Aspiring director/editor/ writer? I didn’t know what I was about, let alone what my blog was about. Was it about my move to the cabin? About my budding interest in food? My pets?

It mostly became about my pets. 

I had a hard time connecting with people at the conference because I was so confused by my own blog. One person I did connect with was Lisa Weldon. We met at a small group session about writing book proposals based on personal blogs. The content of the workshop went in one ear and out the other, but Lisa’s story stayed with me. After the session I introduced myself and wrote a little note on a piece of paper with my contact information since I didn’t have any business cards. I also wrote “you’re awesome!” because, well, she is.

After a few weeks back at the cabin thinking about why I liked Lisa’s story so much, I emailed her and asked if I could write a screenplay about her experience. Lisa had walked every block in New York City the summer before and mastered social media in the process. She said yes.

Eventually I realized that reaching out to Lisa about her story was also a security blanket of sorts. I thought if I wrote about a compelling story that had really happened I’d have justification to write a screenplay. None of my own ideas could be good enough for a script, I figured, I needed someone else to help me along.

Lisa encouraged my writing through emails and calls. We even hung out in her hometown of Atlanta so I could do research for the screenplay. But then a funny thing happened. The story stopped being mostly about Lisa’s trip to New York two years ago, and started being about our relationship. We sent each other drafts of stories, sample chapters, and general positive vibes about our respective creative ventures. We stopped talking about the screenplay, and started talking about a documentary.

Now, almost eight months later, I’m almost halfway through with a short documentary — my first film — about Lisa and a few other talented people who shaped my time at the cabin.

I find it hard to think about what the filmmaking process has been like so far.

This is all I can think of:

At the cabin I used to sit on a concrete bench beneath a rotting old walnut tree. I’d look out across the flood plain and watch deer flicker through the trees. I would watch groundhogs perk up on their hind feet, nibbling grass and rolling their wary glistening eyeballs back and forth across the field. I’d watch birds, those bright little singing kites, gliding through currents of sky.

Making my first film feels something like watching a wild animal from far away. Maybe it's the not knowing what will happen next. Sometimes the deer disappear into the trees, other times they freeze, heads perked up like the wary groundhogs. And sometimes the birds take off over the ridge and soar higher into the clouds, higher than you'd think a bird could go.

Food Crush

The Park Slope Food Co-op has more than 16,000 members and not a lot of square footage. The state of the co-op depended on the crowd, which depended on the day of the week and the time of the day. Some days it was busy. Some days it was chaotic. Some days it was like the pulsing mosh pit of a rock concert. My work schedule allowed me to grocery shop on the off hours, though, so  I could avoid the crush of after work or weekend shopping crowds and visit at 2 pm, joined only by neighborhood moms and their croissant-nibbling toddlers. On one particular day I remember how flush with food the whole place seemed and how empty of other people. Maybe there was a free concert in the park (with a real mosh pit?) or maybe everyone was at the beach? Whatever it was, the place was so unusually empty that it felt like an altar or a tomb. It felt untouched, quiet, ripe. This feeling is hard to find in New York City, where after a long day of work and a long commute on the subway most everything feels touched and loud and stale. At least that’s how it felt to me after a busy shift at the coffee shop or after eight hours selling jewelry at my retail job. Visiting the co-op was my way of relaxing. It was soothing because I could actually afford the nice cheese, the olives, the beer.  I would carry home big bags of food and nibble my own croissant as I moseyed along the streets of Park Slope, Prospect Heights, then into Crown Heights.

I remembered that quiet trip to the co-op really clearly this week for some reason, perhaps because it was so different from this time of year, and perhaps because changing seasons seem to stir up fond food memories and nostalgia.  It was late summer and there were stone fruits piled into little jewel colored mountains, spared from rainbowed avalances by the walls of bulging cardboard boxes. There were mushrooms and sprouts, flats of wheatgrass, various greens, beets, carrots, celery, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, potatoes, waxy, alien-looking tropical fruits. Entire walls of varied color and texture.

What I most clearly remember from that day was the basil. It was ever present in the co-op, stored inside a banker box sized bin that was sometimes full, sometimes empty. Sometimes when I lifted the lid and fished around inside for a bundle all that I recovered was some sand and a few limp leaves. This particular day I found myself lifting the squeaky lid of the bin and inhaling a cloud of strong sweet basil. The fistful I pulled out was huge. I could feel the life in the leaves and the grit of the sand.

As I stood in the empty aisle, fragrant basil in hand, I suddenly felt like I was holding a ribbon wrapped  bunch of flowers. Sure, the flowers were basil and the ribbon was a rubber band, but in my minds eye - in this murky, shifting place of the mind that is memory---this is where I fell for food. Where, I guess you could say, I caught the bouquet.

Dressing

Wine colored jeans. An eggplant hued henley. Chocolate brown leather ankle boots. The elements of my favorite fall outfit are best described through the language of food: wine, eggplant, and coco. In these last few weeks, with the weather turning cooler and the days darker, I had expected to find myself retreating to the warmth and comfort of the kitchen. What I didn't expect, however, was that my wardrobe would also do the same.  That cheerful looking orange pumpkin I roasted in the oven last night? It made me long for a bright soft scarf of the same color. Or what about that deep, blue-green kale? Perfect for a cozy v-neck.  I find myself wanting to eat as I dress and dress as I eat: In a spectrum of colors and flavors. In different styles, but with a similar taste. My dinner plate is my fashion muse, apparently.

It seems I'm not the only one to have noticed this appealing connection between food and clothes. In flipping through a Lands End catalogue recently I came across a slew of vegetable and fruit named garb. There was a  "spinach leaf" sweatshirt and an "aubergine plum" turtleneck. A "boysenberry" pea coat and a "brown spice" t-shirt. My favorite descriptions might have been of the boozy variety: punch, claret, merlot, mulled wine, wine berry, bordeux. So many different names for so many similar colors.

I wondered what these names are meant to convey about these products? A turtleneck that is both the color of plum and eggplant must be very purple, yes. Superficially this naming system tells us what a product looks like. But I think the food language is meant to add something. It adds truth and authenticity, maybe, by connecting the wise earth to the piece of clothing. A turtleneck is just a turtleneck. But food is different, it is memory and nourishment, it is flavor and experience. And food is also, apparently, selling us some clothes.

Reaching for Sweet Things

“So there is a girl sleeping in the front room,” I hear my grandmother whisper to my grandfather. “Did you know that?” I listen through a cracked door. She has just said goodnight to me very warmly, despite the fact that I am mostly a stranger to her these days. The room I am staying in is a blank walled cube with a vaulted ceiling and three big windows. In the mornings I wake when the sun comes in, when it is quiet and bright. The shape of the space reminds me of a hamster carrying crate, the cardboard kind you’d get at a pet store. Four straight walls, a milk carton style top. The ever present sense of fascination and fear I feel while staying in this room makes me feel a strange kinship with those small furry creatures. Bewildered. Alert. In this house I feel wonder at all the new things I see, and also a heart pounding anxiety in facing the unknown.

My grandparents both have Alzheimer's Disease. My grandmother is further along than my grandfather. I have recently been recruited to spend weekends with them so their regular home health aide can take time off. Their regular caregiver is a beautiful woman who moves through their home with grace and kindness, who tiptoes through the land mines of potential conflict as though it were her sixth sense. Instead of correcting, she redirects. Instead of asking "don't you remember?" she slips into their world and accepts their state of being. This is only my second weekend, and so far I have stepped on plenty of land mines. I have, for example, identified myself as their granddaughter, to which they say, defensively: Of course you are, we know that!  Now I've learned to say it less directly, more casually. And I usually add: Well, you have so many, it's hard to keep track of us all. A concession which they gladly take.

Food is also land mine. What to eat, when to eat, where to eat. Too many questions and decisions, too much room for confusion. Long menus with complicated descriptions are overwhelming, and so it helps to pose two options. Would you like the chicken, or the pasta? Because one of those is what you usually get. These are key words and phrasing. You usually do this, so does that sound good? The answer is always: Yes, I will do what I usually do.

Last Saturday morning we had breakfast at home. I made french toast---my favorite childhood breakfast---then arranged pieces of cut up fruit into little bowls and set them at the table next to two small plastic boxes of pills. The next morning I made "sunny side up" eggs, also an old favorite. Each morning I feel like I'm entering into a new world where there are new social codes, new conventions, new people. Our one moor, the one common thing we have to keep us from drifting apart, is food. As volatile as it can be, it is also our touchstone.

As we are finishing breakfast, we talk of lunch. Then we talk of which day this is, we talk of the weather, we talk of the newspaper (which one of us will read out loud, sometimes going into imagined stories of the people in the photos on the front page.) But it always comes back to food. Well, we just had breakfast, so what is for lunch? Breakfast then lunch then dinner -- a sequence of time based actions that is retained. I think talking of food is also comforting because it is a ritual, a measurement of time. Our day is held up by meals. When do you want to have dinner? My grandmother asks. We could eat at five, would that be ok? I will say, repeating this answer to a series of questions new to her, but the same to me.

When I was little I remember standing on my tiptoes in my grandmother’s kitchen and reaching my hand into the wooden bread box on the counter top. I must have been very small, because I clearly remember the discomfort, as I reached, of my armpit digging into the edge of the counter. But it was worth it. If I were lucky, I'd come out grasping a handful of Starbursts.  I would separate the pinks from the rest and squirrel away my cache in my pocket, saving those cherished pale beauties for last. I would sometimes mould many flavors in to one pastel blob, rolling and kneading the hardened corn syrup into a sticky ball, which I would later nibble, pretending it was a special kind of apple.

That breadbox is on their counter still, but I’ve not been able to open it since being here. It’s as if opening that box and finding no Starbursts would mean something. That my grandparents, as I had known them in my youth, are lost forever? That my happiness is no longer so easily accessed, that my inner life is now more bland? That we've lost the time of tiptoes and reaching? Yes, maybe all of the above.

Still, I stay with them in their kitchen and make them the breakfasts of my childhood, pretending that those french toasts and sunny side up eggs can link our two worlds and the past to the present. Maybe next weekend I will buy some Starbursts to hide in the old breadbox. I entertain the idea of catching glimpses of pink wax wrappers beneath loaves of brown bread.  I know that a gesture like that won't make my grandparents feel any less lost or confused. It won't make me less worried for them. It won't bind my shattered heart, which breaks, each day, into smaller and smaller pieces as I brush my grandmother's hair, hold her hand, fold her clothes, paint her nails. But I will do it anyway. I will do what I usually do. I will gesture, reach, and imagine. Just like I will say to my grandmother, for the fifth or sixth time in a row, We could eat at five, would that be ok? 

Yes, she will say, that will be fine.

Greetings from Grrls Meat Camp

The morning is chilly and bright. A sheen of frost covers the picnic tables and the wooden deck, the nearby pond is shimmering in the morning light, and the towering evergreens sway in the breeze. This idyllic setting belongs to the YMCA’s Camp Duncan, located just outside of Chicago. Inside the cozy cabin kitchen there are biscuits in the oven and sausage gravy simmering on the stove. After breakfast there will be an entire 250 pound hog delivered to the back porch, followed by lessons in whole animal butchery, pate and sausage making, and grilling and smoking. This is Grrls Meat Camp.

I first learned of Meat Camp via Kate Hill's Kitchen at Camont blog and through last year's Washington Post coverage of the inaugural event.  It's a gathering of chefs, butchers, bakers and enthusiastic home cooks. It's a weekend of food, fun, and ultimately of camaraderie and encouragement.

The group's Facebook mission statement reads: "To inspire, educate and foster sisterhood through a cooperative collaboration of women . . ." with an aim of "giving voice to those working with animals and meat on farms, butcher shops, restaurants and home."

It was an inspiring weekend, and not just because of all the delicious food.

It was a salon, of sorts, with conversation focused on sustainability, ethical farming, and our shifting food systems.

Even more moving, perhaps, were the personal stories shared of learning a craft that didn't typically welcome gender diversity. At Grrls Meat Camp, though, we were all in the front row. We all had access to new knowledge and experience, and were encouraged to participate.

At one point over the weekend I over heard a conversation between two of the butchers who were discussing the most physically difficult parts of their job. "If you have the right tools, you can do anything. Anything is possible if you've got the right tools." It's true of butchery, sure, but it struck me as some advice for life's work in general. "The right tools" could mean sharp knives and saws, but also the strength an individual receives from a supportive community. Many women I met this weekend were self-educated and self-motivated, their successful careers the products of their own initiative. Even the professional food photographer who was busily shooting stills of the beautiful dishes coming out of the kitchen agreed: No one taught her to be a photographer, she taught herself. So, even if you have no desire to butcher a hog or some beef hip, these lessons from Meat Camp resonate with those of us finding our way---in the kitchen, and beyond.

Freedom from Food

This morning’s bowl of stale corn flakes made me very happy. Lunch was perfect, too: a limp lasagna noodle covered with a thick layer of oily cheese and a lone, soggy artichoke heart. I loved it all because I didn’t have to make it. I didn’t even have to wash the dishes. I haven’t had to think about preparing food for the last 24 hours, and it has been a pleasure unforeseen. My thoughts are usually so congested by obsessing over what to eat, how to eat it, where to buy ingredients, how much money to save or to spend. But waking up this morning and knowing I had no say in what to eat today? It was a gift. This week I find myself at an artists residency program. I say “find myself” because I was invited off the waitlist, whisked away from my normal life and into the resplendent Blue Ridge mountains. Here in the company of poets, painters, and musicians, there is no room for cooking. Literally. We are not allowed into the kitchen. But what lacks in culinary counter space is made up for in the form of a private writing studio with a big desk and view of a rocky, cow-dotted field. There is lots of time, space, and freedom from household chores. But the freedom I am enjoying most? The freedom from food.

It’s not that thinking about what to eat is a problem, not at all. It’s actually one of my favorite topics in conversation, especially with the many adventurous eaters I have for friends.  I love looking at beautiful food photography, too, and I enjoy reading cookbooks front to back for their stories as well as their recipes. The problem is that food and writing about food is the weak link in my chain of focus and concentration when I’m at task on a different creative project. I think it’s because cooking is such a outlet for expression that it does battle with my writing on a regular basis. A weekend afternoon, for example, will be laid out before me, ripe with potential for new words and ideas. Instead of writing, though, I find myself poking around in the grocery store pondering butternut squash soup with garlicky croutons. We have to eat: It’s the most justifiable and enjoyable distraction.

During this writing retreat, however, I’ve come to scrutinize my obsession with thinking about food. My first day here has felt like a week. During this long day so much has happened (when actually so much has not, but that’s a form of “happening” when it comes to the imagination, right?)  This food void and the sense of freedom that came with it reminds me of Barbra Ueland’s book If You Want to Write. I flip to the chapter titled “Why Women Who Do Too Much Housework Should Neglect it for Their Writing” and wonder how many more hours I could spend writing at home instead of planning meals and hunting down recipes?

This is not to say I don’t want to make dinner most weeknights, can tomatoes for a few days at the height of tomato season, or throw an all out dinner party on the occasional weekend. It’s more of a realization that my dinnertime daydreams need to be budgeted. The mental energy saved will be at the expense of fantasies about blueberry coffee cake, pumpkin bread pudding, and homemade pasta. But maybe those dishes might just benefit from this new thought-diet of mine: less time thinking, more time doing.

Same, too, for the writing.

Stupid Charming Things

An olive wood salt cellar will not make you dinner. It can’t chop an onion or boil water, and even it if it could it certainly wouldn’t wash the dishes afterwards. I tell this to myself while pacing around a fancy kitchen goods store, salt cellar in hand, trying to talk myself out of buying yet another kitchen luxury item that is at odds with both my lifestyle and my budget.

My husband and I live in a dilapidated boathouse-turned-cabin that was built in the early 1800s. The kitchen isn’t really a kitchen at all. It’s a room with a freestanding Ikea cabinet, a mini fridge, a convection oven, and a hotplate. Last spring I placed a heavy cast iron Dutch oven on the hot plate, causing the heating element to collapse into the stainless steel base. I remedied this by propping up the feet of the busted-in side with two Christmas lima beans.  So, not only do I cook on a hotplate in a glorified boathouse, but the utility of said hot plate is dependent on lima beans. Not exactly the kind of kitchen where you’d expect to find a pricey,  imported-from-France wooden salt cellar, hm?

This sort of retail conflict happens more than I’d like to admit.  I have a soft spot for stupid charming things: Tiny glass salt and pepper shakers, cheese knives, vintage Fire King coffee mugs, pinch bowls, and pretty much any kitchen item colored sage, mint green, or celadon. I shouldn't be allowed within fifty feet of a flea market or estate sale. And I certainly shouldn't have been poking around in any fancy kitchen goods store, that's for sure.

Over time I've gathered that this addiction to stupid charming things is not uniquely my own.  When I worked at a high-end gift shop in Park Slope, for example, I saw firsthand the pull of lovely objects on others. Thanks, just browsing, an innocent shopper would say. Then, moments later, I’d be ringing them up for a ten dollar trinket. Sometimes it would be a bookmark, a set of overpriced sticky tabs, a travel candle. If it wasn't any of that, it was the tiny glass animals. We stocked a bowl of them---itty-bitty little glass "sculptures" no larger than a penny.  You need a tiny glass cat, right? An elephant? What about an alligator? I felt like a drug dealer as I encouraged customers to dig deeper into the bowl. There’s a unicorn in there some place. I’d say. Then they’d ooh and ah and toss bills across the counter in glee. The glass animals were cute, sure, but were they worth anything more than that initial dopamine bump linked to the act of buying? I'm fairly sure the answer is "no."

A new object might be liberating at first, I think, because it baits the mind and our perspective in that moment, leading us from a place of sameness to a place of newness and wonder. Take my example, where I imagined the possibilities of cooking in a kitchen so well-appointed that flaky sea salt is homed in a dainty and sculptural bowl which was created precisely for that purpose by an artisan in a far away land. A new life opened up to me, one where I didn't find mouse poops in the measuring cups or stinkbugs in the mixing bowls.

Which brings me to narrative. Which brings me to identity. Objects do have a role in the stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves. In that moment at the fancy kitchen store, I wanted to use that salt cellar to tell myself I had good taste, that I understood and appreciated fine objects. I also wanted to pretend that I had no hotplate, no lima bean, no rustic boathouse kitchen. Mouse poops in measuring cups and stink bugs in mixing bowls? No, no, not me---I own this precious vessel, this hand crafted gem, this beautiful, stupid, charming thing.

Here's where I want to say that I stopped desiring the salt cellar. I want to say that I made these realizations about the false connection between things and self worth and identity and I immediately overcame my materialistic instincts. But I didn't. As I put the salt cellar back on the shelf I also added it to a mental wish list of presents my husband could get me for Christmas this year.Then I sulked out the door with a vague and absurd feeling of pity for what I perceived to be a salt cellar-shaped hole in my heart.

A Pumpkin for Your Thoughts

Last week I baked a small orange pumpkin stuffed with breadcrumbs, cheese, herbs, and bacon. I cut a jagged hole in the top of the pumpkin and scraped loose the stringy flesh, which I then gathered up in my hands and lifted out onto the counter. As I clawed at the slimy insides I felt clumsy and childish. The pulp slipped through my fingers again and again, and suddenly I was visited by images of my childhood. I thought of my favorite Halloween costume and the similar clumsy feeling it stirred up in me: A bright green caterpillar costume with a series of stuffed arms, each strung to the next with fishing line so they moved all as one. I remember lagging behind while trick-or-treating with my sister, stumbling across lawns and tripping into bushes. Nostalgia and fall are like those connected caterpillar arms to me. If I’m feeling nostalgic, I think of fall. If I think of fall, I feel nostalgic. Lift one arm and up go the rest. But that's problematic sometimes, because when I think of the words “Fall" and "pumpkin” my mind calls up generic images like those from commercials. I don’t want my feeling of fall to be summed up by the little drawings of leaves on the chalkboard at Starbucks. I want the real deal. I want my fall back, not a fallback.

What I’m longing for, I think, is to have a keen awareness of the present moment.  I also want to be specific about the past, and I want to observe how my impression of a memory shifts over time. When I was preparing the pumpkin, for example, I realized I could glide along the surface of a general fall feeling. But the alternative was that I could focus on the more particular aspects of the feeling and encourage it to become animated by my imagination, and in doing so allow it to occupy my consciousness for a while. I had to think really hard to let my frustration melt away and into those scenes from childhood. For the first time I felt like cooking was a meditative practice, a medium for a wandering mind.

But maybe it isn't about a wandering mind after all? Maybe it's about a mind being led down a carefully marked path, a path marked by a menu and a task. That pumpkin dinner showed me I could time travel but stay grounded in the moment, too. I was stunned by the fact that I could experience a complete break from the present moment while still operating within it. That split between the past and present, I think, was possible because of the constant thread of physical feeling---that lack of coordination and efficiency which reminded me of the time when I so horribly navigated sidewalks, curbs, and front porch steps in that caterpillar costume. (It was like running in a sleeping bag, really.) A whole string of very specific memories came rushing back to me after that, to the point where I clearly could hear my dad’s voice saying “I’m testing it to make sure it isn’t poisonous” while eating my hard-won candy. I laughed and flailed my many arms in protest. The memories were more honest and clear when I saw them through the lens of my pumpkin and my hands, rather than through the soft focus of my typical "general fall feeling."

I realized that my love of food and my interest in the way memories work don’t have to be colored by nostalgia to be interesting. I found a lot of pleasure in thinking about these memories without yearning for them to return. I felt grounded by my gourd, yet I was still sensing a very specific and vivid memory of a distant fall that I hadn’t thought of in years. That simple rustic dinner became a strange experience in thinking about thoughts. That’s what I like about the play between the seasons, food, and memories:  Our perception of each can expand or condense our awareness and our focus on the moment. My dinner, the pumpkin, the Fall---invitations to think back, but also to think on.

Cookbook Confessions

It was a weeknight at Barnes and Noble. The lights were harsh as usual, the whole place too well lit.  Or maybe it just felt that way---I wanted privacy for the deed I was there to do. I needed an off-the-beaten-carpet spot. Perhaps a corner near an under-trafficked genre . . . what about by that sale table of puppy calendars from 2011? Finding every discreet inch occupied, I gave up prowling and slumped back into the curve of a heavy wooden chair.  It was the worst possible place. In the middle of the store. At the end of an aisle. I carried on my despite the indiscreet location, desperate for my ends. On my lap was a stack of newly released cookbooks. I felt like I was about to do something bad.

And I was.

But let me explain.

I am learning to cook. No one I know is going to teach me how to cook. This isn’t because I know no one who is capable in the kitchen. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I have several friends who are culinary professionals and I have worked beside some very talented chefs. My husband, too, is a natural around food, both in terms of consumption and production. He can improvise a meal in minutes. Yet here I am, still needing inspiration and some serious planning before even boiling a some water. I try to remind myself that becoming a good cook is a process. A journey.

This journey into cooking, as with learning all new things, takes one step at a time. My kitchen’s true north, thus far, is my discovery that there exists no better culinary cartographer than a slick new cookbook. They are my collective compass with their vivid photography, exciting personal narrative, delicious recipes; my ladders for scaling walls of recipe boredom, my ships for crossing the choppy sea of a weekday dinner.  Food is an adventure when presented in a beautiful book, and I hunger to be whisked away to France, Morocco, New York, the Deep South . . . They say you eat a meal first with your eyes.  I would add to that the grumbling imagination we feed far before the food is on the plate. At times my mind is sated in simply reading the lyrical titles printed on a pretty cloth bound spine.

Yet here is where I hit another wall: money. That cookbook compass can be quite expensive. I try to be patient and wait for these books to come at at my local public library, seeing as my tasting menu aspirations are really on a lunch special budget. But that never works. They're always snatched up in a flash. There are, for example, twenty-six holds on Tamar Adler's "An Everlasting Meal." More like an everlasting wait . . .

Which brings me back to the bookstore.

The man sitting behind me is breathing loudly and snarfing a candy bar. (Turns out the word “snarf” is in the dictionary, by the way.) Nearby, children are arguing over a wooden train set. Then I look around, eyes darting, and . . . and . . . I do it.

I take a photo of the cookbook on my iPhone. And then another. And then another.

It’s just like sexting, except that the rump pictures happen to be of roast beef in Around my French Table. 

Here’s my MO: I take a shot of the front cover so I remember the author’s name and the title. I take a shot of the index, then a shot of one recipe for a trial run.  I only allow myself to poach that one recipe, as if that makes my illicit photography any less rude. This photo test shoot is my trial run. I tell myself I'll buy the book if it delivers the goods.

Later that night, when I get home, I sit on the couch with my glowing phone an inch from my nose. I peer into the images, sliding back and froth between the choice shots, zooming in on certain spots.

It feels a little dirty at first, but I’m consoled by the fact that though I won’t be taking any of these cookbooks out to dinner, at least I’ll be making it for myself.

On place and pawpaws.

We slide the boat down the muddy bank and into the creek. The water is high and brown with silt from a heavy rain the night before. Scout, our black and white spotted pit bull mix, chases bobbing sticks and floating yellow leaves, his toenails clinking and hissing against the metal belly of the boat.  Jake paddles us along with an old kayak oar as I sit at the bow and scan the shore. We’re out looking for pawpaws this morning, a tropical tree fruit that looks like a mango and tastes like banana custard. I’d never heard of a pawpaw until moving back to Virginia. My curiosity was piqued, of course, by this curious sounding wild edible. We spot a thicket of pawpaw trees along the bank. They are thin-trunked and have big green leaves that look like floppy rabbit ears. Jake maneuvers the boat up to the shore and I grasp a branch in my hand then bend the whole tree gently over the boat. We pluck bunches of fruit from the limbs and I think of the word “bower.” I think of this word later when writing this column, too, when trying to describe the feeling of being closed in by the arch of a bent tree. I look up “bower” in the dictionary and I learn that it is also a word for an “anchor carried at a ship’s bow.” I like this very much, to have been within a bower made of pawpaw trees, and for the pawpaw tree to have also been a sort of bower in the other sense, anchoring us to the shore.

This experience made me recall a piece of writing I once read in Ecotone, a literary magazine about place, that’s published by the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. In the essay that came to mind---“Naming our Place”---David Gessner thinks on the relationship between words and things in nature. The part I thought of while picking pawpaws was this, which Gessner writes about Barry Lopez’s book Home Ground:

“Skim through this encyclopedia of terms for particular places, and if you’re  like me, your synapses will snap like popcorn. Just take the B’s, for instance: berm and biscuit and board and borderland and boreal forest and borrow pit and bosque and box canyon and braided stream.”

Add to that list bower, and my synapses do go pop!pop!pop! At the sound or sight of certain words I think of that morning on the creek. I think of the soft light filtered through the big rabbit ear leaves. I feel the silky pawpaw in my hand and taste its crème brulee-like pulp. I experience that sense of place for a second time, almost more clearly now as filtered through my imagination. It's thinking about the particular words for that place ---the bank of the creek, the bend of the tree, the shape of a bower---and  linking my experience and memories to those words, that focuses and clarifies my memories.

And that’s Gessner’s point, I guess, because he continues: “These are physical words describing physical places, and they have heft to them, and distinctness, and we can say of them what Emerson said of Montaigne’s sentences: ‘Cut them, and they will bleed.’”

I wonder if we could say of words about food:  “Eat them, and they will be tasty,” too?  While hearing or reading the word "pawpaw" may not literally fill me up, I'll still feel sated in a way.  Bower. Bank. Pawpaw. The words elicit a sense of a very particular place and time. Of balancing on my tip-toes in the bobbing boat and anchoring myself to shore, of the a cool round pawpaw smooth in my palm. I can't eat these words, but I can use them to tether me to that beautiful morning on the creek. And that, I think, is quite appetizing.

On Moving and Morels.

My love affair with New York City was ill-fated from the start. My husband Jake and I lived in the apartment of our dreams, but far from within our means. We had a washer and dryer. A large kitchen. Two bathrooms. A balcony with a view of the entire Manhattan skyline. My friends called it a “sitcom apartment.” Real people don’t live in spaces like those, not in New York City, especially not when they’re newlyweds just starting out. I had hoped to seduce the city with this slick and confident façade, instead I just doomed myself to working two jobs to make the rent. I worked extra hours at a coffee shop, in retail, babysitting---mostly to the benefit of my two cats, who would luxuriate all day in generous rectangles of sunlight and chatter at pigeons thru the floor to ceiling windows. After fifteen months we decided not to renew our lease. I mourned the loss of what could have been by eating: my last sandwich from the Brooklyn Larder. My last cocktail at Prune. My last espresso at Third Rail. In the days leading up to the move, revisiting my favorite restaurants and grocery stores became a bitter end to a whirlwind affair.  Visiting these places mirrored those last passionate efforts a couple undertakes before they bury their relationship, except that for my part, the breakup sex was a meatball sandwich. It all ended for good as I crossed the Verazanno Bridge in a Budget rental truck, nibbling frantically at my final almond croissant from the Park Slope Food Co-op.

We settled into our new home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, into my dad’s hunting cabin on fifty acres of beautiful farmland in Western Virginia. Though we had physically moved on, I still couldn’t get over New York. I missed the city. I still loved it there. I tried telling myself it just didn’t work out. It was for the best. I force-fed these bitter incantations to my starving, broken heart. I was still hungry.

It was what I had asked for, really. I had cheated on New York. I had always harbored farmland fantasies. When we finally left the city, we took with us the two cats, the truckload of IKEA furniture, the pots and pans, and clothes, and books. But the heaviest box was no real box at all. It was our idea of what this move should be---an imaginary vessel for our expectations, across which we would have scrawled, “handle with care” and “fragile” if we could have. Our specific idea of how we wanted our life to be in Virginia was complete with vegetable gardens, home-brewed beer, and lazy rocking in rocking chairs.  Bubble wrapped and coddled in newspaper, we hoped these dreams would survive the trip.

The move was exciting at first. For once in our lives we actually had a nearer chance of pursuing the benchmarks of rural lifestyle that are luxuries to urban denizens.  In our old neighborhood of Crown Heights, for example, hopes for a vegetable garden were limited to a forlorn terracotta pot on the balcony. There was no space for home-brew equipment in the kitchen. Between the rent and the groceries, I couldn’t spare a cent to splurge on a nice wooden rocking chair nor the time to spend idly rocking. New York City was a dead sprint. We wanted to stroll.

The expanse of time and space we found in Virginia was not unlike the void one finds in life after the departure of a loved one: Unstructured days washed over us with opportunity and freedom. Our schedules had always been measured down to the thimbleful in New York.  Now each day was like plunging into a dunk tank the size of a reservoir. We adjusted over time. We slept through the too-quiet nights with help from a rattling fan. We started a garden. I began home brewing (though it was kombucha, not beer), and I even found an old rocking chair in the attic.  Yet I still couldn’t let go of New York entirely. I needed something powerful to free me from memories of that shattered romance. I needed a rebound.

That rebound, for me, was the morel mushroom. The mystique of this cherished and hard-to-find fungi impressed my imagination and evolved into a symbol necessary to attaining “the good life.” The morel was the materialization of our new life chapter, I thought. To me it was strange and wild; a delicious and rare thing that couldn’t be cultivated, only found.

All that, and yet, I had never even tasted a morel. I hadn’t even seen a fresh one in person.  I had only hunted down websites in search on foraging tips, read about trained mushroom hunting dogs imported from Europe, and studied images of the morel’s pitted, alien looking surface from my glowing computer screen.  The closest I had come to any was in dehydrated form, which I examined through a crinkling plastic bag at the Park Slope Food Co-op. Despite this distance, somewhere between the Brooklyn Bridge and the foothills of the Blue Ridge, I began my desperate, heartsick affair with the morel. The stakes were high: For the move from Brooklyn to the cabin to be a good life choice, I really needed to find some effing morels.

Here’s the scene of my self-affirming mushroom fantasy, which played on a loop in my mind during those first hard weeks at the cabin:

It begins at dawn the day or two after a thunderstorm. The air is warm, a little humid.  The birds are chirping, the insects trilling, the whole forest lit up by a golden sunrise pouring through the trees . . . You get the idea---it’s perfect.  Jake and I are slowly walking through the woods, pausing at the base of trees to carefully overturn fallen leaves. A straw hat and wicker basket fix prominently in this dream scene, too, their charm and utility reassuring my every careful step. We round the trunk of a massive tree, and then . . . morels are everywhere.  It’s like an Easter egg hunt, except the kind for little kids where the plastic eggs are just tossed out on the lawn.  It’s like someone just smashed open a forest-sized piñata that was filled with morels. It’s like . . . again, you get the idea. Time lapse to early evening. We’re at the edge of the woods cooking the mushrooms in a big cast iron pan. Cue the triumphant orchestral music as the pan sizzles and the butter pools.  The morels are cooked and golden. The field is golden. The whole world is golden. We eat our happiness on golden toast. We’re gonna be just fine, says the dream, we’re gonna be just golden.

Obviously I had a bit of a problem. Call it morel-induced neurosis. As silly as that dream sequence feels now, I can’t forget how urgent it felt then. The only release from the pressure of that absurdly vivid idealization of my new life at the cabin was . . . to make it happen. There were no alternatives. The morel was my only ticket, my golden one shot. My hunger for this food I had never tasted was strong and overwhelming. It sent me deep into Virginia where I wandered past creeks, through thick woods, past dirt roads and hillsides. While wandering and searching in the forest we found the skull of a baby bear, a wild turkey sitting on a nest of giant eggs, a serious toad, tons of fiddle heads, a field of bluebells. But no morels. Not one.

It would be weeks before the stars aligned. Eventually the weather shifted and the ground warmed. We learned about the land we were searching on, about the types of trees and the ideal spots for mushroom growth. Then it happened---we hit the mushroom jackpot all at once. They were everywhere, just like in the dream. Huge, meaty, rich. Delicious. We returned to the cabin and cooked the morels in a skillet with butter. I ate so many but I hardly recall their taste now, it was something like bacon and earth. Like minerals and meat.

The rebound worked, at least for a while. I forgot about New York and the meatball sandwiches and almond croissants and espresso. I focused instead on what was before me now. This new love affair didn't make all of my insecurities about moving dissolve, but at least it made them more palatable.