Pink of Perfection

Elegantly-made or sorely-felt, this time of year is all about transitions. It is a time of year that makes me think of quiet transport, like sitting in a passenger seat on the way home from one of the last swims of the season. I’ve got that to-the-core chill and we drive home the scenic way with the windows down, my hair wet down my back. It’s like waking up from the sweetest sleep. The heat of the day has finally burned off, and I’m ready to eat something warm. Probably fried chicken.

There are five seasons in Chinese medicine. The fifth season, the one we enter now, is late summer. Here’s what my kinda weird book says on the topic:

Late summer itself is a short season, but it can be a time of intense metamorphosis in nature and within ourselves…During transitional periods, it is especially important to stay centered, a state of being in contact with the Earth that we call “grounded”…Centering has to do with finding balance in which we are aware of our polarities, the yin and yang qualities of Earth and Heaven, left and right, inner and outer.

This is a transition I always feel keenly: the slow softening of the light, an edge of coolness in the evenings or on a breeze, and the way I can always feel myself savoring something I can never quite put my finger on but am certain is the end of one kind of thing and the beginning of another.

These are the songs for that.

Continue reading “Songs for the End of Summer” »

I always love the what to do with all this zucchini?!!? hysteria that happens in August and stretches through the first bright days of September. I find the predictability of this annual quandary comforting: here we are again, once again.

This year, my go-to zucchini solution came from the one cookbook I allowed myself to take with me to Massachusetts for the month of August. Simple food was just what I wanted to cook during those long evenings, and simple food was just what I carried in glass tupperware over to my sister’s third-floor apartment most nights. The best and easiest grilled chicken, a quinoa salad so good it was requested a second time. Simple became the guiding principle of the month. The pleasures were simple (bike rides, ice cream cones, swimming holes), the rhythm was simple (wake-write-work-ride-cook-sleep), my role as a dinner-delivering mother’s helper was simple and all the sweeter for it. It was the first time in a long time I can remember feeling truly needed. And so I unloaded the dishwasher and held the baby during bathroom breaks and watched House Hunters late into the night with a kind of joyful purpose I haven’t ever felt. It was simple.

And this recipe, while perhaps not quite as sweet and simple as two sisters sitting in easy chairs with a newborn passed between them, is one I’ll return to. Just like I hope I get back to the evening nook in that third-floor apartment, clearing the empty plates off the table, depositing them in the dishwasher, and quietly closing the door behind me just before midnight.

Continue reading “Late-Summer Zucchini with Spaghetti, Walnuts and Herbs” »

During a heat wave in July, when the days were oppressively hot, all I wanted was to slip into a dark, cool bar in the middle of the day, settle into the air-conditioning on a bar stool and cry into my cocktail. Sometimes summer’s relentless cheerfulness and go-get-’em spirit is too much. You have to rebel. Bonus points for melodramatic flair.

One such hot summer day, when my high-waisted ’50s lady pants were sticking to the backs of my legs, I was on my way home from midtown when I remembered a piano bar on 47th street that I’d wanted to visit since the winter. Here was my chance to make my daydream real! So I went. I pushed through the door and sat at the short end of an L-shaped bar. A woman in her late 20s with short, finger-waved hair sat at the bar in a coral shift dress. She drank one mojito and then another. She would have been in good company in a Hopper painting. The scene was just right.

And then a thin woman, the picture of a beloved piano teacher with her spectacles, baggy, ditzy-print dress and long cardigan breezed in with a two-foot high stack of sheet music in her arms. She divided her music into two stacks, sat on one of them, and opened the cover over the ivory keys. She played heartbroken jazz songs from the ’30s and ’40s, and she sang.

Well, of course I had to cry, but I needed my cocktail first.

This bar is called The Rum House, so though I am usually apt to drink gin or whiskey, I ordered a classic daiquiri: just rum, sugar, and lime juice, shaken madly into an icy froth and served up. It was a revelation: shiveringly cold, sweet-tart, and as swiftly effective as a Dorothy Parker barb. I’ve been ordering daiquiris every since––and only once has someone asked me if I wanted it frozen.

But one night I came home, after a particularly long and trying day and thought it was time I made one for myself, since it is a dead simple three-ingredient cocktail. I don’t keep silver rum on hand, so my drink is always a bit more golden-hued than it was that hot day in midtown when I needed to slip in among the late-afternoon barflies and feel subsumed by their alcohol-hazy heartbreak and loneliness.

Now that I’ve gotten that bit of melodrama out of my system and am on the eve of my vacation as I write this very sentence (!!), the imbibing looks less like a page from Miss Lonelyhearts. I drink these in the early evening sun on the patio while reading the silly book I can’t put down or while dancing around the apartment listening to the hits-filled Hall & Oates station on Pandora. Totally different scene, still delicious.

Continue reading “Classic Daiquiri: Happy Hour at Home” »

Well. I’m glad we got that out of the way. I don’t have much more to say about any of it now except thank you: for explaing the ways in which you feel the same way, for offering solutions, and for laying the support on thick. I am so grateful for the community here. A few of you have written to ask if I’m quitting. I’m so not quitting. I’m just trying to figure out the new world order that feels right and fun and creative and awesome. That’s why I’m calling them growing pains. But now that the slate’s been wiped clean to some extent, let’s try for it. As cheerleaders say: Ready? OK!

I’ve moved two states north for the last half of August to be near my sister and new niece. It’s an entirely different pace here in a valley of rural Massachusetts. This is the view from my desk.

All day a very busy squirrel hauls crab apples to and fro across the side yard. A neighborhood cat, whose name we learned is Walter, purrs past the french doors in the mornings in hopes of a saucer of cream or a dish of cat food or a kind, unhurried person who will let him lean into your legs and wind his way around you in a figure eight. There is a small ornamental pond on the patio with lily pads and tiny little frogs (trite but true!). The first night we were here, I mistook the loud rhythmic cricket sounds for the alarm on my iPhone (sad but true!). We leave the windows open at night to hear all those summer bugs and birds and wake to an apartment that’s turned cool overnight. In bare feet, I walk yesterday’s coffee grounds out to the compost pile over wet grass. The air, if this makes sense, is humectant but not humid. It smells green, like dirt and thriving plants. I have seen more butterflies in the past week than I’ve seen in the past thirty years.

It’s all quite a departure from Brooklyn life, where trucks and traffic rumble beneath my second floor apartment windows. There, after work, I head to the spin bike at the gym or out for a cocktail with a friend. Here, after work, I head to a bike path.

I like it better in some ways. It’s no easy task to shrug off the work day and connect with who we are outside of emails and conference calls. But when I ride down a side street that dead-ends at a bike path traveling through two little villages under a canopy of trees, it’s easier to see the line between work and all the rest of life. Last night I pumped hard uphill. An older woman with her dog grinned at me, like my-isn’t-she-having-fun. And I was. Am. This evening I plan to ride to the Tuesday farmer’s market where there might be a jug band and will certainly be flowers to replace last week’s wilting bouquets, tomatoes for sandwiches, and basil for everything. Zoom I’m at the farmer’s market. Zoom I’m on the bike path cutting through the woods. Zoom I’m at my sister’s holding my new niece, touching her tiny little feet and burying my nose in her fat belly. It’s easy.

I’ve always been interested in the ways place can inform lifestyle. How much a culture values community, leisure, food, or health seeps into the day-to-day. I feel it here especially, where the shifts in the hours that book-end work feel profound (see: natural world rhapsody above.)

How do you transition from the work day to your evenings? Is there a ritual or routine you especially love? Are those rituals at all dependent on place? Do you ever think about how you might change those routines if you were somewhere else?