Pink of Perfection

image via retro renovation

Something tells me you dear readers share my deep and abiding love for Thanksgiving. On Sunday, window shopping in a fancy food shop with a friend, I suddenly got an anticipatory thrill so moving I hopped a little. Not up and down, but just up, once.

Thanksgiving wasn’t always my favorite holiday, but it became so when I was about 14. The day took on a hodgepodge element that made it more unpredictable party than overstuffed family function. My sister brought seemingly-glamorous (to a 14-year-old) college friends home, cousins in their 20’s would take the bus out to the country wearing black leather jackets, carrying cheese plates, and with a friend or two in tow, a fix-up could well be in the works, and a to-the-death game of Trivial Pursuit was a sure thing.

Things have settled down a bit over the years as attendees have grown up and coupled off. Sebastian makes a mean green bean casserole, my mom’s mashed potatoes are inspired, and there’s usually almost as much stuffing on my plate as I want. This year my sister is being held hostage in Montana. For the first time, I can’t count on her bloody marys and bold accessorizing. But two of my favorite eaters are driving up to sit at the long table, and I bring with me not a boyfriend but a husband. After the fast-paced flurry of a wedding, it will be good to sit down and have long chats with friends and family over a slice of pecan pie, a midnight bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy, and a glass of wine or five.

What’s Thanksgiving at your house like? Do you host? Is it friends, family, or both? A somber affair or an event where someone always dances on a table? Music for the table dancing after the jump…

Continue reading “Countdown to Turkey” »

Well. Ahem. I wish there were a microphone I could tap awkwardly.

Are you still out there?

I thought what I wanted to say would somehow just pour right on out of me as soon as I sat down at a keyboard. I thought I would write about the casserole I made last night. But after such a long absence and such a big life moment as getting married, casserole seems more than a little underwhelming. But what do you say after you’ve had the time of you life and you come back to a familiar home in the neighborhood you only recently left and everything is the same yet mysteriously and fundamentally different?

Let me give you a visual: I am sitting in my same old uncomfortable Danish modern chair. I’ve got coffee to my right and the sun is coming through the windows in its diffuse fall way. From the looks of it, everything is the same as it was two weeks ago, but taking the temperature of this living room, it’s all different. The woman sitting in it, for one, is relaxed and filled with enough quiet vibrancy to be a figure in a Matisse painting. The frenzied last minute dash, the stress, the worry — it’s all gone. In its place is a drill that has tapped the source that flows under the surface of the everyday, pumping up to the surface contentment, ease, beauty, and love.

Continue reading “Coming Back Home Again” »

I’m coming off a weekend so magical, that here it is Wednesday and I’m still glowing from its effects. There was a surprise visit from my sister and a luncheon attended by some of the dearest, funniest, smartest women in my life. There was a long dining room table anchored by arrangements of hydrangeas, and a feeling of happiness in me so all-consuming, it started in my gut and bubbled up as an unshakable smile.

I’m a sucker for rituals and traditions, but planning a wedding, until now, has been like planning a big, expensive party. There are moments, of course, when the grave importance of what we are about to enter into resonates in me with a profound gratitude. Most of the time, unfortunately, the daily management of details wins out over the mystery of love forevermore. My Saturday, filled as it was with great women and good food, tied me back not only to the solemn occasion of a marriage, but to a tradition of women. It seems all too rare for women to get together to celebrate passing through life as such. For all the fun of the day, it also felt important–important to honor the sweet and unique experience of being born female, but also to call to center stage a web of support to mark the passing of momentous life events, as well as the more mundane ups and downs of simply being alive.

Continue reading “Be It Ever So Humble” »

This is one of my favorite times of year (yours too, I see!). I love the nostalgia of it, the melancholy of it, the fresh-start of it. I love the switch from white wine to red. I love that I want to run out and buy notebooks and mechanical pencils even though I don’t have 10 pages on the symbolism in A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man due anytime soon. I love that my desire to wear plaid is unshakable, and that on the way to the grocery store yesterday, I caught sight of a tree already turning red at its edges. I like the pumpkins outside people’s houses, the flurry of wholesome activities each weekend (corn maze, anyone?), and the way you can feel one sunny, summer activity-driven life slipping away and something else, something utterly unknown settling in.

But one of the things that I love most of all about this very moment in time is the bounty of summer produce running headlong into the gourds, plums, and squash. Nestled next to the acorn squash, with which you will make soup, is a flat of heirloom tomatoes and thick branches of basil. In terms of produce, I can’t imagine a more bountiful time of year.

There is a mad dash, of course, one that started in late August and finds itself winding down in these next couple of weeks, to put everything up — to preserve, to can, to freeze. I hadn’t felt quite so comforted and cared for as when my mom recently sent me home with five containers of “hell,” (a spicy tomato and vegetable mixture for kicky winter soups), two coffee cans full of homemade granola, and a jar of pesto. It wasn’t just the idea that I had the start to some great meals that was so comforting. It was the way I had watched her bustle around the kitchen making everything, and then packed it up in matching containers, and wedging it all into an insulated bag for me to take back home. I was nursing some kind of existential heartache, and this care package was my bandage.

And maybe that’s getting to the heart of another thing I love about this time of year — whatever hurts we have tend to rear their heads as the light and the air shift into something cooler and less severe. But so too does our desire to be coddled a bit. I blame the weather for it all — the weepiness, the wistfulness, the desire to swaddle ourselves in wool blankets, to have our hands held, our hair stroked. So even if all our vulnerabilities bubble right to surface, at least our allowance to be cared for is not far behind.

When embarking on a large scale project that will involve countless choices and decisions, it helps to have an easily applied litmus test to decide what’s in and what’s out. Ideally, this barometer will help us to see the big picture, again and again, and keeps us from getting bogged down in the details. I have a new such test when it comes to making decisions about an upcoming wedding. I answer a question with a question: Will it affect the marriage?

Should we have a calligraphy wedding certificate? Should the rehearsal dinner be a buffet? Well, will it affect the marriage? If the answer is no, I’m inclined to take the most economical route possible. There, question answered. A greater woman than I, one who excels at details and delegation would probably weigh each of these considerations carefully. But I’m keeping my eye on the prize: the next morning, I will wake up having pledged to be with someone else through good times and in bad. That is big. Much bigger than splurging on letterpress escort cards and table numbers.

I hope there will be day months from now when we will look back, so glad we had this event with all our friends and family. We will appreciate the big picture for what it hopefully will be: a really unique and meaningful night spent with people we love. But the truth so often is, with a wedding as in life, it’s the smallest things that mean the most. Like encircling the bride’s wrist with an antique bracelet while she’s getting ready, the advice an older relative gives about a long and happy marriage, and what the couple whisper into each other’s ears while they’re dancing. You can’t plan those moments, and you certainly can’t pay for them.

So far, my favorite wedding moments have been sort of smallish in the grand scheme of the event, capital E: finding the dress, trying on wedding rings, and sitting at the kitchen table with my little brother for a few hours making escort cards and table numbers. He is a young guy, usually flitting here and there in his exciting life. But for three hours, I held him captive, cutting out print-outs of 20-point Georgia numbers to make homemade stencils. And because there were no distractions — no waiter interrupting us, no parking space to find — we got to talk about all topics great and small. Not only what’s happening in our lives, but how it’s happening, and what that means and how we feel about it.

It’s a feeling that women must have had in quilting circles. Focused on the task at hand, the background of life drifts out of focus and you’re left with needle and thread, a piece of fabric, and the company of those around you. Time feels forgiving; you can really talk. It’s a couple of hours I never would have had with store-bought cards and numbers. The cost was less, but it was worth infinitely more.

Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from your favorite things, even when you don’t feel like you need it.

Few things taste better on a hot summer afternoon than a fountain soda.

Floating is the cheapest therapy.

Feeling taken care of is when someone else cooks dinner, fixes a plate, and calls you to the table where there are ferns in a glass and a seat for you.

A life without email — and the internet — is a fine life.

Shucking corn isn’t nearly as much trouble as it seems.

Outdoor yoga on a sunny afternoon will make you collapse with sweet exhaustion, like a baby ready for a nap.

Great ideas come on walks through the woods.

A change is scenery, no matter how humble, is good for the soul.

Reading is a habit, and a night spent with a book, a comfy couch, and a bright light is my new favorite evening.

A good mood is only a workout away.

After the disappointment wears off, there is a certain comfort in things not going your way; at least you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

There’s nothing more delicious than a perfect peach.

To remember what’s important, step out of your life, take the long view, and then feel how good it is to come home.

When Pink of Perfection was down yesterday (a wave of spam hit our host in Montana — maybe I should do a spam recipe in commemoration?), I felt like a little kid who gets lost in a department store and can’t find her mother. Only instead of throwing a fit and crying to a security guard, the adult in me just threw up her hands and said, “what can you do?” That’s mercury in retrograde for you. But heavens, I am ever glad to be back up and running.

Today, if you don’t mind terribly, I’m going to tell you about finding my wedding dress. And lest you worry, I promise this will not become a wedding blog. But it was a big day, and one, moreover, that even involved a craft.

When I joined my sister in the bowels of Port Authority to meet our mom on the arriving bus, she was holding two bouquets of tissue paper flowers — one in hot pink, and one in pale turquoise. If there’s one thing my sister knows it’s how to mark an occasion. And so, with my arm hooked through my mom’s, I walked through Port Authority, and all through the garment district of Manhattan, smiling so much my face would ache at day’s end, proudly clutching the bright, full, tissue paper flowers that still sit on my dining room table a month later.

But this moment was a bit of an aberration in the wedding planning process. I had already picked out a cake, knew what the dinner menu would be, and for some reason — perhaps my deep desire to not let the wedding overshadow the importance of the event, the marriage — the search for the dress seemed to be just another slightly onerous task on the never-ending list of wedding to-do’s. Mostly, I was looking forward to spending the day with my mom and sister and having a fancy French lunch afterwards. And frankly, in terms of the actual dress shopping my expectations were low.

When we arrived at the discount wedding warehouse, my mom and sister finished their coffees in the front while I searched through the open racks and dragged surprisingly heavy dresses wrapped in clear plastic garment bags around the floor. In the dressing room finally, my mom sat on a chair, my sister sat on the floor, and we were joined by a very kind older woman named Olga. She helped pour the dresses over my head, showed me how to shoot my arms up and dive into the pools of tulle and lace. I tried on four dresses. And then I tried on the dress.

For a girl who wasn’t expecting to emerge triumphant, who thinks the whole wedding biz is a bit of a racket and mostly, more than anything, just wants to tie the knot with her guy and dance to 80’s music with her friends, I was surprised just how momentous finding the dress was. I hugged Olga repeatedly. My sister says I got tears in my eyes. But I don’t think I was crying over the lace gown, lovely as it is. I was crying over my luck. Just like finding the right person, the one who can make trips to Paris and the neighborhood drinking hole equally magaical — after hunting, squeezing into things that don’t really fit, and wondering if you can live with beading when you really aren’t terrifically fond of it, you find the dress and the person who is just right. Well, in moments like that, you can’t help but weep over how lucky you are, and how grateful.

And when you go up to stand on the pedestal outside the dressing room and they fan out the train behind you, you are especially thankful that your sister had the foresight and DIY savvy to craft you a bouquet of tissue paper flowers for you to hold. It really completes the picture.

DIY Tissue Paper Flowers
adapted from Country Living

For each flower, cut six 7-inch squares from the tissue paper. Stack and fold them accordion-style six times, forming a one-by seven-inch rectangle. Snip off the corners of the rectangle with scissors.

Tightly twist a wire floral stem around the center of the rectangle.

Fan out the paper, then pull apart each layer, creating the blossom.

I thought it best to make my mom’s favorite foods for Mother’s Day dinner, and because she likes aioli, salmon, and coconut, my cooking on Sunday wasn’t so much a labor of love as it was a labor of likemindedness.

We drove together to a farm stand on a hilly stretch of road between our house and another town on a warm and sunny day. The flowering trees and forsythia had their moment the previous weekend, and now potted flowers were laid out for sale on splintery tables outside — gerber daisies and lots of blooms I didn’t know the names of. We grabbed two beautiful bunches of asparagus. The wind was whipping around so wildly, the roadside grasses were bowing deeply at the waist like gentlemen.

Back at home, my mom planted Early Girls in the garden and I stood at the counter in her kitchen, snapping off the asparagus ends, and looking out at her leaning into the dirt. The sun was catching in her short hair, and I thought, with such deep surprise and so much gratitude it nearly took my breath away, the spring always comes. After a winter of doctors and tests, prodding and hospital rooms, it is Mother’s Day and it is spring and it almost seems like a miracle. But it’s my mom.

Spouses and significant others stayed at home, and my older brother and sister and I sat in the kitchen with my mom, the wooden table spread with blanched asparagus and aioli, cheese and crackers, and chips and salsa — all mom’s favorites. Oh, and three of four kids — her other favorites. Salmon was to come, followed by coconut macaroons and a cup of tea. I don’t even remember what we talked about, I just know it was perfect.

Continue reading “Spring Menu for a Mom” »