The Crystal Punch Bowl That Wasn't

My grandmother turned 90 last month.  She lived through the depression on a small farm in rural Missouri, married a soldier during World War Two and raised three children.  So when she told me she was interested in recording her ‘life story’ I jumped at the chance to hear anything she wanted to tell me.  I anticipated being enraptured by her tales of living in Alaska and Germany in the sixties, looked forward to hearing stories about my dad growing up, back when everyone called him Butch, and of course stories about the farm, before electricity and indoor plumbing.  I didn’t expect to be sidetracked by a plastic punch bowl. We were looking through the teak buffet table that has sat in the living room as long as I can remember.  My grandmother was telling me about the silver they had engraved and the Rosenthal plates she and my grandfather brought back from Germany.  In the back corner, was something I couldn’t quite make out, so I asked. "Oh that," she said, "that’s a plastic punchbowl I bought for your cousin’s bridal shower."  Not a remarkable piece to be sure, but it’s what she said next that has stayed with me for months.  My grandmother told me that when she was a young military wife, in the forties, she thought she needed to have a crystal punchbowl.  This wasn’t said with any sort of entitlement, if you knew my Granny you’d know she’s not one for thinking she ‘deserved’ this or that.  No, she and my grandfather entertained at times, and he was an officer in the Army; it was something she thought they should have, like wine glasses or nice china.

A crystal punch bowl.  When my grandmother was married, roughly 70 years before my own wedding, she thought a crystal punch bowl was a vital part of her kitchen.  As it turns out, she never did get her crystal punch bowl, and in fact never needed a punch bowl of any sort until a few years ago when we hosted a bridal shower with a dozen guests; and then she went out to her local big box store and bought a plastic one.

The first thought that occurs to me is how different my life is than my grandmother’s.  When I registered for wedding gifts 6 years ago, I didn’t even list any fancy china; I knew I wouldn’t use it.  If someone had even mentioned a punch bowl to me I would have laughed.  But then I got to thinking, maybe I have a punch bowl of my own.

Of the items I registered for years ago, aren’t there some that do little more than collect dust?  Or even today, that purchase I was thinking of making, the current must-have; will it cause a fit of chuckles in a 20-something a few decades from now?  Or will it become a cherished heirloom?  Maybe it’s impossible to predict.  I don’t know.

But I can’t stop thinking about punch bowls . . .

On Deserving

My sleep patterns change according to the season. At this time of year, as summer fades into fall and the days grow shorter and darker, I sleep deeply and long—but once the year has rolled around again, and light peeps into my bedroom late into the night and again early in the morning, I develop seasonal insomnia. Sleep doesn’t come easily to me in the springtime; even when exhausted, I feel the pull of so many things I’d rather be doing than closing my eyes. This year, as sunny days peaked around Midsummer, I found myself once again in the throes of my circadian sleeplessness. My mind seemed to whirl and spin, filled up with the promise of all that sunshine, leaving me spent and ironically too tired to do any of the things on the to-do list that called me out of bed again and again.

As the sun-filled days passed, I tried to unravel the layers of physical, emotional, and spiritual components to my lifetime of insomnia. I came up with many ideas: I didn’t feel safe; I had too much to do; I had a hard time convincing my irrational mind that I’d get more done if I also got more sleep.

And then, one afternoon as I lay on my couch trying and failing to take a much-needed nap, I thought: I don’t deserve to sleep. I don’t deserve to rest.

And that was an attitude I recognized. “Deserving” has played a large role in my life; I fight a constant battle with the insidious little voice inside me that is always fixated on what is fair and what is deserved. Because my energy is limited and must be parceled out in careful allotments, I find myself locked into a continual war with this voice of guilt over how I spend my time.

I don't deserve to rest, because I haven't done anything worthwhile today. I don't deserve to take it easy, because I have been lazy all morning. I don't deserve to have my husband make me dinner, because I ought to get up and do it, whether I feel well enough or not. Sometimes consciously, always unconsciously, I have a running tally always going in my mind. X amount of rest requires X amount of doing. If I have taken it easy today, I need to work extra hard tomorrow. If I have missed this many hours of church this week, I must make sure to go to all of them next week, even if I feel the same or worse. I must not do anything "fun" if I don't have all the "not fun" stuff finished, even if that means I will never have the time or energy for the "fun" stuff.

Since the winter of my junior year of high school, when I began this new life where my energy is so limited and I must live so carefully, I have been afraid. I've been so afraid of becoming that useless person, the one who just never musters up the willpower to get anything done, who always falls back on their physical failings as an excuse for checking out of life. This fear has clawed at me, ruled me, always dictated with precise care the doings of my day-to-day. It has made me feel enormous guilt when I fail to follow through on something I have assigned myself to do. It has made me hard on myself.

It has made me feel undeserving.

That summer afternoon as I lay sleeplessly on my couch, new thoughts came crowding in my mind.

What if it is okay to rest?

What if it is okay to take it easy when I need to?

What if it is okay to care for myself, regardless of what I have or haven’t done today?

What if it’s okay to cherish my body, even if it means letting go of some of the expectations I have for myself?

What if I deserve these things, not because of something I have accomplished or as a result of how clean my house is, but simply because I am a precious soul? What if we are all precious, not because of what we have done, but simply because of who we are?

What if we are all deserving of love? Of rest? Of joy?

.   .   .   .   .

In the months that have passed since that summer afternoon, I have felt my thinking gently shift. That voice—the one that harps so much on deserving, and tries to tell me that I do not deserve to rest—is still there; I suspect it always will be, somewhere deep inside my heart. And, all too often, I find myself listening to that voice, giving it leave to shape my thoughts and feelings about myself.

But I like to think that I’m making progress. I like to think that, in the last three months, there have been a few more times where I gave myself a little grace, a few more times where I reached out for peace and happiness in my life regardless of what I had or had not accomplished. I like to think that I’m a little closer to being able to claim these things for my own, to let go of what I can’t do and live abundantly with what I can.

Because you know what?

I deserve it.

Time is on my side

While my daughter is still an infant, I am trying to adhere to a schedule of spending at least two solid weekdays alone with her, despite the fact that I own and run a business.  “Alone,” in our household, means that my husband (who also works for himself) might tag along and spend some portion of the day with us, as well.  This is quite obviously living the dream and I mean that in all sincerity.  Like so many people, all I ever wanted in life was to create a family and to have one in which the adults prefer palling around together to any other activity.  The addition of the portly, charming baby (who, I might add, has been impressing even total strangers of late with her glittering, two tooth-bud smile, full-body laugh and enthusiastic hand-clapping) is just the definitive bonus.  We have these epic moments, often only the two of us, where we find ourselves sitting on a blanket in the park in the middle of the day, staring up at the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.  We are saturated in, practically oozing happiness.  But lest you think we are busy having it all (wait for it, Schadenfreudes) you should know that organizationally, domestically, we exist in a state of utter chaos---a ceaseless game of whack-a-mole. There are, as they say, absolutely not enough hours in the day and it is my perpetual struggle to prioritize appropriately.  On the days when I am solely focused on the baby, I make an effort to really and truly be present during her waking hours.  I have the great privilege of a somewhat flexible schedule and the even greater privilege of being her mother.  It is in this spirit that I strive to keep work emails and tasks tucked away in my pocket or purse.  I look at the mounting pile of laundry or the creeping clutter in the apartment and decide that it can wait.  I shrug off the light sense of despair over the two primed walls that we were supposed to paint last winter.  I tell myself that she will never be exactly this age again and that I will look back on this first year and know I didn’t miss a thing.

I am acutely aware that most women (or men, for that matter) do not even have the option to do this and I feel almost a sense of responsibility to parents everywhere to take full advantage.  Of course, this means I have to work harder and smarter when I am on the clock.  It also means that I am on the clock longer and at odd hours.  Ultimately, it means that we sort of live in a college dorm and have to run to the bodega at 7:30 PM to buy an $8 roll of toilet paper because we ran out and nobody had the chance to get more.

Meanwhile, as is my wont, I am plagued by the notion that everyone else must be doing it better---they have to be, right?  During a recent trip to the playground this was confirmed, as I zeroed in on a few other mothers and observed their whole set-up.  Each one seemed to have the diaper bag completely dialed in, down to the perfectly portioned organic snack foods in an eco-friendly/non-petroleum/possibly Swedish baggie.  Their strollers were tidy and their children even had on accessories.  They had brought galvanized tins of French sidewalk chalk and appeared to have organized play-dates.  When I arrived on the scene, my daughter was assiduously chewing on the rubber case from my iPhone (almost certainly made in China).  My stroller was pandemonium---it included incongruous items like dog poop bags, my diluted vitamin water bottle and a calcified, half-gummed whole wheat dinner roll from a restaurant adventure the day before.  I plunked my daughter on the padded playground surface and watched as she crunched fall leaves between her fingers and attempted to stuff them in her mouth.  She was not wearing shoes or a bow in her hair but she seemed pretty thrilled.  We did not have an adorable German tube of bubbles (why is everything good European?) and I hadn’t even remembered my nursing cover.  We embarrassed the family with an awkward lean-to situation using a cotton drape, which she repeatedly tore away with a whipping motion, exposing my breasts to the most populous borough in the city.

So, I am coming around to the idea that I actually only have so much bandwidth.  The letting go of certain practical elements of daily life in favor of more time for human relating seems a fairly obvious choice to me.  While I aspire to be a person who deftly balances her infant on one hip while folding fitted sheets or doing the taxes, it turns out that I only can/am willing to (?) do one thing at a time.  Most tasks, therefore, are sort of shined on or phoned in until they have the good fortune to be in the pole position.  I keep the goals small, so then when we have a fully stocked fridge or I send out a birthday gift, I feel like I have summitted Everest or passed the California bar.

Although I mostly feel good about the way I am partitioning my time for now, like every working mother I grapple with needing and/or wanting to be in two places at once.  Who knows how this will all change as she gets older and as my business evolves?  It is a little disheartening to realize that I did seem to need the “excuse” of a baby to finally feel justified in prioritizing enjoyment.  Why didn’t I do this before?  And why do I still feel like I’m “admitting to something” when I tell you I spend entire days, in the middle of the week, not just being with my baby, but actively trying to do little else?

Needless to say, I want my daughter to be proud of her mother as a role model and an entrepreneur.  But I am hoping she doesn’t have to feel this from a remote place.  I want her to experience that I am as available to her as I am to my work.  She will doubtless have a wide array of things to discuss with her therapist about her home and family.  I figure I won’t just hand her the line that her mother always had too many things on her plate.  I want her to work a little harder for her gripes.

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.

Days undocumented

I was a child of the pre-Facebook, pre-Pinterest, pre-Skype, pre-plus-one-and-like era. Our mode of digital anticipation involved waiting for someone's screen name to show up as Available on AIM or for someone to sign into MSN Messenger. Those were the acronyms that felt relevant to us. Beyond the availability of our friends to chat and the esoteric lingo that came with those conversations, we gleaned insight from carefully-crafted Away messages. Nobody was just "Away" back then, and---because we were 16 and, no matter how much self-importance we could muster, we were not quite busy---nobody was just "Busy" either. We populated Away messages with song lyrics and quotes, inside jokes and pointed messages full of the truths and feelings we could not utter face to face. In the past few weeks, I have felt the need for an Away message to hang on the door of my life---preferably one with a witty quote or Green Day lyrics for the full throwback and nostalgia effect. For the first time in four years, I am no longer living out of a suitcase. I own shelves. I have put nails in walls. I have shared coffee with people with the confidence that we will all still be right here tomorrow . . . and in 13 days, and in 4 months. My universe has been flooded with the kind of permanence of which I once dreamed.

Permanence makes me quiet. It is my love of "process" that has fueled my embrace of transitions with relative peace. I am intrigued by the little shifts: the packed box, the new photo on the wall, the coat hanging in the corner, the new bakery from which I buy muffins in the morning. Those become the markers of a new chapter, punctuated by a different routine, marked by different milestones. I document the process of moving, the process of saying goodbye, the process of making a home and then disassembling it as though it were made of Legos. The photographs freeze those transitional moments in time to remind me that life is not just the story of neat heres and exciting theres, but of clumsy in-betweens.

This time, there are no photographs of transition. My silence has been born out of impatience: an impatience to find a place for everything, and for me, and to have those places feel anchoring enough. I have not pointed the camera at the new corners that make a home feel like me, nor have I written about the new batch of muffins. I feel firmly planted here, bound to an address, magazine subscriptions, and a barista who knows my coffee order. I own possessions that make it impossible to pack up and leave into the night. Nobody left lightly with three coffee makers in tow.

Once an embracer of process, I am now embracing the photos not taken, the words not written. I am living in a blank away message, waiting for the lyrics to populate it, and for new processes to appeal photogenically to a pair of eyes perpetually in love with novelty. Inspired by Kim and, inevitably, by the 1990s.

Kicked Out of Our Flat the First Day? Jolly Good Times!

The flight from New York to London is exactly long enough to get enough sleep as to be considered a night’s worth, and exactly short enough that this should be considered a travesty. I arrived at 9 am London time, better known as 4 am New York time, approximately 6.5 hours after I settled into seat, secured my neck pillow, sleeping mask and blanket---my arsenal of “I’m sleeping---don’t screw with me” devices. Zack met me at the airport with a rose, my name hand drawn on his phone. We picked our cat up at customs, where she was, if not content, remarkably nonplussed for having just crossed the Atlantic in a vibrating steel underbelly. We hopped in a black cab, which, because of the wondrous feats of British designs, fit all of us and my three bags nicely. (Fun fact: due to fold up chairs in the backseat area where I was storing my luggage, they all also are capable of carrying five people. Take note, NYC taxis.) We arrived at the flat Zack had found for us after three weeks of searching: a cheery, sunny two bedroom we’d be sharing with a PhD student in Kensington, an area you’d probably recognize from the quintessential, I’m-in-England montage in many movies. The streets were curved and lined with leafy trees; the houses a stately white, encircled with small wrought iron fences. It was, in a word, lovely. It was, in two words, too easy.

It was noon when disaster struck. In New York, people were just waking up, stretching their arms to the sky and inhaling the scent of coffee and street cleaners and the wisp of autumn that had recently begun to show itself. In London, Zack received a phone call. “It’s the letting agent,” he whispered to me after answering his phone. Zack had been subletting from the PhD student for the past week he’d been staying at the flat while waiting for the letting agent to call him back so we could officially sign the lease. I nodded and tried to keep my eyes open as Zack’s went wide. “What do you mean cats aren’t allowed?” he said. “I explicitly asked. I was told the landlord was 100% fine with that.” I looked at him questioningly and he held his pointer finger up. “The landlord doesn’t like men either?” Zack said into the phone. “Well, that’s just creepy.”

We had, we were told, 36 hours to remove ourselves from the flat before the landlord returned from his vacation, a trip to Poland taken out of the same fondness for Slavic women that caused him to ban Zack and others of his gender from the building. In New York, I would’ve been settling in front of my computer to read my favorite blogs before starting work, a full pot of tea and maybe a cat by my side. In London, Zack sighed and rubbed his temples. “Looks like we’re going apartment hunting,” he said. We are a couple with a cat. In the world of expensive, competitive apartment shares, we are what is considered “highly undesirable.” Like dating, highly undesirable is often met with highly undesirable. Any flat that looked halfway decent didn’t want us, leaving us with the kind of flat who might fart at dinner before ditching you with the check, the kind of flat that’s really hoping to make enough money playing the lottery to move out of his mom’s basement someday.

And then, as fate would have it, we hit the jackpot. On our way back from seeing a flat the size of a New York closet (and most New Yorkers don’t have a closet, so do that math) we walked by a place Zack had checked out the week before. The landlord was sitting on the stoop smoking cigarettes. An affable Greek immigrant named Chris who’d been married to his plump, baklava-pushing wife for thirty-five years, Zack and Chris had stayed on the stoop chatting for hours last time he visited the apartment. “Come in, come in!” Chris said. “I’ll take you and your girlfriend on a tour of the whole building, show you all of the renovations I’ve been doing.” The top flat, the one Zack had been previously looking at, wasn’t finished being renovated yet, but he showed us the rest of the flats, which became progressively nicer as you went down in the building. The final one had floor to ceiling windows, a balcony, hardwood floors, granite countertops. “Here’s the thing,” Chris said. “I have to be honest with you. Since Zack came to look before, I’ve decided to sell the building. So I can give you a flat, but it must only be for 2 months, until I sell. But if you choose to stay---I can give you this apartment at a discount, and you can move in tomorrow.”

Zack and I looked at each other. In my tired brain, I tried to calculate how much of a discount we would need to be able to afford the apartment. “Can you do half off?” Zack said.

Chris laughed. “You drive a hard bargain.” He shook his head and then reached his hand out for Zack to shake. “Welcome to the building.” In New York, it was those few early morning hours where the city is still as much as it can be, the streets silent and houses dark and sighing with sleep. In London, the world was waking up.

This Mother's Work

I'm more than happy to introduce a special guest contributor this week: my cousin Michelle. As children, we spent summers, holidays, and many a weekend together. Now, as  adults, we unfortunately see each other much more sporadically, as Michelle currently lives in Baku, Azerbaijan, as the Program Director of the American Bar Association's Rule of Law Initiative in Azerbaijan. Impressive, huh? Michelle writes about her mom here. My aunt, or "Annie T" as we call her, holds a special place in my heart, too.  She and my mom were night and day, but as sisters-in-law, they shared a deep respect and love that bypassed any and all differences. Personally, I'll be forever indebted to my aunt, for the love and support she has shown my sisters and I since my mom died. Clearly, commitment to family was one thing my mom and aunt shared in common. And with that, I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did.

By Michelle A. Brady

There’s a picture, stashed away somewhere in a drawer or closet at my parents’ house in Rochester, of my mom and I relaxing in our bathing suits and inner tubes at my grandparents’ old cottage in the Finger Lakes.  It’s the summer of 1982 and I’m five years old.  I haven’t seen the photo in awhile but I remember that we are smiling and laughing.  A couple months later, that September, I carried the picture with me to my first day of kindergarten.  I cried the entire morning, missing my mom, and feeling perhaps, that our five years of intensive mother-daughter bonding were about to end.  Years later we would recall that day and joke, because as an adult it seemed I was always eager to get away.

Over the years my mother and I have laughed and cried together, shopped, danced, and traveled together, and yes, at times yelled and said hurtful things to each other.  Despite our ups and downs and growing pains, I am forever indebted to her for one thing in particular, because without it I would not be the woman I am today.  This one thing she gave me above all else was the example she set as a working mom, laboring tirelessly along with my dad, to provide a better life for me and my brother.  That example, and the values it instilled in me, has made all the difference in my life.

I never thought it weird that I had a mom who worked full time.  From kindergarten onward, my mom went back to work, remaining at Eastman Kodak Company---along with my dad---until retirement many years later.  I stayed with baby-sitters and at after-school latch key programs and, quite honestly, never thought twice about it.  In fact, I have positive memories of using these morning hours at the baby-sitter to watch cartoons: G.I. Joe, Jem, and Transformers, in particular.  I ate snacks in the afternoon at latch key and finished my homework while waiting for my mom to pick me up.  And when I was older, I’d arrive home to an empty house and immediately call my mom to inform her I’d arrived safely and that yes, of course, I would get started on that homework right away!

Having a working mom, though, often proved to be a major lesson in organization and planning ahead.  When I was in junior high, my dance lessons really took off.  This required cross-town transportation to dance class right after school, in order to be dressed in my leotard and tights with hair pulled back by 4 p.m.  More school days than not, my paternal grandmother was tasked with this responsibility.  Like any doting grandparent, Grandma Kay arrived on time everyday in her Cutlass sedan, smoking a cigarette and carrying a Wendy’s large chocolate frosty, because every budding ballerina needs some carbs before a workout. Hours later, my mom would arrive at the dance studio with dinner and a ride home.  I would often collapse into the seat, sweaty, exhausted, and not too happy with her efforts to catch up on the day.  Yet she paid for the classes and costumes, supported me at competitions and recitals, and even joined a mother-daughter tap class to spend more time with me.

While my mom was busy with my dance lessons, my dad was similarly busy with my brother and his hockey and lacrosse activities.  During the winter season---which is excruciatingly long in Rochester---my mom would often cook chili on Fridays, a low-maintenance meal that could simmer all day and be ready when we arrived home late after my brother’s hockey game.  In typical pre-teen fashion, I didn’t appreciate this practical dinner choice in the least; in fact, I hated that chili. So one Friday, knowing my fate for dinner, I “came down” with the stomach flu at school.  This, of course, required my mom to leave work early and pick me up at a school.  She was calm and quiet as we drove home, seemingly concerned about my well-being.  But within just a few minutes of questioning, my mom had me confessing that no, I was not actually sick; I just didn’t want chili for dinner that night.  In hindsight, I’m sure my mom didn’t appreciate having her work day interrupted like that, but she never said a word to me. And I never did eat the chili again.

So many of my childhood memories are connected in some way to my mom, and especially, to her role as a working mother. When I look back on it all now, as a 35 year-old single woman, living out my dreams halfway around the world, I realize the extent to which it has affected me. My mom gave me the example of a working mother who handled stress at work and paid the bills at home; a mother who cleaned the house and organized everyone’s schedules; a mother who was tough and forceful when necessary, and equally conciliatory and compromising; a mother who did all of this while remembering every detail and splitting responsibilities with my father in a gender-equal way.  Above all else, I witnessed first-hand the benefits of organization, multi-tasking, and motivation, and along the way, saw the rewards of goal-setting, hard work, and investing in education.

I haven’t told my mom nearly enough how much I appreciate the example she set for me.  So I will tell her now, and then again the next time I see her in person.

Thank you, Mom, for showing me what is possible, and for selflessly paving the way for me to realize my dreams.

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.

Watching Weather and Red Earth

By Eliza Deacon From up here you can forget that much else exists and your view of the world is only what spreads away down over tops of trees and the Maasai Steppe beyond; at the moment much of that is impassable anyhow after early rains. It would be all too easy not to leave this place and to become deeply rooted in the red soil along with the coffee, easy to become a recluse and slowly slip off the social calender until, in months to come, people wonder whatever happened to you---not such a bad thing really.

The farm grows slowly around us and the coffee seedlings---planted earlier this year---are now knee height or thereabouts. With a nod to the aesthetics of line and form, they are planted on the contours of the hills, gentle curves that owe much to good farming practice; there is something peaceful about following their lines and your walk always finds direction because of them, although the dogs pay them no mind and have yet to learn to tread softly around fragile roots.

I walk a lot these days, frustrations like lack of power (we’re not on the grid) resulting in lack of internet---not so crucial really, except for that lifeline to the outside world---are easier to handle when you’ve been up to the highest point on the farm and squatted down in the red earth letting the view take away often murderous thoughts. I’m trying to learn patience and that all things are not always solved by another glass of wine, when you’re at your limit but you can’t get off the farm, because ‘you can’t actually get off the farm’ as the rain has made the tracks too slippery and you’ll only wrap the truck around a coffee bush if you try. All these things are good. I suppose they’re lessons if only I took the time to remember them.

Our house sits in a wind tunnel and at night the wind howls down off Kilimanjaro and roars straight over the top of us. I now see why the back side of the house is largely without windows and also why we block up the hole in the back door at night with a wooden bread board. I’ve learned, with much cursing, how to start the old cable-pull-start generator for when we need power; two hands and a firm stance are what’s needed, it’s got a mind of its own and doesn’t like me obviously.

It feels far away here. It feels like we’ve left behind a life that was easy, yes, but a tad dull. Here the challenges are not insurmountable, it’s mainly funds---or the lack of---that are much needed, as with any start up project. Our farm, a small but perfectly formed 400 acres, might soon be joined by another 800 or so. You can see that farm on the hills bordering ours, higher up and often in Kili’s clouds; out of reach but perhaps not for much longer. We moved in in July, but already the days have blurred and I don’t think back to where we were; this place wraps itself around you very quickly. It makes me wonder if we’ll ever leave. I rather hope not.

On Waking Up Happy

I am a nighttime worrier. As soon as the sun goes down, my creative and productive energy dissipates, and a dreary little cloud of worry and anxiety takes its place. It’s the sort of superfluous worry—“recreational worry,” as my friend and I like to call it—that winds around and around itself as a tired mind loses steam amidst the liminal space between today and tomorrow. I worry about whether I’ve done enough today, and I worry about what I need to do tomorrow. I worry about larger questions, like finding purpose in life, and smaller questions, like whether I should have worded something differently in an email. This is usually my cue that it’s time to redirect my wayward mind to the simplicity of bedtime rituals and get myself to sleep as soon as possible. I’ve accompanied myself through enough worried evenings to know that this is simply my mind’s way of grinding from “full-speed” to “stop” in a matter of hours.

Mornings, on the other hand, have marked the difference for me across different stages and passages of life. I remember straggling out of bed before dawn, only to fall asleep again on the bus during high school. I remember waking up much later in college, always with a half-finished paper still writing itself in my mind. I remember the summer I took up running, bolting out of bed and out the door each morning with a surge of powerful energy I’d never known otherwise.

More recently, I remember waking up a little disoriented on so many gray Boston mornings during graduate school. My sweetheart was waking up hundreds of miles away, and my footing felt unsure. It took two cups of coffee and several hours before I could fully process stimuli from the outside world.

In my new home, I still tend to fall asleep to the cranking of my internal worry machine, even with my love close by and Southern sunshine to look forward to the next day. Waking up, though, these days is another story. As I rub the sleep from my eyes and my last dream slips from memory, I’m struck by the certainty that I am exactly where I’m meant to be. Before the small disappointments and successes of the day take hold and before my worry mechanism starts asking too many questions about where I’ve been and where I’m going, I can’t help but notice there’s something just right about right now.

I suppose this is what it means to wake up happy: to peek out from the business of life for a brief moment each day and smile at the thought that you’ve secretly begun to enjoy the journey.

Never Forget

My husband and I bought our first home together, a condo in Brooklyn, just about two years ago. Apartment shopping in New York is certainly not for the faint of heart, something we learned after our first round of open houses. After months of searching, we found our diamond in the rough. It lacked the dining space I held out hope for and the corner windows and light our last apartment afforded, but had a parking spot and other amenities that made us cheer, while allowing us to stay in the neighborhood we had grown to love. We moved on a hot and sticky Saturday in August. After saying goodbye to the less-than-quaint walk-up apartment that we---and many families of mice---had called home for the last several years, we drove around the block to our new home, moving vans in tow. My parents arrived on cue, to help with the moving efforts.  After coordinating my sister’s move in Rochester the day before, they were on the road to New York first thing in the morning, to help with their second move of the weekend.  For three days we cleaned, unpacked, argued over where to hang each picture, and of course, ate. We drove to New Jersey to buy our first grill---a housewarming gift from my parents---and on my mom’s urging, we picked up shrimp cocktail and strip steaks, for a celebratory dinner that night.

My favorite moments of that weekend were the conversations with my mom, held over cups of coffee each morning. Long before my husband or father roused, we solved the world’s problems and tackled lingering interior decorating questions. Just the two of us. I’ll never forget my mom, sipping coffee in the perfect morning light from our eastern exposures, and telling me definitively: “You’re going to be happy here.”

I might never forget my mom’s confidence on that beautiful morning, but I have pushed it aside, more often than I’d like to admit, over the last couple years. It's particularly poignant to be writing this today, on 9/11 of all days, in this adopted city of mine that I have such a troubled relationship with. New York and I don’t always see eye to eye, to be sure, and I let that conflict overwhelm me at times. But this, I’m realizing, this is why I’m here. To share a piece of my mom and to connect with others, certainly, but just as importantly, to keep myself in check---to remember the wisdom and no-nonsense advice my mom handed out, wanted or not.

As I continue to share my mom’s stories here, I’d also love to hear from you, dear readers. How and why do these relationships, as mothers, daughters or otherwise, connect us as women?  What is your story? And will you share it here? If you think you might, take a look here for submission guidelines. Make sure to include the title of this column, "You Remind Me of Someone," with your story.

Thanks for reading---and I hope, for sharing.

Out of Dreams

By Eliza Deacon You know the moment at dawn when sleep still lies over your body and pushes you back into the night's dreams? As you wake, fragments of memory fade too quickly before you can piece together their story; just as you grasp an image, any meaning attached to it is gone. This happens a lot and you are left wondering at the nighttime world you inhabit, when you are at your most open to it. I don't often remember my dreams, although I know that I do dream and sometimes I wake suddenly in the middle of the night stiff-limbed and cold.

I know that the things I see during the days, the things that impact me enough to remain, will appear eventually, although changed; dreams only need a small element of reality, the rest is as if you are looking through a kaleidoscope, warped and surreal.

Last night, during a waking moment, I found a cobra in our garden, large and black and very angry. He had our littlest cat cornered, had his hood flared and was up in the air by at least a third of his body. I shouted at him in the dark, stamped the ground to distract him from my small cat who was naively trying to pat him with her gentle paw. Help came in the lanky form of William, our Maasai askari, who dispatched him with one blow from his knobkerrie stick. I've lived in Africa for 16 years but some things still scare me; this was a nightmare which I know I will revisit later.

As a child, I used to slip into a half-state between wakefulness and the stage they call REM sleep. Not yet asleep and still very much aware. I'd open my eyes and see things in my room, a figure sitting at the end of my bed would slowly turn and face me. I don't remember him as particularly malevolent, but my 13-year-old self was too terrified to do anything but scream and turn on the light. It's funny what you remember; the man at the end of the bed wore a white hat with a silk band. Other nights I was woken by small winged creatures crawling all over my bed and the more I stared at them, the more they took form and shape. Their wings took on detail and I could see the movements of their legs. I'd hold my nerve for as long as I could before I panicked and turned on the light.

My mother, concerned about the state of my mind, took me to a doctor who dismissed it as an over-active imagination. The bad dreams, for that was what they were referred to---although I wasn't convinced---pursued me for the next 15 or so years. And then they took a hiatus for a very long time.

I went back to England last year, stayed in our family house in my old room, which now, transformed into a smart guest room, bore little resemblance to what it used to be. On the third night, my sister---trying to catch some sleep with a newborn baby at her side---was startled by loud screaming downstairs whilst I, in some in-between place, had found myself facing an army of something, exactly what I don't remember, and literally thrown myself out of bed, cracking my head on the window seat on the way down.

I am capable of good and deep sleep though and here, in our mountain castle, I feel the karma that flows in and out of the many open windows and doors. This is a house where I have known most, if not all, of its inhabitants over the years and that gives it a familiar feeling, as if they are present in the very fibre of it. And our large freestanding bed, with softly draped netting all around, is a place I like to be in often. I like the view it affords, almost 360 degrees out of all its windows. You can see far, like a lookout place, see whatever is approaching from any direction. I go to sleep with that thought in my mind. I light a candle in my dreams.

On Living Close to Family

Without trying to, I’ve lived close to at least one side of my family for my whole life.  When I was choosing colleges, while I contemplated far flung schools with catalog-created fantasies (strolling through crumbling stone archways at Oxford, living in a Gothic Southern mansion at Duke), I ended up at Berkeley, the school where my dad had attended and continued to live less than two hours away from.

This meant that when I got the flu my sophomore spring, my dad hung up the phone after I called and showed up at my doorstep that afternoon, bearing cleaning supplies to take care of my sick-filled apartment and chicken noodle soup to heal by belly and soul.  When I moved to San Francisco after college, my dad was there to take me sailing and out to a nice dinner after I got rejected from job after job.  When an adverse reaction to medication caused me to faint and hit my head, my dad moved in with my roommates and I for three days, playing cards with me and watching my pupils for sign of a brain bleed.  An IKEA couch that needed assembling?  Moving from one apartment to another?  Help was only a phone call away.

I live on the East Coast now, and have been similarly spoiled to be close to my mom’s side of the family, who were born and raised in Brooklyn.  My aunt has become my go-to source for intellectual stimulation and emotional comfort, popping over from suburban Scarsdale to discuss men, politics, entertainment, and life over cheap Mediterranean food.  My mom, who fled the cold of New York for Atlanta, hops on the two-hour flight several times a year, to make sure I have enough culture in my life (Broadway plays are always a must-do on the weekend agenda) and color in my clothing (“it’s so much more flattering than all that black you wear, sweetie!”).

It snuck on me as the unconsidered yet blaringly obvious fact of my move to London:  this is the first time I will be living on my own, an ocean away from my family, my points of stability and unconditional love and comfort and constancy.  I’ll have my boyfriend---my partner in all of this---but the support and interactions that come with a romantic relationship differ so greatly from those offered by family.  Yet it makes me ponder something I’ve never before factored into my thoughts or decision making (sorry, Mom and Dad!):  the value of living close to family.  I’ve chosen the cities in which I’ve lived based on their worldliness, their amazing restaurants, their walkability, their job opportunities.  While the dynamics of family relationships have morphed as I've grown older (although having my dad show up with chicken soup when I'm sick will make my heart tingle even when I'm 50), the relationships themselves have been omnipresent.  Family, so consistently, blatantly there, has unintentionally slipped to the backburner for being there in physical form.

I don’t know where Zack and I are going to move when his graduate program ends in two years.  I don’t know how much at that point family will factor into our decisions after having experienced the other end---the being far after being so close.  Do you try to live near your family?  Or try to live far away, or not factor in it at all?  I’d love to hear your take.

III. normandie

One summer I live in Normandie for a month. Clémence is my host sister, about to start her last year of lycée, French high school. We have just spent the past month at my home in Ohio, and now it is my turn to come with her to France. Clémence and I are the same age and height, and thrown together like this we are fast friends.

She lives with her parents, Pauline and Roger, in the countryside just outside a small town called Bernay. Their home is an old barn they spent years converting into a house. It is beautiful, all dark beams and old stone walls warmed by a fireplace that burns real wood when it gets cold, which is often, even in August.

I am given a small bedroom of my own. It is up the steep, narrow wooden steps to the attic, where the ceiling is slanted and the floors creaky. I push open the window and the view is of misty, grey-green grassy fields, scattered with cows and lined with hedges. I can see the next-door farmer baling hay from where I stand. It doesn’t look too drastically different from rural Ohio, but I find it all endlessly romantic.

When I come back to the Unites States it’s my senior year of high school. For New Year’s, my friend Liam has a party out at his house. I drink too much vodka and spend half an hour speaking French to Liam’s cat. Everyone is impressed by my accent.

Reading the Signs

We got some bad news. It came in Friday at 5 pm, while we were driving through the Florida back roads to buy the couch of my dreams; the couch of my dreams to put in the house of my dreams in Pennsylvania. We were driving the bumpy black pickup truck, swamplands on both sides of us when the call came in. “They are considering another offer.”

The house that nobody wanted had suddenly turned into a bidding war. After several verbal agreements that the seller was signing the contract this week, this news comes in. I was in turn, hurt and confused. I felt cheated. I had finally found this great lover, this perfect lover with ten-foot ceilings and gleaming original hardwood floors, and suddenly, he dumps me---without warning and kind of harshly. I was reeling. It could be the pregnancy hormones, but I cried more over that house than I did over some of my college boyfriends. We were forced to withdraw our offer, we couldn’t afford to get into a bidding war, especially a manipulated one. I suddenly wanted to be Charley, safe at school, playing quietly with his trucks, instead of this bawling grown-up, with no idea where to go.

We turned around from going to get my dream couch. There was no sense if we didn’t have the house to put it in. All week we had been juggling, rushing from chore to chore, and suddenly, it all came crashing down. This is the scary part of moving while pregnant. Selling one house and buying another means everything has to line up perfectly or we are homeless, and it rarely lines up how you want it to. And then, along the way, we got lost. We rumbled through a little town with boarded-up convenience stores and gator jerky stands. Every other building was a church, no bigger than a one-bedroom apartment with a two-story steeple. The road, while paved, was dusty, brown dirt on both sides. I turned to my husband, “Where are we?”

He laughed. “I don’t know, I don’t know what we are going to do.”

“No, I mean, right now, where are we?” I pointed outside.

He did know the answer to that one---luckily he has a better sense of direction than me. We quickly found our way out, to the bustling I-95 highway and back to our beach neighborhood. But we still don’t know the larger answer to that question. My dad believes everything happens for a reason. “It’s a sign.” He tells me as I cry on the phone that we lost the house. A sign for what though, I wonder. A sign we shouldn’t move to such a small town? That we are secretly big city people? Or a sign that a year from now that house will get flooded, or struck by lightning, and we will be glad we never bought it. It seems unlikely. I have trouble reading the signs.

I’m still hurting, days later. My husband wants to show me other listings, and I shake my head no. I’m not ready. I need time to recover before jumping right into another house relationship. And I’m still not convinced I don’t have one last go round of the city in me. I still feel like I don't fit in there, fit in here, fit in anywhere. I think of this song:

“I change shapes just to hide in this place, but I’m still, I’m still an animal . . .”

And I wonder what shape I will be at the end of all this. Part of me wants to give up on this grown-up business of house buying, go back to renting, being a nomad, an animal. How long can you fight settling down with two kids and a dog?

Not what they expected

Standing in the Shampoo aisle I turned to my husband and half-joking asked ‘Which one will make your mother like me?’

My in-laws are perfectly lovely people, who don’t speak a lot of English.  I am a perfectly lovely girl who doesn’t speak Bengali. My in-laws are also coming to visit. For a month.  And while I find them to be perfectly lovely people, I’m still stressing over every little thing: is the apartment clean, do we need new towels, will she like this shampoo, etc. Its silly, and I know that, but I'm still anxious.

You see, I don’t know my in-laws that well.  We communicate in broken sentences and third person translators.  Every morning when we lived in Bangladesh as my husband and I walked out the door to work, my mother-in-law would ask Kamon Achen? How are you?  Every morning I responded Bhalo Achi.  I’m fine.  It’s the response I was taught, and the only one I know.  So every morning, rain or shine, I’m fine.  Besides the lack of communication, prior to last year, I had spent a very small portion of time with my mother and father in-law.  I quite literally met them three days before our wedding.  They spend the majority of their time in Bangladesh and I spend the majority of my time in America, so we’re not exactly crossing paths at the grocery store.

Which brings me to the second issue: as you may have perceived, ours is a cross-cultural relationship.  I love the fact that my husband and I come from different cultures and grew up worlds apart.  I love hearing stories about what it was like growing up in Dhaka, where my husband went to school, what he did for fun, even where he took girls on dates.  But I am acutely aware that my husband’s parents expected him to go away to college and then come back home and marry a nice Deshi girl.  In fact my father-in-law specifically gave my husband three rules when he left home: Don’t do Drugs, Don’t Marry an American girl, and Come Back to Bangladesh.  It wasn’t that he had anything against pale girls like me, he had just never seen it work out.  Every cross-cultural relationship the family had witnessed ended in disaster: people split up, kids were caught in the middle, finances became tangled. They just didn’t think it could work.

Happily, my husband and I are proving to be the exception to the rule. But I still wasn't what they expected.  I know they like me now, I know they see that both my husband and I are happy with each other. Without a doubt, all of the tension and worry is on my end, not theirs. So perhaps I should just chill out and release the anxiety that's knotted in my chest.  But I think its much more likely that I'll buy more towels.

And then, on Friday, we’ll pick Abbu and Mamoni up at the airport, have a nice dinner, and then drive back to the small town we currently call home.  We’ll help them unpack and Mamoni will pass me the gifts she brought me from Bangladesh.  My husband will complain that ever since we got married his parent’s spoil me instead of him.  The knot in my stomach will ease, and that will be the start of things.

My Story: Epilogue

My mother came to visit me in early spring, nearly two years after I was married, just a few months before I finished my last college classes. In the previous four years, I had only scraped by three years’ worth of credits. I knew that the end of my classes would not bring a walk across the stage or a diploma to hang on the wall for me. But I also knew, deep in my heart, that it was the right time. It was time for me to be done with school for the present; to focus my energy on taking care of myself and keeping things running smoothly at home. I had learned that it was possible for me to go to school part-time—but when I did, I found I couldn’t do anything else. Keeping one or two classes each semester was a grueling effort for me, demanding all of my time, attention, and energy, and leaving absolutely nothing left of me when I was finished.

It had been a difficult decision to make, but the raw grief that I had felt two years before, when I first realized that graduation might not be in the cards for me, had mostly dissipated. I was tired now, worn down by the endless barrage of health problems and the pressure to keep up with what should have been a light load. I was ready to be done, ready to have the energy to explore other parts of myself again.

That week, as my mother and I sat together at my kitchen table, she asked me if I felt like I had had a “good college experience.”

The question took me by surprise. I had certainly not had a typical college experience; after my first few semesters, I’d had to pull more and more away from the rigor of the academic environment I loved. By necessity, I’d had to learn to find my own identity in something other than the world of scholarship. I’d spent the past two years discovering how much there was to love in my newfound role as a homemaker; I’d learned to take satisfaction in keeping a house of order, and to approach a new recipe with the same zeal I’d previously felt for literary criticism.

I sat at the table, the silver afternoon light of late March diffusing through the windows, and thought about it.

“Yes,” I said finally. “I have.”

Then I added that focus of the last two years had certainly not been a quintessential college experience, but that they had still been good. Very good, in fact.

“I feel… fulfilled,” I said, realizing as I said it that it was true.

Somehow, in the slow passing of days and weeks and years, fulfillment had crept into my heart. I realized, sitting there at the kitchen table, that I was content—that even though the path my life had taken was so different than the one I had expected, I was still happy. My days felt full of beauty; I had learned that even something as simple as loading the dishwasher could feel meditative, fulfilling, if I only opened my eyes.

So yes, I thought. Typical or not, my college experience has been a good one.

.   .   .   .   .

It’s been more than two years since that conversation with my mom. Like everyone, my life is filled with ups and downs, and I still have far too many moments of doubt and insecurity. And yet, the contentment remains. The fulfillment remains. I have come to love this life I’m living, even if it’s not the one I had planned for myself. It’s a continual process, a journey of discovery and delight.

And when I look back on it, even with all the bumps, I can’t deny:

I’m glad to have had the ride.

On Time

Since we’ve made the decision to move, everything seems to be moving at a quicker pace. Actually, it could have started moving at a quicker pace when I found out I was pregnant for the second time; an allusion to what will come of two children underfoot. Like any good holiday weekend, we are spending time with family. Yesterday, as the grill was smoking, and music was playing (Nina Simone) my dad was in the process of fixing the old screen door. Charley loves my dad, his Pop-Pop, and was right there with him, with his own kiddie toolbox, a weathered paint-chipped yellow tackle-box my dad had given him. He is barely as tall as Pop-Pop’s knee, and took out his little plastic pliers, to match my dad’s real metal ones, to twist the door frame. There was much grunting and production involved. And I stood just inside the porch watching them thinking, These days are numbered, and it almost made me cry. Something about being a parent makes you see time more clearly, see that it will pass, that it is a constant. This is a comfort for stressful periods, when you think you can’t make it any further, and a sadness for happy periods, when you wish the night would never end. It’s striking me much more with this second pregnancy. I see my husband and our life together stretching infinitely ahead of us. We have so many memories yet to make, traditions to start. I want to make renting a beach house every summer a tradition, we’ve only talked about it for several years! We have our ritual of only $20 gifts for each other at Christmas, a chance to be creative and thrifty. And I see my past with my family, all the memories already made, history that won’t be forgotten. So many family vacations and apple picking trips, beach days, and snow days, and all the days in between. I am standing in the middle wondering, How did I get here?

There is truth to that Talking Heads song:

You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? 

But perhaps I am feeling overly nostalgic because my brother, my LITTLE brother will soon graduate college, and when we visited a quaint Pennsylvania college the other weekend, and had lunch at a hipster café, I felt old. More than the extra pregnancy weight and the tiredness of chasing a toddler, I looked at the young college girls, so oblivious to anything else but themselves, and thought ‘I don’t see myself there anymore’. They were giggling, wearing their sweatpants to breakfast just rolling out of bed at 11 am, ordering their omelets with only egg whites, and nobody looked twice at my toddler running around.

I am scared of the day when weddings and births turn into funerals, and wonder when that day will come. When it does, there will be an irreplaceable chasm that opens up. I know there will be comfort in my own family, my roots I am just starting to set down. But I will wonder how I made it that far, and how I will carry on.

II. paris

Leah and I have a week off from our classes at the American College Program of Provence, and we have met my friend Will in Paris. It is night, the October streets are full of people, and after drinks in the Latin Quarter we are going to see the Eiffel Tower. The métro is still running, shuffling back and forth across the City of Light those accidental Parisian revelers who are not even aware that it is Halloween, something of a peculiarity to non-Americans. I haven't been trick-or-treating since I was a kid, and don't particularly like the drunk college Halloween parties that have recently marked the holiday, but for some reason I miss just having the possibility of disguising myself this year.

The tower is still blocked from us by the tawny apartment buildings, and Leah turns to me as we prepare to cross one last street before our view is clear. She has never seen the Eiffel Tower before, never even been to Paris, and the excitement reflects in her eyes like the twinkling, spinning lights that are illuminating the city. As someone who tends to keep something of a perpetually calm exterior, I like how openly excited she gets about these kinds of things.

We are about to take our first step onto the empty road when a Frenchman on rollerblades zooms in front of me from the right. And then another, and another. Soon there is a whole crowd of them whizzing by under the golden light of the street lamps, some wearing spandex shorts, others in helmets, one is still in a suit and clutching his briefcase from work just a handful of hours before. And then there are costumes, too, lots of them for the holiday. I catch sight of a man dressed like a sandwich, and the slices of cardboard bread are so wonderfully out-of-nowhere and unexpected that I feel a pang for back home. Everyone dresses up there.

The whooshing sound of plastic wheels on cool pavement dies away as the last of the rollerbladers continue into obscurity down the street. We can finally cross, and do. We drink Heinekens by the tower---just as tall as Leah thought it would be, and glittering---and Will talks about American things in his loud, carrying voice. I find myself thinking fondly about that man dressed as a sandwich. Then we go home. Back to the hostel.

Photo by Melissa Delzio on Flickr, Creative Commons License

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Rebecca D. Martin is an essayist and book reviewer in Southwest Virginia. She's also a wife and a mother, a reluctant meal planner, a relaxed home keeper, and an obsessively avid reader. Her work has been published in The Other Journal, Kinfolk Magazine, and The Lamppost, and she is a staff writer for The Curator. She writes about books and domestic culture at www.rebarit.blogspot.com. When longtime friend and fellow writer Carrie Allen Tipton and I get together to talk books, especially books with nuanced considerations of family and homemaking, we can’t say enough. So here are in-depth reviews of just two books that are on our shelves lately. We hope you enjoy them!

Rebecca D. Martin Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Our bags were packed for vacation. Our small family prepared to set adrift and let the sand and waves and salted air breathe a simpler, richer life into us. I zipped the final duffle bag, sliding Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea into the top.

Morrow Lindbergh knew what we were after: the “spontaneity of now; the vividness of here” that would strengthen our small family. In this thin volume, organized by meditations on a handful of seashells (literal gifts from the sea), Morrow Lindbergh’s connections flow from an interesting 1950’s cultural critique to early Feminist philosophy to her own struggle maintaining a balanced, introspective life while housekeeping and caring for a family of seven. I hoped her thoughts about home and family, culture and womanhood, work and writing, nature and the sea would set my own thoughts on a good course for our beach week.

I also approached Morrow Lindbergh with some reservation. Here was a complex woman. She lost her first child in a horrific kidnapping and murder. She married early Feminist thought with troublingly hardlined notions of feminine identity. Her husband was a mid-Twentieth Century aviation icon who held racist ideals disturbingly in line with the Nazis. In later life, both Anne and Charles admirably championed environmental protection and preservation. She learned to fly planes when other women merely stayed at home. She recognized staying at home to raise children as a choice, a noble one. This was a woman who had things to say. But did I want to hear them?

I discovered I did. One of the significant and unexpected gifts I gleaned from this book was a sort of readerly humility, a willingness to keep listening to the end, whatever my responses page by page. And in the end, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was a person I genuinely liked, whether or not our worldviews aligned.

There are, indeed, many treasures to be found between the covers of this book. At times, Morrow Lindbergh’s prose grows pedantic, but in other moments it shimmers with a lovely, rhythmic give-and-take, and leaves the reader with gems, most notably her thoughts on simplification: “Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distractions.” Or, “What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it – like a secret vice!” Or, prescient of our current information age’s pitfalls (and she didn’t even have a Facebook account!):

“We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The inter-relatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold.”

There is a kindred understanding here. I feel challenged to return home to our normal-paced autumn life and consider how I might simplify (a slimmer Facebook newsfeed, for a start) – and how I might love my family better in the process. Yes, I’m glad Gift from the Sea made its way into my duffle bag, and I’m glad I could overcome some of my hastier judgments in order to glean some of Morrow Lindbergh’s sea gift insights for myself.

Carrie Allen Tipton

A Southerly Course: Recipes and Stories from Close to Home by Martha Hall Foose

Someone else will have to review this lovely book as a cook. I am reviewing it as a homesick southerner. Martha Hall Foose’s recipes and stories emerge from her deep love of southern culture, a sentiment which I share and which remains a source of puzzlement to both of us.

In the introduction, she muses over why southern foodways exert such a hold on her, profoundly realizing that “it is perhaps because we Southerners are homesick for the place in which we still live.” Her poignant longing for the very earth on which she stands connects with my own desire to stand there once again. Like Foose, I was raised in Mississippi; like her, I left to learn of the wider world; unlike her, I return now only in my mind and twice a year for holidays. But her book has helped me undo my own exile this summer, to come back home again.

I first came to know Martha Hall Foose’s work at a cold Christmastime, the right time to snuggle under a quilt made by my great-grandmother in Arkansas in 1936 and read Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook. This, her first book, hooked me with its ingenious cocktail of stories, recipes, tidbits of culinary advice, photos, and mini-essays. I wasn’t the only one; it won the 2009 James Beard Award. The writing was elegant and funny and, thank heaven, deeply unconcerned with speed, ease, or health. The recipes called for mayonnaise and deep fryers, and celebrated regular afternoon libations.

In A Southerly Course, published in 2011, Foose expanded on this successful formula. Marked by her blend of formality and informality, its dishes run the sociological spectrum from congealed salads for bridal luncheons to crawfish bread for tailgating. Its arrangement in five sections, corresponding to the courses of a proper dinner, emphasizes her formal training at the French pastry school École Lenôtre. Ingredients such as mirlitons, sweet potatoes, and crawfish highlight her fusion of indigenous southern staples with highfalutin’ techniques. Unconcerned with political correctness, the author draws heavily on the hunting culture of the Mississippi Delta, her childhood and now adult home. She speaks of a world of monogrammed serving utensils and ladies’ luncheon clubs.

In her recipe for Custard Pie, dedicated to fellow Mississippian Eudora Welty, Foose said that Welty helped teach her that “you don’t have to leave the place that you love and know, that it is not a prerequisite that to understand home you must exile yourself to gain perspective.” For me, leaving birthed fresh perspective on the traditions, people, landscape, and culture that I grew up with a few states east of Texas, where I currently live—and which is most definitely not the South.

A Southerly Course reminds me that though I may live in exile, there are many paths back, through word, image, palate, and most especially, through memory. And if I keep flipping through this book long enough, I might just try my hand at the crabmeat casserolettes. At least I can eat well while I long for home.