Peppery Preparations

Gray skies, snowflakes, red berries, the vague outline of trees, the cold dregs of coffee, the scent of fir. Can you tell I'm mixed up about how I feel? December is at once depressing and delightful, dark and twinkling, exhausting and joyful. To sum it up, last night I had a dream where a talking snake said: "we have to search for the sparkly places."

Auspicious? Perhaps.

My passport is now in the hands of the Indian and Thai consulates (fingers crossed that I spelled my name right). In the meantime I try to collect the things I need for my trip; read strange stories about Ms Yingluck and the Thai government, do the laundry, buy Christmas presents, watch the snow fall, make onion soup.

Saffron & Onion Jam

My back is throbbing from a cortisone shot at Quincy hospital yesterday, where afterwards, sitting in a wheelchair eating Lorna Doone shortbread cookies and sipping cranberry juice, I listened to a nurse give the office lunch order for Chinese food over the phone, at the end of which she was required to give the delivery address: "Quincy Medical Center, fourth floor, wing C, Pain Clinic," but the person on the other end of the line, the Chinese take-out phone person I suppose, couldn't understand what she was saying so the nurse kept repeating "Pain clinic. PAIN clinic. PAIN. No, no, PAIN. As in, P-A-I-N." 

Sweet Fennel Seed

A lot has changed in the past month. The light has changed, and darkened. Now when I come home at six o'clock I find that the orange from the sky has gone, and the landscape looks like she's been dipped in blue ink. I love these changes, as everything begins to smell different, and the menus shift to autumnal flavors, and the sound of Red Sox sports-casters rattle noisily from car windows.

Curry Love

Trying to consider the line of a poem that caught in my throat at my brother Ian's wedding last weekend. I'm usually pretty good at speaking in front of people, loving the spotlight just for a moment, my voice a calm and steady stream, but this time I got caught on a line and couldn't go on, tears streaming down my cheeks while all the guests sat and watched and the sun blared, and the blue sky stared me down with a blank blue stare. "For better, for worse, splicing spirit-bodies to each other in the daily / Communion of light..."

Even now I'm having a bit of trouble keeping it together here on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I like to think of this line from Eamon Grennan's poem as a nod to the beauty of a good marriage, a wedding of two people whose "spirit-bodies" are suddenly realized. A wedding ceremony offers us the chance to join in this literal "splicing [of] spirit -bodies" and we are all there to share in the joy of that joining.

And even though the wedding last weekend on the coast of Maine was not religious, there was indeed this "Communion of light" that we all drank—it glimmered off the surface of the Atlantic, it sank into the pores of our skin, it lapped up against the rocks and the grasses and the fir trees. Though the toasts are all finished, the tent is collapsed and the chairs folded, I'd still like to raise one last glass of sunlight to my brother Ian and his wife Amanda: may your love be a kind of walk on water.

Dizzy Lemongrass

It's the last day of August. This summer was like a bright, strange dream. The last thing I remember I was swimming in the Atlantic ocean in my underwear on July 4th. Then everything went into super-speed-surreal mode, like a ferris wheel of colors, days, moments—here they all are, views of the landscape in the late afternoon light, of treetops and little houses and the blur of fairgrounds down below and then of the bored operator's face as he stares at the gears in the giant turning wheel, the blinking lights of the fried dough stand like a halo around him. I close my eyes and feel dizzy, I open them and am fed with light.

It's been a vibrant summer, and I'm celebrating it tonight by drinking a martini out of my home-made lemongrass straw. I'll tell you right now it doesn't work too well, but it tastes nice. What better way to spend a Saturday night?

Lily Children

My days open and close like the lilies. Each day another bloom, a new color, a fresh try. The flowers are named daylilies because they only bloom for one day, reminding us, I suppose, to live in the moment. But right now the lilies are in full force, showing their faces for us in every shade of orange, red and yellow. They demand my attention, they holler at me in five-petalled flower voices. The colors reflect the bright pulse of sunlight, that bee-buzzing, cricket-singing thrum of early August.

My dad hybridizes daylilies at our home in Maine. Every year he must plow new land to plant more of his daylily offspring, and we wait for even another year to see what new colors, heights, and ruffles emerge. During a recent visit to see my folks up in Maine, I decided I wanted to try to experience dad's lilies in a new way—that is, to eat them.

The Basil Clan

This morning the sounds of summer play like a modern concert: the tinkling electronic whir of a neighbor's air conditioner, the high-pitched squeal and clank of a city garbage truck, and in between, the loud caw of crows, the low buzz of cicadas, the throaty groan of a distant lawn mower. It's a beautiful, if dissonant concert.

I've been feeling homesick today, and I don't really know why. I'm not technically far from home, and even my oldest brother, who lives on the opposite side of the planet, is only a Skype call away. But there is a spaciousness to the days of mid-summer that makes me a bit sad, as though everyone is far away doing their own thing: busy mowing the lawn or splashing in the waves of some fine beach. Being busy is distracting, and I realize when I have a second to stop and breathe, I miss my family.

Ah, Little Rose

I betrayed the roses I was trying to honor. I boiled them too long in syrup and ended up with a caramelized, sticky rose petal mess. After a lovely fourth of July on a secluded beach collecting Rosa rugosa petals in between swimming in the ice-cold North Atlantic and lying on the beach blanket squinting at the pages of my book, I tried to make rose petal jam. I collected a lot of petals. I used the edge of my shirt pulled up to form a basket and then filled the empty Tupperware containers from our picnic with the cool, silky petals. Then I brought them home and it all went downhill. When I combined them with sugar, water and heat the beautiful petals began turning into syrup, then jam, then all of a sudden they turned into a candy as stiff and inedible as tire rubber.

These failures happen in the kitchen - perhaps more frequently than I'd care to admit - but a failure with hand-picked rose petals is particularly heartbreaking. I stood over my pot of browning petals and wanted to crumple. But only for a little while until I decided to HELL with rose petal jam I'm going to make a wild strawberry tart. So I did, and it was delicious, but my heart still ached for those petals.

Vanilla Cured

I don't know what happened to June, but I think I ate it. It was full of bright green flavors, crisp days filled with sunlight, evenings that were as sweet and fragrant as a mountain primrose. It was strawberry rhubarb pie and baby arugula and French radishes and citrusy spruce tips. June was truly tangy and sweet and tart. Now that it's July we can safely say it's "Grill O'clock." Gone are the tender and sweet moments of early summer replaced by the flavor-packed, juicy and char-grilled days of July.

Silver Thread Spruce

It's a strange sensation driving over land that contains precious metals and semi-precious stones. Mountains dug and scraped and toppled and rocks chiseled and sorted and turned over and over to find what is valuable to us, what has use, what will hammer smooth or hold fast. Or even beyond any practical use, what will give us pleasure, what will delight us by virtue of its color, its shadowy gleam, its quiet sparkle-song.