You can tell I’m in a cooking rut if you visit my kitchen at 5pm on any given weekday and find us all dining on salami and apples, a handful of walnuts straight from the bag. It’s my unofficial back-up meal, swooping in to save the eve for my other unofficial back-up meal (breakfast for
If we’re paying attention long enough, and if our ears are bent low enough, it’s easy to find the magic in summer. The smallest caterpillar gliding effortlessly on the shivering edge of a paper thin leaf. The cool shock of a juicy watermelon, pink swimming down your chin, your elbows, a seed to spit into
The dog days are here. Yesterday, I passed a trio of towheads sitting cross-legged on a grassy front lawn, electric blue popsicles dripping down their chin, elbows, knees. Bikes piled haphazardly in the driveway, garden sprinkler a flurry.
We’re a snackin’ family, is all. Pre-parenthood, my visions of mealtime were saccharine at best. Small heads gathered around a table, small hands folded in prayer. Three courses at the ready, three times daily. We’d pass bread. We’d bless the cook. It is this, on rare occasions, but mostly it is not. Mostly it is
Hair, of all things. I’ve never been blessed with a sense of consistency in the beauty department. As a child, my own grandmother often failed to identify me in family photos due to a near-constant rotation of (admittedly terrible) hair choices: the leave-in Perm, the impromptu bangs, the great Sun-In overdose of 1994.
This week, the bulk of my daily conversations with friends, family, neighbors have been swollen with current events. We circle around kitchen tables and stretch our own small theories, thin solutions, blistered understanding. We clash. We talk ourselves tired. After a long while, everyone agrees to one thing and one thing alone: It’s complicated, but
Ours was a week that was both glorious and terrible. Bikes and bistros, disagreements and diaper rash. For every moment of beauty, it seemed, a futile moment trailed. Laughter around a bonfire, the bite of a mosquito. Tortoise hunts, a bloody fall on the rocks. Trust gained, trust lost. Small and ill-timed furies shouldered until
Early this week, in a Chicago hotel room, I order French toast for eating in bed. Two rarities: sugar and silence. I’m punchy with anticipation. But then it arrives, and the plate is hard to balance on my legs, keeps tipping askew, the knife in need of a stable surface for cutting. I move to