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Bricks in a Curve, Tamarind, and a Velveteen Couch

By

Dear—

I woke early this morning, to welcome a mason who is taking apart (and hopefully putting back together) my front stair, which is a lovely but complicated brick arrangement with a slate top that is so heavy it took three men to lift it. As you might imagine, the pounding I am just now listening to is not quite conducive to writing to you.

But this week I am trying to remember my own advice about writing with the ingredients at hand. A crumbling step, new bricks stacked in a curve waiting to be placed and mortared, strawberry plants I tried to keep from underfoot (but am not confident will survive the day’s work), and a life that feels like it has no space: these are what I have at hand.

Last night I sat right where I am sitting now, on the muted brass-colored velveteen couch, which conjures up wishes about having my own velveteen rabbit worn with love, but the couch is not all too comfortable. My older daughter wrote a poem about it, in fact, that begins “I love my couch! It’s like a wall.”

Sitting here with my younger daughter last night, on the velveteen couch, we had just listened to a draft podcast of my couch-poem daughter talking to the people at WNDYR about work and legacies and so forth. We were mildly amused that a young woman who illustrated a bedrock story of women and freedom had told the interviewers she wanted to leave the next generation with these skills: cooking and sewing. You could almost, almost hear the interviewer fall off her chair. This was not an answer anyone probably expected from a “Gen Z guest.”

I have to admit I hadn’t expected that answer either, Dear. And I also thought all the podcast listeners would suspect I had spent my days simply schooling my daughters in domesticity. How quaint, I could just hear them thinking, in a world where legacy is supposed to be about saving the world with the next big tech solution.

Outside, the pounding has tuned itself to a more fine sound of chiseling, though I’ll tell you it isn’t any less distracting, as it goes. Saving a woman’s step is no easy job. And it’s not a quiet endeavor, either.

On the wood and glass table beside me is my morning tea. A ceylon from Sri Lanka that is so strong I can’t drink it after noontime. I learned this the hard way several nights ago, as I lay awake into the wee hours, wondering what my legacy would be. I told someone recently, and maybe this will surprise you, that even though I have “tech skills” I could put to use for financial gain, I just really want to cook for the people I love and bring beautiful work to light. That is all.

Before I sat on the couch with my younger daughter last night, I had cooked an evening meal of either Lebanese or Persian or Moroccan lentils and rice (we aren’t sure, as the cookbook is a fusion of the three). I am embarking on something I’m calling Morocco in May, and food is one of the centers of the experience. The rice was actually supposed to be bulgar, but I had none on hand. And, besides, my older daughter has recently decided to try going wheat-free. The recipe called for three red onions that I later decided must have been for sweetness. I had used up my last red onion the previous night, so two shallots and a yellow onion had to stand in. Next time, if red onions are scarce, I’ll add a half teaspoon of sugar to strike a better balance. I did happen to have tamarind paste in a jar. Tamarind, I rediscovered, is smoky sour (thus the need for a balancing sweetness). Since I actually had a bit of this molasses-black substance, I used it instead of lemon, which was the alternative for a kitchen that might not have a legacy of spices and colorful ingredients from around the world.

I’ve been thinking that whenever I have traveled, there are two things I look for: beautiful buildings and beautiful food. My younger daughter looks for beautiful clothing. She has always had a fascination with designing it and has recently taken to teaching herself to sew lavish or eclectic creations using fabrics and notions she gathers from the most surprising places. Etsy is her favorite haunt. As is the old trunk up in the attic. Poshmark and Depop are a close third. One day, for a Gish challenge, she made a pair of patchwork overalls from a dress I wore years and years ago, plus pieces of old jeans, and antique lace that was my grandmother’s. My girl looks lovely in the self-fashioned outfit. It’s adorable and totally unique.

At the door, there has just been knocking. The men outside want to power up a machine they are using to cut the bricks. As I told you, fixing a woman’s step is no easy job. Mine? Even less so. The stair height, if it is to fit with the other two, requires one line of bricks to be cut in half. Who knew that brick-cutting was a thing? I did not.

My ceylon is half gone now. The rest is in need of reheating. A lone cardamom waits at the bottom of the teacup. Did you know you can use a cardamom several times over and it will still give quite the burst of flavor and fragrance to your tea? It will.

“As my legacy, I would give people communication and mediation skills,” says my younger daughter. “Empathy, too.” She and I then remember the first (and only, to date) interview she had with a woman who did not seem to think she’d be capable of handling a big crowd of rowdy kids at a local theater group. “You’re quiet and gentle. I think she underestimated you,” I say. “I think she underestimated what kids need,” my daughter returns. Then she shares a story of being with a child who told her some secret sadness on the side, at the end of a busy day at the school where she once volunteered. At some point, amidst all this talk of skills and interviews and legacy, my daughter tells me, “I loved that food tonight, Mommy.”

I loved it too. The depth and heart of it. The mix of flavors. The gentle collision of history with my unique kitchen. The way it has given my daughter something she wants to bring to this velveteen couch.

Outside, the pounding has stopped. There’s a knock at the door. Rain has begun to fall. I can see that the step is put together afresh, but now it is wrapped in plastic. So I cannot, as yet, see the total result.

And now I am thinking of you, Dear—. I don’t know what you need, but if I could, I would cook and sew it for you. If you needed me to build you a stair, I might need to learn a new trick or two. A curve of bricks, the depth of tamarind, a little velveteen, I would use whatever I could to give you space for your sadness or your joy. And remember, when you’re ready, I’ve got cardamom for you, too.

As always,

L.L.

Of Sourdough Tears, a Desert Driveway, and the Taste of Paper

By

Dear—

This morning I cried over sourdough.

Well, not sourdough exactly. But the smooth white slightly-waxy bag it came in, stamped with LMNOP Bakery in faded Baskerville letters on the front. I’d gone—curbside pickup style—to Fable Farms, for sweet corn and dark cherries and little deep yellow squashes that look like tiny flying saucers. I’d gone for olive oil, rosemary infused, which they ended up not having, so I went away with plain olive oil.

The words plain and olive oil really don’t belong in the same sentence. Olive oil itself is infused with tenacious fruiting from tenacious trees, harvested with attentiveness and, sometimes, crushed with stone that is generations old. I love olive oil almost enough to cry at the taste of it.

Eating sourdough with olive oil, especially LMNOP Bakery’s sourdough, could revive you from a life of flatness where you feel like that smooth white bag that brought me to tears just an hour ago. I had asked for two loaves this time, knowing what I was happily in for, and I had gotten the pair. Thankfully they were not out of it.

At the moment, I am drinking Buddha’s blend tea, infused with mullein I’d let grow in my driveway. I have not really gone anywhere since March, so my driveway thinks it is not a driveway anymore, but perhaps rather a garden for wild things. In fact, the other day I heard the woman next door, the one who always wears some variation of tiara in her hair, even large tiaras that look like they belong on a bride…I heard her walking by with her little blond son, and she said to him in a conspiratorial tone, “This is where the wild things grow.”

I was almost sad to harvest the mullein, but my tea and my body needed it. Mullein is good for bronchial suffering.

When 2020 began, full of hope, I did not know I would need mullein more than once. In March, when I suffered what may or may not have been The Virus that flattens us to the floor, I had none, because I’d neglected to harvest it last summer, thinking it just a weed that made my property look vaguely Southwestern, with its rosette softness that reminds me of the patterns of succulents and the single, tall, very tall cylinder of lemon flowers it eventually reaches to the sky in a way that says this is all I’ve got, in a hard parched place, but I’m making it reach and blossom in any case.

On Friday, I saw someone’s wish on Instagram. She was feeling flattened, all insular and empty, and wanting that feeling to fold itself over into something more like inspiration. This caused me to ponder.

I will not recount to you my losses since the beginning of this year. You’ve had enough of thinking about the suffering of the world. Plus, you’ve had your own. This is part of why you (and I) feel flattened.

When I think of flatness, I think of the two dimensions of A Wrinkle in Time, in which, at one point they accidentally get propelled to a place where they cannot expand, not even a little. It’s painful. Only a fast escape, a shift in magic to a different dimension, allows them to once again breathe, to feel whole and full and rounded with life, though their dark journey is not nearly over.

After I folded the LMNOP Bakery bag into a perfect rectangle I could hold and easily smooth between my hands, I remembered the workshop I’ve picked up and put down creating for the last six years. Day 1 is about breathing and holding. I decided to try it myself, not for the purpose of writing anything, but simply to try it, and because I wasn’t ready to discard the sourdough paper bag.

This was when it happened.

I closed my eyes and took in the fragrance of fresh-bakedness. I ran my fingers over the paper and felt its crinkles here and there. I heard the sound of softness, rustling. And my grandmother came to mind. Her land, ten acres of corn and dark cherries and flowers growing wild. No olive trees, but there were mulberries. And there was tenacity. And the attentiveness of love. The humid air, the way I could almost taste the paper of the patterns she cut with care and pinned and fashioned into dresses for her and for me.

It has been a long time since I’ve written to you here. I noted that the last entry was in the season of wineberries, which I now see was in July, from a year that feels like it was surely seated in another world, though it was only twelve months ago, right here on Earth, and on this very porch where I am yet again sitting with my feet resting against the dark brown Adirondack chair. I was drinking jasmine tea. Today, it’s peach-fragrant white and green.

Sometimes, Dear–, it takes many months to unfold, to find, again, our fullness. But sometimes, if we close our eyes and breathe, and hold, it takes just a moment for the taste of paper to tesser us to memory. And that opens us back up to reaching with our words.

So that is what I wish for you today. The taste of paper. Or dark cherries. Or sweet corn. The startling moment when something old unfolds—into something newly-born.

As always,

L.L.

Pumpkin Blooms, The Leaf on the Glass, and the Most Delightful Toy Store

By

Dear—,

I am writing to you again from the retreat center perched on the edge of the Hudson River. On the glass, between me and the empty courtyard, is a single leaf that is tipping and tilting in the wind. I’m not sure how it’s attached there. Possibly by the slenderest thread of an industrious spider who wanted a little red roof above her spinning.

From where I sit, I cannot see the river. The river which, if I had to choose something to signify the most contented pulse of my life, is running on under a silver sky, past towns and bridges, out, eventually, past New York City, and to the Atlantic.

Beside me, there are the funniest little pumpkin-gourds, made of paper, I think, sporting autumn blooms—silk nasturtium, eucalyptus, golden rod, and something that resembles a Gerber daisy.

Do you ever feel tired, Dear—? As if you are that leaf, red with hope, but only attached to the glass by the slenderest thread? Sometimes, these days, this is how I feel.

Today, I saw a quote from Henry David Thoreau, from Walden Pond. “I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side,” said he. And I asked myself, what is it my feet wear a path to that is as life-giving as that pond? I am not sure.

Last week, I made my way downtown with my girls and we had tea at a little place we’d never been to before. Tea and scones. The scones were sugared, the big crystally kind of sugar, and very buttery. One had blueberries. Another had pumpkin seeds, dried cranberries, and the tiniest chocolate chips. There was a woman at a circular table, meeting with artists and writers, the whole time we were there. I was happy it was she who was meeting with artists and writers, not me. I was happy to simply be drinking Paris tea, which I’d taught the barista to decaf (just dip the bag in for 30 seconds, discard the water, then steep for the requisite five). I was happy to be with my girls.

When we left the tea place, I was ready to simply go home, but my 19-year-old begged: “Let’s take a walk.”

Always, these days, I have too many cares. I told her no. But she persisted. “Okay, just to the end of the block,” I said.

We passed a plumbing store. All the fanciest tubs and sinks and showerheads. Beautiful. But somehow, these too just made me tired, thinking on renovations and change. A few stores down and my girl suddenly exclaimed, “A toy store!”

And so it was.

Inside were the most beautiful toys I have ever seen. Wooden toys. Colorful puzzles. A unicorn notebook (which I went back and bought a few days later). My girl bought herself a stuffed animal. Frivolous? It was so soft. So needless. We took the newly-named “Rosie” home.

I ask myself, what is it, besides my many cares, that I want my feet to wear a path to each day, each week, each year? I don’t have answers. But I am thinking about the most delightful toy store, about the river, about my girls, the leaf on the glass, and the pumpkin blooms. And I am wishing, for you, Dear—something delightful today. And answers if you need them. Or, just a question to begin you on your way.

As always,

L.L.