it shocks us every time we are out. at the grocery store, at a department store or boutique, at a restaurant. the prices!
though we love a wonderful epicurean experience just like the next person, we rarely have them out in cafes or eateries. the cost of eating out and a generous tip equals quite a few groceries for us. so instead, we end up creating our own dining experiences – at our kitchen table or in the sunroom under happy lights or out on the deck or somewhere else at our pop-up table and stools. we eat as healthy as we can and enjoy a glass of wine with dinner when we can. nothing fancy.
because we believe it’s not really about the food. it’s about being together.
i remember when we were on the whole30 diet. we’d pass a tray full of scrumptious brownies and be taunted by their deliciousness. ultimately – because brownies are not on the whole30 – we’d walk on. and the thing we’d remember is that the brownie experience would have only been about five minutes of food bliss.
in paris – with fabulous cuisine and bistros at every turn – we picnicked at parks and on cathedral steps with baguettes and cheese, olives and tiny salads, glasses of wine. neither of us felt gypped. instead, it was an experience rich with blissful moments, immersed in the city.
and so it’s a little bit like that with eating out for us.
we either need to get the side salad and bread or we just need to find our food bliss somewhere else.
“…eat bread and understand comfort….” (mary oliver – to begin with, the sweet grass)
flannel is like that. flannel shirts, flannel sheets, flannel pjs. the touch of flannel on our skin and we become swaddled babies, small children held in the arms of a loved one, cozied, reassured, comforted.
though there are expensive flannel sheets ‘out there,’ our flannel sheets are from target. two sets of them now. both soothing, serene, bread-like.
we sat in paris – on park benches, cathedral steps, in the grass – with baguettes and cheese, bottles of wine, olives. when i think of paris now, i think of this…comfort – sinking in to the place, like sinking in to flannel sheets on a cold winter’s night, gordon lightfoot’s webs of snow drifting outside our window. i wonder how we could have had a better time – i know…the butter, the starred eateries, the crepes, the cuisine. but we are flannel people, i suppose, and we learned – for us – the way to really feel paris was to sit on its steps, in its parks, in the grass. it was to shop its markets, its boulangeries, its tiny groceries. it was to simplify and to feel the flannel.
because we ate bread and understood.
“…i have become older and, cherishing what i have learned, i have become younger….” (mary oliver)
each time we stood in line at the little grocery in paris, we had a kinder bueno bar in our hands. we also had a baguette and camembert and a container of caprese salad and a bottle of wine. sometimes we had a fruit tart. just one.
i didn’t know it then, but the bueno bar is related to ferrero rocher which is related to tic-tacs. and so, in a roundabout way, we were honoring my sweet momma’s passion for tic-tacs. the ferrero group, clearly brilliant sweet-tooth satisfiers.
momma always had tic-tacs in her purse, in the car, in the cabinet in her kitchen. she never bought just one container, like when you are standing in line at target and see them and suddenly think of purchasing a tiny plastic box with the hinged flip-top. she bought multiples, all shrink-wrapped together, and shared them with everyone.
in recent days i decided to go through and reorganize the pantry in our kitchen. our kitchen, like our house, is old, so the pantry is not a walk-in, plastic-wrapped-wire-shelved cavern of space. there is a limit to this miniature cave of goodness, so one must plan and shop accordingly. we set up some metal shelves in the laundry room downstairs to hold rarely-used appliances, which gave us the illusion of more space in the kitchen. anyway….i was pulling everything out of the cabinet to restructure things.
diving into the recesses of the pantry, there it was, kind of hidden. a tiny plastic box of unopened tic-tacs. my momma was instantly there with me.
it is likely that this box came to wisconsin in a care package, for i cannot remember ever buying tic-tacs myself. we all had a never-ending supplier in my sweet momma, who eagerly gave them out “for your purse”, “for your pocket”, “for your backpack”, “for in the car”. and along with kraft macaroni and cheese, ramen noodles, andes candies, poptarts, bags of peanut m&m’s, twizzlers, interesting news articles she cut out, coupons she painstakingly clipped just-for-you, she would tuck tic-tacs, her favorite freshmints. when the boxes would arrive, you knew what was in them. some things are just steady and predictable. some things you just know.
it was a good time for my momma to be standing with me in the kitchen. it’s been a helluva couple years for us, for so many of us. last night, in the middle of the night, sharing a banana, we talked again about these last two years. in some strange way things feel both foggily distant and freshly raw. but they are no less astonishing, no less confusing, no less painful. it is a grand mix – a caldron of emotions.
i spoke aloud to my mom in the kitchen. i told her in bits and spurts – though i’m certain she already knew – about all that had happened in the last years. i told her about how i had just alphabetized the spice cabinet, which made her slightly gleeful. i told her thank-you for all the care packages, all the letters, all the ramen and the mac-and-cheese and the clippings and coupons and m&ms and twizzlers and the unwavering belief, the unconditional love. i told her i was sorry for the times, like everyone, i got too busy. i asked her to hug my dad. i told her i missed her.
and i saved the tiny box of tic-tacs. not to eat them. they are on the shelf in the pantry. steady and predictable.
you know you have a nutella-reputation when more than one person sends you nutella in the mail, via ups, on the fedex truck, in packages at your front door. i went a little crazy when i discovered it. it had been around; i was not an early adopter, but when i fell, i fell fast.
johnathon and i walked around amsterdam, eating, sipping espresso, laughing. when we came upon him, i could not help myself. i don’t usually do this with strangers, but i kissed him – the nutella man. he was coy, slightly unnerved, but mostly unmoved by my ardent display. it was sheer bliss for me. and he had the biggest jar of nutella i had seen to date. so, yes, in this case, size matters.
all over paris you can get waffles with nutella and nutella on crepes or croissants or toast, nutella on fruit, nutella in coffee. it’s omnipresent. the nutella carts are everywhere. there could possibly be nothing more enticing than a bench in jardin des tuileries with espresso and nutella and your beloved.
we recently introduced david’s momma to it. she has found it to be a staple – apples with nutella are pretty amazing. for us, it used to be animal crackers and nutella. ohmy! if you haven’t tried that, you must. it is a worthy dessert!
we haven’t eaten a whole lot of nutella in recent times. the whole30 diet knocked it out of the rotation. costco wrote us a letter asking if we were ok; their sales of hazelnut cocoa spread were plummeting.
in truth, i miss it. the nutella chip in my brain is quivering.
back in the day crunch and i went to every lighthouse on long island’s shoreline and its peripheral islands off the coast. i was doing a photographic study for a college class and crunch was a happy participant, lugging me around in his big green truck and taking us out in his boat, a few boats before his current beloved ‘elephant ears’. the day i got to go up into the fire island lighthouse was memorable. it wasn’t open to the public but the lighthouse keeper was there and generously offered us a tour. the textures – going up the 182 steps on that spiral staircase to the light tower – were photographically inviting: the iron stairs, the cement walls, the ribbed glass of the light. every so often there was a peek out one of the windows built into the structure in 1826 and rebuilt, more than twice as high, in 1857, its eventual black and white bands of color distinguishing it along the ocean front. my essay is all on slides and, after borrowing one of those kodak carousel slide projectors (you can hear the ca-chunk of the slides changing even in your memory), we watched it a couple years ago. all those lighthouses – some steadfast, tall and proud, some crumbling, some pristine and unmanned, each a source of a study in woven texture and, when you are lucky enough to hear the mournful sound of the foghorn and breathe in thick salty air, a synthesis of senses. discovery.
when we were walking along the seine river in paris the sun was setting. i had never been to the eiffel tower and, though i had seen pictures, kind of expected to be underwhelmed. i’ve never been a really big tourist-attraction kind of person, preferring places of nature. we kept walking toward it, strolling, and i could see it in the distance starting to loom into the sky. the lights turned on as we got close and i caught my breath. it was stunning. gold against the early evening sky, light of day dropping away, it was one of my favorite moments in paris. discovery.
every time we come over the pass and start to drop down – the vista of high mountains before us – i cry. forests of evergreens to our side, snow-caps ahead, towering mountains that make my toes curl. i literally want to pull over every few feet to capture the sheer stunning beauty of it all, to remember the green and the blue, to breathe in the cooler air and the scent of pine. we keep driving and i memorize it for the days i am at sea level, wondering if, were we to live there, i would ever not see the incredible-ness of it. or would it always and always be a discovery?
as we walk around our ‘hood, as we hike familiar and unfamiliar trails, i feel open. open to seeing the textures of life as it goes on around us, as it goes on through us. back in the day, with crunch and my blue jean cap, i took a lot of photos on my old 35mm camera. nothing has really changed. my camera is an iphone these days, i don’t have my old blue jean cap and, missing him, david and i haven’t seen crunch in a few years.
but on the best days, in the best moments, when everything else drops off and we are nowhere but right where we are, i am aware of texture after texture, grain and weave and nap and frequency and harmonics, a composition of smooth and rough, woven and intermingled, softly and intensely waiting to be discovered.
reverse threading 