My father had always told me that my birthday was the first day of spring. Not a specific day of the year, but the feeling- an undercurrent of warmth waking up the earth. The scent of violets. Green in the air, he called it.
When it was mixed together, the salsa was a celebration of red and white and green, cool and fresh and alive. On a tortilla, with a bit of crumbled white ‘queso fresco,’ it was both satisfying and invigorating, full of textures and adventures, like childhood held in your hand.
Helen found ways to sneak summer into the dark months of the year, canning and freezing the fruit off their trees in July and August and using it extravagantly throughout the winter- apple chutney with the Thanksgiving turkey, raspberry sauce across the top of a December pound cake, blueberries in January pancakes.
The more she cooked, the more she began to view spices as carriers of the emotions and memories of the places they were originally from and all those they had traveled through over the years.
A signature scent is a brand,” she said. “It works fabulously for helping people make emotional connections with places, but if a person wears the same perfume all the time, you risk muddying the memories.
I think one of the most fascinating things about perfumes is how they change with each person’s skin chemistry. I’ve always thought of them as verbs, not nouns. Truth, I’ve found, is much the same.
In the currency of friendship, empathy is more valuable than accuracy.
Back before there was time, I lived with my father on an island, tucked away in an endless archipelago that reached up out of the cold salt water, hungry for air.
And that night she dreamed in French.
Caroline had felt more comfortable thinking of beauty as something separate from her, like a scarf or a coat you could check before going in to a show. She wondered now, however, if she had treated more things as a part of herself rather than an accessory, perhaps everything would have turned out differently.
Jack’s marketing books had been a part of her life for so long that she had ceased to register their presence, simply moving them from the couch to the coffee table, from the bed to the nightstand. How to Sell Everything to Anybody. Eight Great Habits of CEOs. They all seemed to involve numbers, as if you could simply count yourself to riches, like following sheep to sleep.
I hadn’t realized how much I counted on the emotional armor of his friendship until it wasn’t there, and.
We humans are almost entirely made of water, except for the stones of our secrets. May mine become solid places to land your feet as you cross the wide river of your life.
Foragers feast,” my father would say, and we’d set out into the woods, cedar bark baskets in our hands. In the summer, we harvested bright red huckleberries, and salal berries so dark blue they looked like night in your hand. In the fall, we found mushrooms hiding under the trees- I was captivated by the convoluted morels, each one a labyrinth of nooks and crannies.
Everyone else thought it was magic, but I knew better. In the end, it wasn’t the flavors or the alcohol that made people relax – it was the experience of being seen and understood.
We are the unwitting carriers of our parents’ secrets, the ripples made by stones we never saw thrown.
I remember the way the rain seemed to talk to the roof as I fell asleep, and how the fire would snap and tell it to be quiet.
We’re all caretakers of the stories, Alice. Writers are just the lucky ones that get to know them first.
Did you know that otters sleep holding hands? All night long, so they don’t lose each other.
Picking up a book was a decision: I’m going to go away. The exciting possibility: I may not come back the same.