Tag: pacific northwest
June 1
I’d been planning to put up a post tonight about some meatballs that June has been into lately (MEAT! MEAT! she yells; I think you can imagine it). They’re delicious, served in broth with peas and grated Parmesan, ugly but molto Italian. But then, possibly because it is June 1st, the sun came out and the day got hot, and meatballs felt very wrong. Instead, first thing this morning, I texted a friend to propose a late afternoon trip to the beach with a picnic dinner for our two babies, who are really now toddlers.
And then Brandon and I ran into a couple of new friends and their two children at the farmers’ market, so I invited them, too. I am the least spontaneous person on Earth, so I had to mark the occasion. This post really could not be about meatballs. This is a post about the beach.
I’m from Oklahoma. Where I grew up, it is flat. I have no idea what it’s like to grow up near water, or islands, or mountains. Sometimes when we’re at the beach, or even just driving around town, I think to myself, WHOA! June is from Seattle! It sounds obvious, because it is, but I wonder how this place will shape her, what it will be like to grow up near the water, someplace where you can pick blackberries and catch your own Christmas Eve crab, someplace way up north, way out at the edge of the country.
Being out on book tour was incredible – thrilling and invigorating and heady and thank you all(!) for coming out and being there(!) – and it was also the longest I’ve been away from home in a couple of years. I’ve always loved to travel, and to travel alone, and I still do. I knew June and Brandon were fine, helped along by grandparents and friends, and I didn’t worry. I want her to have sturdy attachments to people who aren’t her parents. Plus, it was good to have time to sort of live my pre-June life again. I liked that life a lot.
But there was one big thing that I missed about having her around, and that’s this: being with a young child forces you to be radically present. You can’t zone out, replaying this morning or planning for tomorrow, when you’re at the beach with your kid, because while you’re zoning out, she’s going to put her sticky sandy hand in your friend’s Tupperware of roasted asparagus. You’ve got to stay there. You’re on. I’m glad for that, even if I’m not very good at it. My friends got some extra texture with their asparagus tonight.
It’s good to be home.
P.S. Hey, Kirkland, I’ll be at Parkplace Books this Tuesday night, June 3, at 7:00 pm. See you there?
December 24
Whenever we spend the holidays with my relatives in northern California, we eat Dungeness crab on Christmas Eve. I can’t remember when the tradition was started, but when Brandon and I got together, I introduced him to it. He was still mostly a vegetarian then, and he’d never tasted crab, but he was curious about it – enough to grab a couple of crab legs and, however awkwardly, get himself around them. He took to it fast. This year, we spent Christmas in Seattle, on our own, and we decided to continue the Christmas Eve crab tradition, since Washington is the state that gave Dungeness crab its name. It felt fitting. Plus, Brandon announced, he had a plan: he would…
Read moreI could talk about the weather
I woke up this morning and found the house entirely wrapped in fog. If you stood in front of the window in the kitchen, where I stand to make my coffee, you could watch it blow up the street in gusts – sometimes wisps, sometimes great puffs. I called Brandon over to see it when he woke up, and even half asleep, he managed a moderately enthusiastic WOW, which surprised me. The fog horns were blowing. And now, a couple of hours on, the sun is out, searing through it, working its way steadily across the floor. I could talk about the weather all day. I am turning into an old man. The dog does his morning walk of the…
Read moreNow here, now there
I have two half brothers who live on the East Coast, and when I was a kid, if they came home for the holidays, they would bring a Styrofoam cooler of oysters. My father would get out his knife and shucking glove and lean against the kitchen counter, flicking grit and shells into the sink as he went, and they would all stand around, eating and sighing, making the noises that people make when they eat oysters. I don’t know how old I was that night, but I think I must have been about six. I stood next to my father while he shucked, and he leaned down and gave me an oyster, a fat one, an enormous one, amoeba-like,…
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