On exchanging art for candy, coincidences with Laurie Colwin, and how we do not have to change much to change everything
November 5, 2021
Dear Eva,
I was utterly delighted by the thought of you yelling out I AM A GENIUS after finishing a sweeping project last Friday. You sure are, my friend! Sing it to the sky!
I am currently having the weird but lovely experience of noticing that, although I have largely the same number and weight of things on my proverbial plate that I did two weeks ago when I was feeling overwhelmed, these days I feel light and breezy. I am intrigued by this, especially because I think a big part of it is attributable to me drawing on your wise words from these letters: what if instead of things being hard, they could be easy? How remarkable to realize it really can be that simple if we let it. On the whole, I am grateful for many of my sponge-like qualities, but sometimes the tendency to absorb the energy and emotions of others can become a means to forgetting that I know for myself what matters when nothing matters.
Speaking of which, I think it is worth saying out loud on the page that my two children are going through two different but equally charming stages at this moment. J is just on the precipice of edging over into tweendom, but right now he is still in a place where he will call out “I love you Mommy” as I close the bedroom door at night. I don’t think I mentioned yet that he recently got glasses, a light prescription but the two eyes were different enough that the eye doctor thought it was worth correcting. His new look makes him look like a high schooler, especially with the thick bush of long hair he has grown out these past few months. S, who the kindergarten teacher described as “very quiet” at parent-teacher conferences, is at full volume at home, his exuberance often bubbling up so high that he is quite literally bouncing off the walls at times. In advance of trick or treat last weekend, he decided he wanted to make drawings to give out to everyone who gave him candy. And in characteristically persistent fashion, he sat down one afternoon and created a stack of probably 15 pages of art. When Beggar’s Night arrived, he steadfastly gathered the stack of art and carried it along with his candy bucket as we went from house to house. S can feel shy at times, so I wondered how he would handle the trick or treat pressures of telling a joke for candy. To my delight, he nailed it every time. (What kind of instrument do you have in your bathroom? A tuba toothpaste!) Each time, after he picked out his candy, he would run back to us shrieking with joy. I would then say, “Did you want to give them one of your drawings?” And he would say, “Oh yeah, I forgot!” and then go running back with a drawing in hand. This happened Every. Single. Time. It is no surprise that people were quite charmed with his Halloween innovation of exchanging art for candy. In other words, he pretty much nailed Halloween this year. Next year, he says he is going to make even more pictures. A new tradition is born!
All of this is to say, I want to hold my gaze at the kids right now, keep my eyes open and take it all in while it lasts. We will be on to the next stages soon, and I refuse to find myself wondering where the time went.
This week I did something I never do, which is go to a concert on a Tuesday! I am chuckling to myself at this sentence because the Tuesday-ness of it was something B pointed out at least three different times in explaining why he was uninterested in joining me for it. My pal A was game, so we headed out to a little venue to watch two folksy performances on a Tuesday night this week. Neither of us knew either performer, but they did not disappoint. I am currently listening to Sierra Ferrell as we speak, thinking back fondly to my saucy Tuesday night rebellion. I will be looking for more live middle-of-the-week music in my future.
I just peeked back at the notes I grabbed from your letter last week. One was the anecdote about Minnesota-style pizza. Can/does Minnesota claim the grid-like pizza portioning? Who knew! There are some places here that serve it up in that style, but that does not mean it did not come from our northern neighbors. This week I learned that they do the joke-telling part of trick or treat in Scotland. I thought it was a Central Iowa-specific tradition. You never know who else might be doing something over yonder!
I love to hear that you are stretching a little further toward living a life that is less about others and more about [yourself] and what [you are] drawn to. I think I am on the same journey in my own way. For my part, I am trying to emphasize to myself that the challenge can be seen through the frame of one day, rather than thinking about it from the how-do-I-restructure-my-whole-life perspective. Little things like live music on a Tuesday, or finding 20 minutes to doodle and write in my notebook on a Wednesday morning can help get me there. I am continually struck by how the smallest changes can sometimes have an outsized effect. It is inspiring actually; we do not have to change much to change everything.
I am relieved to be finishing this letter just after noon, rather than late into the Friday evening hours like I have of late. It feels much more spacious and leisurely this way. Thank you for bearing with me these past few weeks while I got close to the rushed “hi, bye” letter that we have threatened in weeks past. We do not have many of these letters left (8!), and I want to make the most of them.
Wishing you a glorious, restorative weekend!
Yours,
Sarah
Friday November 5 2021
Dear Sarah,
I had the feeling that perhaps I had already started this letter to you, but I think that feeling was the ghost of writing last week’s letter, which was a week ago now! Recent but not that recent!
It’s midday on Friday and M and I just did a seven-minute exercise with his family members and now I am all hopped up with fizzy energy and I haven’t figured out where to direct it. It feels too fizzy for regular old work so I’ve cracked open this document to start my letter to you sooner rather than later!
I just added our 100-day activity to my calendar starting on January 1. I have labeled it “100 creative days!” It seems like technically 100 days will get us to April 10 but I think I might carry it on through my birthday on the 12th, and who knows what will happen after that!
I have a few notes jotted down for this week’s letter to you, one being that Monday and Tuesday are the evil complement to the weekend in a seven-day workweek. I think I’ve said before that I often feel like Monday and Tuesday comprise the feel of a whole week for me; by the end of the day on Tuesday I’m spent, and then Wednesday is easier or at least more approachable. I’ve hit the bottom and things can only go up from there! I am trying to figure out how to actually enjoy my weekends these days; I think perhaps I’ve been too cooped up at home (an odd feeling because I also think I’ve been away from home a fair amount of weekends this fall) because when I’m at home on the weekends I end up harboring the prickly sense that I should just be working, which is unfair all around. Thus Monday and Tuesday are like a kind of penance for having taken the weekend “off,” which is all wrong — but this is still the hypothesis I am batting around for why Mondays and Tuesdays have felt so rough for a while! This week I thought about how we should have societally pushed for a four-day workweek with the pandemic as impetus; the five-day workweek is old and tired just like how I’m feeling these days!
I was recently browsing The Creative Independent for a bit of inspiration and was reading about the worker-owned design studio Partner & Partners; among other things they discuss their adherence to a four-day workweek and I love it. Lulu Johnson said: Three-day weekends are great. I do one chore day, one rest day, and one social day. I don’t know how I could do without that. I was really liking the flavor of that. Also, the four-day workweek was described as “a socialist ideal” and I was feeling that, too. Five days of work these days are a decision that we’ve made as humans, and many of us haven’t really decided it for ourselves, we’re working at the whims of those who are in charge. In my particular work I’m not working to make someone richer — though I am working to bring in money for organizations — and if I were working to make someone richer I certainly don’t think it’s worth five of my good days! The rich are more than rich enough! We work to obtain both real and conceptual sustenance but our lives as modern humans don’t inherently require daily work like farming the land (unless you are a farmer today). Anyway, I like the sound of four work days a week and I am going to see if I can make that a way of life! Today I am certainly on the path to completing a very work-light day! My first new year’s resolution?
I just had a satisfying lunch of seasoned lentils and rice. Yesterday I was having a(nother) very casual day and, in combination with the fact that M and I have been very lazy grocery shoppers lately, there was not much at all to eat, yet at the same time I felt like I needed a restorative kind of lunch, so I made up a batch of lentils. Today we had them hot with rice and it is a treat to have a hot lunch!
This week I’ve been bopping around in Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking, which I mentioned last week. It’s the kind of book that you don’t have to read straight through (one of my favorite kinds of book). This book has already yielded two satisfying and pleasant coincidences.
The first coincidence: in a chapter called How to Avoid Grilling, Colwin discusses how she doesn’t like to eat al fresco — “No sane person does, I feel” — and goes on to state: “My idea of bliss is a screened-in porch from which you can watch the sun go down, or come up. You can sit in temperate shade and not fry your brains while you eat. You are protected from flying critters, sandstorms and rain and you can still enjoy a nice cool breeze.” Laurie! I was just blissfully discovering your work on a screened-in porch a few weeks ago! She goes on to discuss how one year she and her husband rented a lake cottage that was otherwise unimpressive but featured a screened-in porch. She said, “Nevertheless, we ate on the screened-in porch all the time and with great success. Friends with beautiful houses came to our broken-down lake cottage to eat on that crummy porch and watch the sun set over the lake.” I love a good screened-in porch! The one I recently stayed in had lovely floor-to-ceiling screens in a high-ceilinged space, segmented only a few times by wood-frame mullions, so that you felt like you were just as close to the outside as you could get while still being inside (perfection!).
The second coincidence: in a chapter called The Same Old Thing, Colwin discusses how “when the chips are down, the spirit is exhausted and the body hungry, the same old thing is a great consolation.” One of her same-old-thing recipes is a creamed spinach with jalapeno peppers which she described as having during a meal at someone’s house during a literary festival in Dallas, and which “was so good it made me want to sit up and beg like a dog.” I read this on Monday morning and I thought it sounded delicious, and mentally bookmarked it for Thanksgiving. Then at lunchtime on the same day M and I went out for lunch to celebrate our wedding anniversary and I unwittingly set my heart on a dish that then happened to feature creamed spinach with jalapeno peppers, which I only noticed because, ordering the dish via my phone as one does at restaurants in these post-not-post-covid days, I saw that I had the option of ordering extra spinach, which sounded promising but I wondered why with this particular dish I would want extra spinach, and then reading more closely I found that it was the aforementioned creamed spinach accompaniment! I had never heard of this dish and then I read about it in a book from 1988 and then it turned up in my very delicious lunch bowl! I am really feeling Laurie Colwin’s vibe these days and have requested more of her books from the library. Come to me soon, books!
I liked your letter last week and I am still digesting the aphorism you shared: You are free to do whatever you want. You need only face the consequences. It feels obvious but it isn’t! I think the concept of consequences will actually take some work for me to process; I almost think that in my life I’ve been avoiding not just the consequences I fear, but somehow avoiding consequences at all? This isn’t possible — all actions have consequences, or at least trigger the events that follow, like a slowly unfolding Rube Goldberg machine — but I find myself having to think hard to conceive of the consequences of the actions I take. Perhaps I have so fully formed myself around the idea of avoiding negative consequences that the concept of consequences is almost foreign. And-or perhaps I am continuing to live too safely!
It is windy and almost 60 degrees outside right now, an odd November afternoon! A branch is dangling from the honey locust outside my window, and curiously enough has been dangling for years, even somehow dangling through its pandemic date with the city tree-trimmers. It’s a fully broken branch that is just hanging from another branch! When I see it from the window it appears that I should be able to run out and pull it down, but as is the way with trees, when I am below it, it is actually much higher up than it initially seemed. Another day goes to you, dangle-branch!
One more thing: I meant to ask you when we talked today if you have any favorite Thanksgiving side dishes! As I mentioned, a delightful veggie Sidesgiving looks to be in my future! I’ve got lots of ideas and I would love to hear if you have any faves you and the fam return to!
Happy weekend to you and yours! Until soon!
Yours,
Eva