Grateful Tumult

occupying a privileged space with an awareness of what it is to not occupy that privileged space is to say thank you. Always thank you. Any irritation or slight, any discomfort or wrong, greased by the blessings that buoy. I had a year of living freely. In and out of countries, my days spent according to my whims. How dare I complain about the bumpy reentry.

The reentry has been bumpy. A road lined with challenges, some foreseen – like making friends in a new place- and others unfathomable until 2020- like a pandemic marching through every nook of the world. But I had a place to land, free housing and food and the warmth of love as a bonus. Even as I struggled to find full-time employment, contract work did more than simply sustain me.

In a world that began imploding in 2020, unemployment and sickness and fear, I was so thankfully spared the brunt of it. So how dare I mention the discomfort of a bumpy reentry.

But feelings can’t be logic-ed. I felt what I felt and I feel what I feel and my reentry has been bumpy. Filled with newness and uncertainty -things I was prepared for but for much longer than I anticipated, and adding extra challenges to the mix. How do you make friends in a pandemic? How do you make home, home, when home is so much more than an address?

Family helps. Family helps so much. But family can’t be everything.

In the past few weeks the uncertain tumult of the past few years has calmed. It is by no means settled but I can see the faint traces of possible paths. I am embarking on first steps – sharing a meal and talking with strangers who, after food and conversation feel a little less strange. These past few weekends I’ve girded myself against the possibility of revealing the oddities that make me me and finding no one to see themselves reflected in them. But I parade my oddities just the same. In search of my people, the ones who, more than street name or neighborhood, mark a spot as home.

(This isn’t what I want to say or how I want to say it, but I miss writing and if I don’t post this I fear I won’t post anything, won’t write anything for even more months...so here it is. And next time, I’ll try to get closer to my voice and the stories I want to tell.)

A Hippie and Her Food

 

My quest is a smaller footprint. Less waste. Less harm. My desire is to tread lightly in this space I’m borrowing from future generations. Oakland, California made that a touch easier. I drove less. The produce at my grocery store was local )less than 100 miles). Compostable and recyclable materials were so normalized that doing anything else was scandal.

I’m still shocked that Whataburger, a Texas institution, uses styrofoam cups for no discernible reason.

My nieces call me a hippie. They swear they don’t but my sister assures me they hippie do. I’m not offended. Even if the term doesn’t resonate with me, the sentiment it conveys does. I'm pro-tree hugging. Even as I know that individual choices have little bearing against a great tide of industrial waste and pollution I try anyway.

Some days there are compostable successes and other days there are plastic setbacks.

My apartment has a tumbler compost bin; of no interest to many but a definitive selling point for me. I keep a small bowl in my freezer and dump my organic waste into it until it is full and I can (bring it to room temperature to not disrupt the decomposition cycle) add it to the tumbler. It feels...complete. The missing link in a cycle of planting and eating and starting all over again.

Before I get to the compost bin though, I am trying mightily to avoid wasting food.

I cook. A lot.

If I’m in my apartment I’m more likely to cook than grabbing a quick bite from one of a dozen places within 5 minutes of my house. Something about the magic of pulling a meal together without having to put on shoes is so gratifying.

All that cooking leaves my produce bin flush with an array of vegetables and herbs. Right now I have fresh broccoli, cauliflower, kale, zucchini, sweet peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, mint, parsley, and dill in my house. Oh, and cilantro. But I’ll get to the cilantro in a moment.

My newest cooking challenge is to juggle the things in my fridge in such a way that I don’t have to throw anything out. Sometimes that means cooking something I hadn’t planned on cooking, like roasted Japanese eggplant to go with my zucchini lentil fritters. Sometimes it means getting creative with a meal I’d already planned, like using the increasingly sad looking leek staring at me from the recesses of my fridge in my black beans (leeks are in the onion family so why the hell not). In those moments I proclaim victory over my compost bin.

Of course tonight, when I pulled out the cilantro I bought a few days ago, I was reminded that I should

have rinsed and dried it, possibly put it in a glass of water or at least wrapped it loosely in a towel. Instead I tossed it into the crisper still bound at the stems and a little moist. The slimy mess I retrieved when preparing the garnish for my dinner was...disheartening.

A single plantain mocked me from the counter-top. Pitch black, I couldn’t tell if it had gone the way of the cilantro or the leek. Not too soft, not oozy, it would be perfect or it would be disgusting there would be no middle ground. Luckily it aged, not like an avocado but like Ciciley Tyson, and was the final complement to my meal.

Sometimes the rotting of food is a slap to the wallet, specialty items returned to the earth prematurely. But these days, the price isn’t the point. One dollar’s worth of cilantro, a single plantain, won’t break my budget but the waste is no less salient...this was grown, watered, fertilized. Somebody picked this, exposed to the elements, at risk for COVID.

I purchase food to eat. I should eat it.

Prodigal Writer

I haven't written in so long this feels strange.

I mean I've written. I've done work. But sitting in front of a computer for my own reasons has been something I conveniently avoided. The flux of returning from a year of traveling the world into a home-country ravaged by COVID-19 provided wonderful cover. Who could argue with my sincere explanations of needing space and time to process what had happened, what was and continues to be happening in the world?

Only, things are always happening.

The world is always turning and tragedies, big and small, are always here or on the horizon waiting to make grand entrances. The truth is much more garbled than the eloquence of global tragedy. The truth is lazy and scared and stifled. So today I sit in front of my computer, only a month late to my 2021 plans for myself, to write.

Writing when I travel has always been an easier task than writing at home. Life feels so much bigger when I'm recounting trying to chase a stubborn Jagenda, my chicken, out of the living room where she insisted on laying a single egg on the couch every morning; or having the kids (and adults) laugh at me as I tried to carry the water from the pump on my head like everyone else. But what convenient excuses those expectations of my daily musings set.

No random animal stories? My pen should be still. Not drenched in water and left with only half full bucket? My fingernails should not click against keys.

The last two years have been flush with lessons and realizations and triumph and terror and love...so much love. There have been quiet victories and small stinging tragedies that dwarf in the shadow of death and sickness and houselessness- but they are no less tragic to me.

So this year I want to return to my pen. Return to telling the tiny stories of food and fancy and friendship. Share the warmth I am able to gleam from those I love, the ones who by some magical turn of fate and gift from the heavens, love me too.