Local adventures: alllll the British treats.

Recently, on a mild midweek evening, my guy and I ate dinner at his house and then went for a walk through the neighborhood. We have savored these midweek dinners in this season; they began as taco nights, but have evolved to include lasagna or hot dogs or whatever is in the fridge or pantry on any given week. They also, sometimes, include episodes of Black-ish or The Mandalorian, but on this particular evening, we wanted to wander.

He lives in a mostly residential area, leafy and quiet and hard to get to by public transit; I like it, except that it’s not all that accessible. The houses are a mix of single-family, classic Boston triple-deckers, brick mid-century apartment blocks. There were, on that evening, so many climbing vines and blooming roses and blowsy, beautiful peonies.

We ended up at Kiki’s, a nearby market whose name always makes me smile, because it’s what my nephews call me. I’d never been inside, so we decided to go in for a browse. And to our surprise and my utter delight, we found the aisle you see above: lined with every conceivable kind of digestive biscuit, Cadbury chocolate bar, and various other British treats.

Suddenly I was 20 years old again, standing in the smallish Sainsbury’s on the Woodstock Road in Oxford, or in the tiny post office around the corner on North Parade. I was gazing at the unfamiliar chocolates in their purple wrappers, trying to decide which one to take home for my study session that night. I was in the House 10 kitchen with Jamie, late at night, munching on an orange-wrapped roll of Hobnobs biscuit, talking about dreams and travel and love.

There was more: custard creams and bourbon creams, jammy tea cakes wrapped in marshmallow and chocolate, the orange-scented Jaffa cakes that are my friend Cole’s favorite. I was taken back, too, to the tiny newsstand across from St Anne’s College, Oxford, where you could once buy a bag of broken biscuits (exactly what it sounds like) for a pound or two.

We brought home an assortment of biscuits, plus a Cadbury Mint Crisp bar (still my favorite), and some spicy beef jerky (G couldn’t resist). I was – am – completely surprised to find all these treats in such variety and volume, three blocks from G’s house in Brighton. It kicked my ever-present wanderlust back into gear, of course, but more than that it simply made me happy: so glad to find these goodies that are part of a place I love, and happy to share them with my favorite man.

What local adventures are you having, these days?

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Poetry Friday: Ada Limón

Before

No shoes and a glossy
red helmet, I rode
on the back of my dad’s
Harley at seven years old.
Before the divorce.
Before the new apartment.
Before the new marriage.
Before the apple tree.
Before the ceramics in the garbage.
Before the dog’s chain.
Before the koi were all eaten
by the crane. Before the road
between us, there was the road
beneath us, and I was just
big enough not to let go:
Henno Road, creek just below,
rough wind, chicken legs,
and I never knew survival
was like that. If you live,
you look back and beg
for it again, the hazardous
bliss before you know
what you would miss.

I have been thinking a lot about the lives we live “before” (this time of year makes me remember, vividly, the process of going through my divorce, three years ago). This poem of Limón’s made me think of Nora Ephron’s lists of what she would (and wouldn’t) miss, written before her death in 2012.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry – with an emphasis on women of color – here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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The women of country

Happy July, y’all. I can’t believe we’re here. We always seem to wait forever for summer in New England (certainly this spring dragged, for several reasons), and then when it’s here, it feels rich and fleeting. The trees are lush, the roses and daylilies are showing off, and I’m cranking up the country music on my morning runs. Though, really, I’ve been doing that for months.

I was raised on country music, as you may know (or assume) if you know that I grew up in West Texas. My hometown had a half-dozen country radio stations, and my parents had a stack of George Strait cassettes that we nearly wore out on our long summer road trips. (I shocked a colleague at Harvard, years later, by telling him – and I am still confident in this assertion – that I could probably sing, on demand, at least 50 of George’s 60 number one hits.)

George was and is the king of country as far as my family is concerned, and I love a lot of his male compatriots: Alan Jackson, Brooks and Dunn, Randy Travis, the guys who sang in Alabama and Diamond Rio. I have a soft spot for Brad Paisley (especially “She’s Everything”) and I still adore Garth Brooks. But this year, I’ve been spending my miles mostly listening to the women of country music.

I loved them all as a child and teenager: Reba, Martina, Trisha, Shania, the women of the Dixie Chicks (now the Chicks) and SheDAISY. I marveled at LeAnn Rimes (what a prodigy!) and based my high school graduation speech around Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance.” I can still sing you most of Faith Hill’s hits from that era, and Deana Carter’s dreamy debut album takes me right back to middle school.

I’ve never stopped loving country music, but I did stop listening to it for a while. I grew older, my tastes expanded to include folk music and Broadway show tunes and so much Christian pop music (bless it), as well as jazz and big band and the classical stuff we sang in choir. I left Texas, stopped driving to work (and thus listening to the radio as often), and married a fellow Texan who was a real snob about country music.

With all that, I’ve been on hiatus from these ladies for a decade or so. But I’ve been tiptoeing back: I heard the Highwomen at Newport Folk 2019 and fell completely in love. Last spring, I loved Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Songs from Home” on Instagram during quarantine, and a few weeks in, I went down a Jo Dee Messina rabbit hole. This winter, in the depths of job-hunt woes and loneliness, I rediscovered Martina McBride. And since then, I have been pounding down the harbor walk singing along to classics like “Heads Carolina, Tails California” and “Take Me As I Am” and “She’s in Love with the Boy” and “Independence Day.”

These songs are a particular brand of badass feminism: it wears mascara and uses (a lot) of hairspray, and it doesn’t let a man (or anyone else) tell it what to do. It celebrates grit (“I’m a Survivor”) and individuality (“Wild One”), and it champions both true romance (“Perfect Love,” “We Danced Anyway,” “Wild Angels”) and the need to leave sometimes (“Ready to Run,” “Consider Me Gone”). There are power ballads and tender love songs; there are girl-power anthems and some good old-fashioned honky-tonk. These songs reconnect me to the teenager I was, but they are helping me shape and discover the woman I am now.

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Apple memories

I had my first bite of a September apple last week, sampling a crisp Macintosh from the white bag on the kitchen counter. It tasted delicious: tart, juicy, the embodiment of fall in New England. And I was stunned by the wave of sadness that followed it.

Since I moved to Boston, apples have been tangled up with September: crisp sunny days, cool nights, black-eyed Susans and dahlias and late daylilies in the flower beds around town. September is the start of the academic year, and in a city like Boston, that shifts the rhythm in a big way. And every fall, September has meant apple picking.

Apple picking was and is a beloved tradition for my former church. I’d eaten apples all my life, but there are no apple orchards in West Texas, and I wasn’t prepared for the sight of their rambling, gnarled branches heavy with fruit. I fell instantly in love.

Last year, some dear friends who’d moved away came back to visit for a long weekend, and we made sure to plan our apple-picking excursion when they were here. We wandered the orchard and filled our bags to bursting and ate the traditional orchard lunch of hot dogs and apple cider donuts. There were photos and laughter and tired kiddos, and cold, fresh cider. It felt right.

This year, so much has shifted: I’m living across the water in Eastie, spending my Sunday mornings sleeping in or running instead of going to church. I’m navigating the end of the marriage whose story began when I was in college. I am not who I was, and my life is a testament to that fact. But it is still September, and the apples have appeared at the farmers’ markets and grocery stores.

I’ll keep eating them, because the flavor and enjoyment are worth the reminder of all I have lost. Things are different now, but life is still full of sweetness. I’m trying to feel it all, live it all, truly taste both the grief and the joy.

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Settling into Eastie

I’ve been in my new place for almost a month (how is that possible?), and it’s gradually looking and feeling like home. It’s not quite “done” yet, but we’re a long way from the initial wilderness of boxes and also the half-done state I lived in for a couple of weeks. I’m hoping for many more happy days here, but I want to remember what this first stage has been like.

The first few weeks in the new apartment have sounded like foghorns blowing over the harbor. This is the first place I’ve lived in Boston where I can’t hear the train, but I’ve traded it for the jingles and barks of neighborhood dogs, the particular creaks of this wide-plank wood floor, and those ships making their presence known.

These first few weeks have looked like a crazy mix of old and new: the dressers and bed frame I’ve had for years, with new living room furniture and four bookshelves lining one brick wall. I have a new red kettle, an old bookshelf repurposed as a bedside shelf, the stereo I’ve had since college and beloved books in a totally new arrangement. The neighborhood itself was familiar from my dog-sitting adventures this spring, but I’m learning it in a different way now.

I haven’t done much “real” cooking this summer, but these weeks have tasted like sourdough toast with butter and strawberry jam, Greek yogurt and granola in the same brown bowl every morning, and cup after cup of ginger peach tea. In the evenings, they’ve tasted like huevos or gazpacho or tacos from the Cactus Grill in Maverick Square. And sometimes, a few sips of rosé and a few spoonfuls of Ben & Jerry’s raspberry-lemon sorbet.

Since my new place looks out on the harbor, these weeks have smelled like salt and sunshine, wild Irish roses growing in the neighbors’ yard, the scent of barbecued meat drifting down the street. They’ve smelled like a lemon-rosemary candle and the clean scent of dish soap.

These first few weeks have felt like new sheets on bare skin, a cooling breeze coming in off the harbor after a hot humid day, sore muscles after lugging boxes up and down stairs and building furniture. These weeks have felt like retuning my body to a new space, reaching for different light switches and stove burners, finding the new ways this space already fits me.

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Bella Roma

My parents have spent the first part of May on a European adventure: flying into Athens, cruising through part of the Mediterranean, then ending their trip in Rome.

I can’t wait to hear all their stories when they recover from the jet lag, especially since most of their destinations are places I’ve never been. But their final stop – bella Roma – was part of my first Oxford semester, long ago. And I’ve been remembering.

I flew to Rome for a late-March long weekend with my friends Jesse, Adrienne and Heather. We slept in hostel bunk beds and spent three days walking around as much of the city as we could cover together. I’d given up chocolate for Lent that year (what on earth was I thinking?!) but fortunately, I could still eat fruit gelato. And I ate as much of it as possible.

I remember Rome in flashes and glimpses: elaborate public drinking fountains on every corner, cupping our hands to drink the fresh, cold water. Counting out brassy euro coins and colorful bills (mostly to pay for pasta and pizza). Open street markets and loud Italian that sounded almost-but-not-quite like Spanish. Tossing coins over our shoulders into the Trevi Fountain.

The green oval of the Circus Maximus, once a chariot racing stadium and now a public park. Doing a double take when we saw an elderly nun smoking a cigarette, and another when we spotted a gladiator at the Colosseum with a lip piercing. Buying T-shirts on a side street near the Vatican that said “Ciao ciao” in flowing script like the Coca-Cola logo. Nearly getting hit (so many times!) by crazy drivers on cars and Vespas. Trying my first tiramisu at a little hostaria with plaster-and-beam ceilings on our last night there.

We spent about half a day touring the Vatican, getting up early one morning to beat the crowds. (That was Adrienne’s idea, and she was right on.) I remember being awed by St. Peter’s Basilica and underwhelmed by the Sistine Chapel (so crowded!). I fell in love with the elaborate, colorful, ancient maps in many of the exhibits, and I sent at least one postcard home from the Vatican’s post office.

We climbed up 500-plus steps to the top of the cupola, and that was my favorite view of all: Rome, in its entirety, spread out beneath our feet. If there’s a way to climb up and see a city from above, I will take it: see also St Mary’s church tower in Oxford, and a trip with my dad to the top of Notre-Dame.

That weekend was my first (and so far, only) taste of Italy – which didn’t capture my heart in quite the same way as Paris or Spain (or Oxford, which is still home). It ended with a frustrating coda: we took the wrong train, missed our flight and had to spend half a day (and too much money) trying to get back to Oxford.

Despite that, I loved Rome, and the smiles on our faces in my scrapbook photos bear out that truth. It’s been fun to walk down that particular memory lane again.

 

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“You smell like outside.”

This is what we used to say to my dad, when he came in from mowing the lawn or an afternoon walking the golf course. In West Texas, you can do both for a good chunk of the year, and while it’s often warm (or hot) enough to break a sweat, this was something different. Sometimes I could smell the lawn fertilizer or the musty scent of dried leaves, but often it was simply the outdoors: earthy, fresh, dusty, a distinct contrast to the clean interior smells of our house.

For as long as I’ve lived in Boston, I have commuted by a combination of public transit and walking, so I have to – and like to – get outside multiple times on any given day. But since I’ve become a walker and then a runner, I get outside much more often, for longer stretches, in nearly all kinds of weather and at all times of day.

Whether it’s the river trail or the Commonwealth Ave mall, or a long, rambling stroll through the streets of Cambridge, I go outside as often as I can, to feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my face, to observe the particularities of the changing seasons. I go to move, to take breaks, to run errands, to ride a bike, to meet friends: to refresh myself by being out in the big wide world.

Of course, I often break a sweat, especially when I’m running or riding. But sometimes, when I come back inside, it’s not quite sweat I smell. It’s something different, more earthy, in my hair or on my clothes. I realized the other day what it was: sometimes I just smell like outside. And I am so happy about that.

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It’ll all work out.

I keep hearing that phrase in my grandfather’s voice, these days.

To be clear, I am hearing it inside my head: Papaw died when I was 16, before I’d ever faced problems bigger than a difficult history exam or a temperamental band director.

He was my dad’s dad, a quiet man from Mississippi who spent his adult life in small-town Missouri. He was mostly deaf in one ear as a result of his time serving in Korea, and he wore plaid shirts that snapped up the front, and black-framed glasses, and baseball caps when he went golfing.

When my sister and I were young, we would try to arm-wrestle him, and though I’d push with both hands and throw all my weight against his big hand, I never managed to move it an inch. This made him throw back his head and laugh, a raspy, joyous sound that I loved to hear.

I don’t ever remember hearing Papaw say “It’ll all work out” when he was alive. My mom told me, not long ago, that he used to say it, and immediately I heard it in his voice, infused with the simple, rock-solid faith that I associate with him and my Mimi. They didn’t say much about their faith, but they helped out their neighbors and served their church and raised their three sons to love God and love others.

This summer, I am searching for a new job: combing job boards and sending out applications and trying my absolute best not to panic. I don’t know what is next, and I don’t like that at all. I am a person who likes to have a plan.

There’s no magic formula to quiet my soul when the fear sets in, though I am using all the good, healthy tricks I know, like yoga and running and lots of tea. But sometimes, Papaw’s voice floats through my head, saying this one simple phrase that I never heard him say in life. And it settles me, in a way I can’t quite explain: to know that if he were alive, he would say it to me, believing that I’ll find my next right step.

I don’t know if Papaw ever had doubts or dark nights of the soul. I’m not sure how I could explain to him the work I do, how I worry, what I’m hoping to find. I don’t quite believe he’s speaking to me from beyond, not that way.

But sometimes I hear him say these four words. And it helps me believe they are true.

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Ten years of marriage

When you say those wedding vows at eighteen, you are committing yourselves—with all that you are and all that you have—to only each other because you are young and wreathed in glory and take up all the space there is.

When you say them at thirty-five, you are signing on for something wider: a whole garden full of people to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, in wheelchairs and sleepwalking and heart attacks, in arrogance and graciousness, stubbornness and forgiveness, stumbling and wisdom, in meanness and in kindness that falls like snow and shines brighter than the Dog Star.

To love and to cherish, yes. Like a tiger. A hurricane. A family. Relentlessly.

—Marisa de los Santos, The Precious One

Today we are celebrating a decade of marriage.

This passage comes from the end of de los Santos’ novel about Taisy and Willow, estranged half sisters who share a difficult father and eventually come to share much more. Taisy, who narrates the passage above, makes her wedding vows twice, to the same man. As she says, and as one might expect, the commitment has deepened and widened in the intervening 15 years.

J and I did not (quite) make our wedding vows at age 18. But we did begin dating as 20-year-olds, and at 34, we are standing on the edge of our second decade of marriage.

We knew, I think, that we were signing on for a broad and complicated commitment when we said our vows amid a crowd of people we loved, at age 24. But we did not – because nobody ever does – understand quite what the intervening years would entail.

Marriage is a joy, but it’s not always an easy one. It is a life-giving foundation, but it is neither unshakable nor unchanging. I have come, gradually, to believe that it’s more like a plant than a building. Like anything that lives, it requires tending and care. And like anything that lives, it sometimes changes in unexpected ways. Growth doesn’t always look the way you hope or assume it will. It is often surprising, and sometimes it hurts.

Because we met when we were so young, J and I have done a lot of growing up together: learning how to navigate the world as adults, especially during and after our cross-country move from Texas to Boston. In other ways, we have had to let each other grow on our own, and make space for the slightly different shapes we have taken on, even as each of our growth has informed the other’s.

We are facing (more) transition this summer, as I search for a new job and he continues to deal with changes at work. We are used to this by now, but we can’t just coast; marriage, like most things that are worthwhile, requires taking care. I am no expert on anyone’s marriage besides my own, but like Clare, another de los Santos character, I believe deeply that “at least half of love is paying attention.”

Celebrating a decade of marriage feels big, and it is. But it’s also simply waking up to another day together. It is daily and it is infinite. It is lifelong and it is right here, right now. It is doing our best to walk forward as flawed but loving human beings, trusting that our past experience and our present efforts will carry us into the future.

Happy anniversary, love. Here’s to many more.

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Return to La Alhambra

Here is the thing about revisiting a place after 14 years: sometimes it feels less familiar than you expected.

I knew that much of our Spain trip, this time, would feel new. I’d never been to Sevilla, never flown straight to Madrid and then Málaga from the U.S., never been to this part of Spain with my husband. Even the neighborhood of Granada where we stayed, the steep cobblestoned streets of the Albayzín, was entirely unknown to me. I expected – even anticipated – dozens of new experiences, new memories.

But I was also expecting something else: the shock of recognition that often comes when you step back onto the ground of a place you have loved.

I am no stranger to this feeling: I’ve had it happen in London, in Washington, D.C., in Prince Edward Island and San Diego and always, always, in Oxford. I am a person who remembers, and I remembered loving Granada, on my first visit there. So I hoped, even expected, it would feel familiar.

And, at first, it didn’t.

I kept waiting to turn down a side street or step into a restaurant or happen upon a square, to glimpse the roofline of a building or the sweep of a view and remember something. And at first – though, as I said, we were staying in a different location and doing new things – I didn’t feel it at all.

I’d glanced through my old photos, the week before we left. I kept remembering snippets of the time I’d spent in Granada with Kyle and Jenny, Elizabeth and Marcela. I remembered a sun-drenched hostel kitchen with saltillo tile on the floor and stacks of toast for breakfast. I remembered tapas and sangria at La Bella y La Bestia. I remembered a group trip to La Alhambra. But I couldn’t make any of it fit with the city I was seeing before me. The architecture matched, but none of it looked like anything I’d seen before.

On our second day in Granada, J and I hiked down and across the Rio Darro, up the opposite hill, to La Alhambra. We had a perfect view of this ancient Moorish palace from our apartment terrace, and I remembered it – palaces, gardens, fountains – as absolutely stunning. And it is. But most of it felt unfamiliar: the labyrinthine garden paths, the intricate tile and plasterwork in the palaces, the views from countless arched windows, the roses. (That last was definitely new: my first visit to La Alhambra was in March, so different plants were in bloom at that time of year.)

We walked on, and I snapped dozens of pictures, but felt sadder and sadder that I couldn’t remember any of it. I’m no longer that girl, twenty years old and wide-eyed, who came to Spain on a whim and a prayer, but she’s still a part of me. I wanted so badly to find some glimpse of her, and I wondered what it meant that I couldn’t.

Near the end of our tour, we walked through the Generalife gardens, which are lush this time of year: tall cedars and red nasturtiums, vivid sweet peas and green arching hedges, so many roses in every color. We wandered into one last palace courtyard, and I all but literally stopped in my tracks because it finally hit me: I was here.

The twin fountains on either side of a long, narrow reflecting pool; the whitewashed building at the opposite end; the light and color and feel of the place, even though (as I have said) it was long ago in a different season. I almost started crying, because it was finally true: I remember this.

Suddenly, I could glimpse my friends, or thought I could, out of the corner of my eye. Marcela, squinting into the sun and taking pictures; Elizabeth, with her backpack and sunglasses. Jenny, with her T-shirt sleeves rolled up, and Kyle, gesturing toward every view and saying, with a smile, “Qué linda, no?” (Linda means beautiful, and he was right every time.)

We lingered a few minutes and I snapped half a dozen pictures. Later I would compare them side by side with the one I’d saved from my first trip to La Alhambra, to confirm: this was the place. But I didn’t need to look at the old photo. I knew in my bones that I’d been here before.

The city did not magically unfold itself in memory after that. I only caught a few other glimpses of our first trip, mostly through smells and tastes instead of other sights. But La Alhambra was one of the reasons I fell in love with Granada, one reason I’d insisted to J that we go there this time. So it seems fitting that it was the place where past and present clicked together.

Just for a moment, I stood in both at once: the adventure I went on as a college student and the life I’ve built as a grown and married woman. The first-time traveler, clueless and eager, and the more seasoned one who’s still searching for something in every place she goes.

I’m no longer that girl, as I said; nor should I be, after nearly a decade and a half. I’ve grown beyond her in many ways, but I still carry her with me. It felt good, and somehow right, to meet her again in a garden and a city we both loved. I breathed a bit easier for the rest of the trip, after that.

More Spain photos and stories to come.

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