heirloom tomato ginger muffins with pine nuts, olive oil, & orange blossom

After our sojourn to New York, Tennessee seems positively vast and serene, especially in the late August light. I’ve been so exhausted I’ve yet to even unpack. Brocade trousers are tangled with winklepickers and indignant silk shirts spilling out of the old Samsonite next to the bed as I’ve rummaged through them to retrieve necessities like medicine and toothpaste. Treasures I acquired are strewn on my dining room table. Books and magazines: Kinfolk, Diner, Meat Paper, and Lucky Peach, a biography of M.F.K. Fisher and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste. Tins of salt: black, pink, and truffle next to a crumpled, long since empty brown paper bag stamped “milkbar”. There’s also patina mottled flatware, a cow skull, The Birthday Party’s Peel Sessions on vinyl, and a cheap pair of round, wire rimmed sunnies. Suffice to say, for now, the trip was a feast. It was grand, and I’m glad to be home.

 

I imagined my summer was going to be this over-exposed heat wave during which I would make gazpacho, read novels, write daring manuscripts, snap effortless, enigmatically flawed photos with a Brownie, and cook everything over an open fire. Float. I look at too many photographs. These real months did not turn out to be a languid roll of film full of light leaks and rippling water. I may have not seen the seaside or spent as many evenings on the porch as I’d imagined, but instead this summer was animated. We have a our new project afoot that I keep alluding to and between the two of us have been researching everything from holiday in Romania to how to make kombucha to the Chinese zodiac. I am, as it turns out, a water pig in love with a fire tiger. Huh.

 

I’m excitable. That’s evident. I say yes to everything. But often I get so ahead of myself that I actually feel behind, like I’m forever catching up, keeping up, tripping over my shoe-laces. I careen. Scramble. Forever late with wild hair & impudent eyeliner smeared along my lash line. Flour every where. I rather like to think I’m not behind in the first place. I like to look at the cliques of dirty cups that congregate on my counter and think it is just so. And no matter how frantic my internal or external reality, every day ends beneath a white sheet tucked neatly beneath his arm like a parcel. There’s always that. And that is better than surf or grilled peaches or finally finishing Infinite Jest. Which is saying a lot. Because those are some of the best things on this green earth.