A Body Story

It’s 10:20 p.m., and I’m tired, so I don’t know how this piece will turn out.  But I committed to daily posting, so I don’t want to turn out the light on the day without expressing my gratitude for its fullness in little things.  It’s not like I was so busy with anything outstanding: I subbed a class, I went to the market, I got my hair cut.  I walked the dogs and cooked dinner for friends.  Nothing special.  Yet all of it was flourished with little grace notes.  The class began oddly, when the janitor didn’t show up to move fifteen spin cycles and mop sweat off the studio floor. The club manager got snippy with me when I came down to ask for help. The towels we used to swab the sweat turned a deep grungy gray; this floor must not get mopped too often. Ick. But the students were warm-hearted and so welcoming.  I’m hard pressed to recall a group of students who smiled more enthusiastically, or expressed greater appreciation after class.

I try to avoid the Cambridge Whole Foods on Saturdays because the parking lot is mobbed. Checkout lines sometimes snake halfway down the food aisles. Today, I found a parking spot easily. As I was getting my bags out of the Prius, I heard a whistle, and looked up to see my friend Kira parked the next aisle over.  She lives in Cambridge and I don’t get to see her often enough. We walked in to the store together, stopping in front of a sweet-smelling display of cherries, where we gabbed for about ten minutes. She’s one of those friends who always gets to the heart of things; I admire her courage, love her vulnerability, groove to her intelligence. It was good to see her.

My hairdresser Katie is due to have a baby in just two weeks. She’s been cutting my hair for at least ten years, reluctantly escorting me through the gnarly transition from chemical brown to natural gray. She co-owns the salon with her friend Gina. Gina has had a few kids over the years, but Katie, who is thirty-six and single, thought children probably weren’t in the cards for her. Then bam! She and her boyfriend found themselves expecting a baby, a little girl. They like the name Vanessa, or maybe Danica. Katie looks radiant, rounded and softened, as she rolls around me on a stool to cut my hair.  She’s traded out her usual high-heels for bedazzled Birkenstocks; it’s so endearing how motherhood changes us. Katie has big blue eyes and dimples. I hope Vanessa/Danica inherits those traits.

The dinner I prepared tonight was not elaborate: grilled salmon and a niçoise-y platter of steamed new potatoes and green beans, hard boiled eggs, and olives, a green salad on the side. Yet it fit the bill—elegant in its simplicity, satisfying enough for our friends, who between them had biked over a hundred miles this afternoon and needed to refuel. The conversation was fun and thought-provoking and effortless.

And: there were no bugs out on the trails today when I walked the dogs. It’s deerfly season, and the little buggers usually swarm Westley’s drool-y jaw, dive-bomb my eyes, get stuck in my hair.  But today, they were absent, and we could walk in peace, no constant swatting at the air in front of my face.

A day full of many small blessings.

Gratitude #13

I had a stirring experience out walking the dogs at lunchtime on the trails behind our house. Cordelia bounded off into the underbrush on the scent of some varmint or other.  She loves to find chipmunk hidey-holes, digging down until they are deep enough that she can stick her entire head underground and sniff. She looks headless, butt and tail high in the air, snout submerged. Meanwhile, Westley rumbled out of sight on the trail ahead, as he does on the homeward leg of our walks. I thought he might be investigating a loud, squawking bird in the distance.  I often find myself in this position, suspended between two dogs with different instincts, one a homebody, the other a hunter.

I sat on a log on the uphill side of the trail to wait for Cordelia to get bored and catch up. A steep incline rose behind my back, its crest perhaps forty yards above.  Down below, I could see the brushy growth of an old cranberry bog long overcome by a thicket of invasive shrubbery. I didn’t mind the wait. I enjoy the sounds of the woods, the sussurus of leaves, scrabbling sounds of small rodents, birdsong. But today there was this NOISY SQUAWKING BIRD caterwalling down in the bog. It sounded like a duck, or maybe a baby. I was near the back of my neighbor’s property—could this be their toddler kicking up a fuss?  She had been a colicky infant, with an insistent, piercing cry. Up over my shoulder, on the ridge, I heard a loud rustling in the leaves.  Cordelia, I suspected, and turned to call her. But Westley came barreling down the hill, juking off to the right as if he were running from something.  Seconds later, a doe bounded over the ridge; simultaneously, the squawking in the bog grew more insistent.  The doe bolted down the hillside towards me, cutting wildly to one side when she saw me, tearing back uphill and racing back and forth along the ridge.  Every few seconds, she’d stop and make an agonized, chuffing sound. She was frantic. Recognition dawned: the wailing from the bog must be her fawn, trapped in the thicket or the oozy mud. I stood between her and her baby, not a great place to be. A kick in the head from a deer would be fatal. The desperate call and response between the separated mother and her child continued, the deer streaking along the ridgeline, grunting feverishly, the baby crying out.  I felt paralyzed.  Cordelia appeared on the path, running to my side, spooked.  The deer stood still on the hill, looking at us, ears twitching, her breath coming hard. The fawn screeched out from the bog, then fell silent.  “I’m so sorry, mama.”  I said to her mother. “We’ll get out of your way.”  The doe looked at me, her chest heaving, as we retreated. And then she exploded down the hill towards the bog.

In that brief second, we understood each other: there is nothing more excruciating for a mother and her child than a forced separation.  I hope her baby was okay.  It’s late afternoon now, and the woods are silent.

Gratitude #12

Need I say more? I think it’s even better in my forties and fifties than when I was twenty, perhaps because I don’t take my friends for granted the way I did when I was younger. At every age, I’ve had a few epic evenings out with my friends:

Like with Kimberly and Laura in Chicago, in the 1980’s. We regularly ate dinners at Turbot’s or PJ Clarkes in the Gold Coast, cupping warm, fresh baked rolls in our palms and ordering white wine with our salads. When Kimberly turned thirty, we spent an unforgettable night fending off guys and overindulging in peach schnapps (!) on North Avenue. I was 26.  When I came home that night, I kicked off my shoes in the hall outside the apartment and left them there overnight, lined up by the door as if this were my closet. I hung my stockings on the refrigerator door handle and left my clothes in a trail across the living room. The next day was rough.  I took the train back uptown to Laura’s, and we sat around groaning, nursing our hangovers with McDonald’s french fries. Kimberly’s still in Chicago, and after a few moves, Laura has landed in New Orleans. They both lived in St. Louis for awhile and I was envious, but also happy to know they could easily get together. We message each other with occasional callouts for a reunion in the Big Easy. It’s on my bucket list, for sure.  Without the schnapps.

Another particularly memorable GNO was with “the Broads,” a dozen fellow singers in the a cappella group BroadBand, at the old Watch City Brewery in Waltham. At the time, Waltham was still one of the few towns in the suburbs west of Boston to retain its gritty, working class identity (during the nineteenth century, it was the premier watch making city in the U.S., and it has a deep history in the twentieth century labor movement), although recently, millennial professionals looking for more affordable housing have started started to hipster it up.  We arrived en masse for dinner after a performance at the nearby Watch Museum, seating ourselves loudly in the front window.  We wore “cocktail attire:” Our gig uniform that night was black formal. We certainly stood out among the Boston brewery-goers in their Patriots jerseys and Red Sox hats. Another diner leaned over and asked politely, “Excuse me, but why are you ladies all wearing black?” “We’re a coven,” someone shot back, to the gentleman’s bemusement. And then we laughed and told him we were a singing group, and somehow we wound up on our feet performing for the tables around us, the servers leaning against the wall laughing, fellow patrons smiling and clapping, asking if we took requests.  Thereafter, we self-identified as “the coven,” casting spells to help various group members find love, or work, or get pregnant. We haven’t failed yet.

Tonight, I had dinner with my Nia sisters in Concord before a seven p.m. dance class:  Maria, Amy, Lisa and I. We had a little over an hour to spend together and we didn’t talk about anything particularly earth-shattering. (Although, Maria: we are totally serious that we want you to lead a Dance Spell retreat in Thailand in 2020. Let’s manifest that!) We didn’t get drunk or dance on the table or laugh so hard we snorted water out our nostrils; it wasn’t a Judd Apatow movie moment. We no longer need those, if we ever did. Yet it felt luxurious to spend time with these goddesses, sipping club soda through our cold steel straws, picking tortilla strips out of our salads, checking in on everyone’s well-being. Your women friends hold you in a different embrace than your partner or spouse, at least if that person is a man…not better, but with a distinct quality that’s nourishing and liberating and absolutely necessary.

 Ok, ladies, you’re in my calendar for August 9.

Gratitude #11

That’s right, I’m ba-ack. The ten pounds I gained, lost and regained in my childbearing years turned into twenty as I trundled through menopause. Last year, I ladled on another five, like hot fudge on a sundae. That simile sounds cavalier, but I actually made a choice, out of self-care, not to go crazy worrying about eating when I had many other pressures to juggle. If your relationship with food is disordered, as mine has been off and on since girlhood, there are a million traps to fall into: food is solace, it’s reward, it’s excitement, catharsis, fun and shame—everything other than what it actually is: flavored fuel.

It’s not the number on the scale that concerns me, or how I look. As a fitness teacher, I spend at least four hours a week time watching myself in the mirror, and I love how I move. I feel profoundly beautiful, every inch, when I’m dancing. My motivation is that the rest of the time, I’m not physically comfortable in my skin. Clothes pull, sweat gathers in a recently acquired roll at my waist, my feet hurt. I wish I was one of those people who could avoid gaining weight by trusting innate body wisdom. But if I leave things up to my intuition, I’ll eat too much sugar and drink too much wine, because those substances are addictive for me. It’s hard to increase my exercise level; I’m already so active. And any program that’s too restrictive is out of the question – if I have to deprive myself of all of the pleasures of eating, forgeddaboutit.  I’ll cave in, usually spectacularly, as if the best reward for two weeks without bread is two loaves tonight.  Weightwatchers is the only approach I’ve ever been able to sustain.

It takes guts to walk into a meeting. My armor is to feel that I’m somehow better than this person or that since I’ve fewer pounds to lose. Snotty, right? Whether you are ten pounds overweight, or a hundred, you show up with your best intentions in one hand and your shame in the other. The room is full of lively women and a handful of men who daily face down the judgment and insensitivity of people who have no idea of their struggles: backhanded compliments (“You’ve lost forty-five pounds? You must’ve been big as a house!”), implied criticism from co-workers (“You’re eating that?”),  superior sideways glances of airplane seat mates. These folks wear their hearts on their sleeves, sharing stories about sneak eating subs parked behind the dumpster in a mall parking lot, or hiding “evidence” of a binge—candy wrappers, ice cream or Chinese food cartons, pistachio shells—in their kitchen garbage or the trash bin of the company across the hall. Every day is a battle for my Weightwatchers colleagues, against their own impulses, and the humiliating ways our culture treats them. Every meeting I go to, I learn something from them about vulnerability, courage, comraderie.

Gratitude #10

I must have started to write three different times this afternoon, but my brain felt sludgy and clogged, like a sewage drain. Nothing was really speaking to me, and the blessings that did come to mind were cliché: love, friendship, healing, serendipity, flowers. Although of course I am grateful for those things, without which the stresses of the last year would have squashed me like a bug on a windshield. Searching for inspiration, I pulled an affirmation card from a Nature deck I bought when I needed a muse: “Winter Solstice” – pause for reflection, review, rest, imagine, move forward. The illustration was wintry and cool, all icy blues and deep snow in a forest of naked birches, the popsicle of cards to have pulled on a day when the temperature tops 90 degrees. I reflected on the prompts for some time, the invitation to take a break, to rest, to honor the fallow moments of quiet, the waiting times, the deep freeze.

This is all a poetic way of telling you I took a snooze on the living room couch.

I slept for about twenty minutes, waking to a drizzle of drool on my bicep, and Cordelia looking at me curiously from the floor.  This is not my typical afternoon behavior.  Those twenty minutes were pure gold – not so much that I won’t sleep tonight, but enough to reboot my brain.

I’ve always loved to nap. When I was pregnant with Nate, I was a teacher at a high school about an hour from home. There was a big break between morning classes and my afternoon theater program, so I stashed a sleeping bag in my office and curled up under the desk every afternoon for a serious first-trimester snooze, more hibernation than catnap. A couple of my students—boys—found me once, my office was in the theater shop, off the beaten track for kids, so I thought I was safe. Their expressions when they saw me snoring on the floor were gobsmacked. “Mrs. K, are you ok?”  They probably thought I’d been drinking.

Up until they were three or so, my kids loved their naps.  They thudded like fallen trees down onto the crib mattress, waking with their hair curled against sweaty foreheads, clutching an over-loved scrap of blankie or stuffed bunny, eyes bright and ready for action.  When they began to fight off sleep, I thought “Nooooooo!”  I don’t know who needed their naps more, the overstimulated toddler, or the overtired mom.  Can you imagine resisting a nap?

When I first left my job six years ago, though, I did feel weird falling asleep during the day.  It confirmed my sense of interstitial otherness – no workplace, no kids to tend to, only dogs, dinner, errands, and whatever else I freelanced up. Studying neuroscience, I’ve since learned that naps are super-charged brainfood.  Any excuse….

Gratitude #9

Some mornings, I just feel rushed the moment I wake up. Such was the case today, when I shoveled my laundry into the bin and tossed my water bottle and phone on top to carry everything downstairs. The fitted sheet had pulled off the corners of our mattress, and the top sheet was nowhere to be seen, oddly. So making the bed took more time than it typically does. I was about ten minutes off my usual timing when I arrived downstairs, which in turn meant I only had a half an hour to get the laundry going, have a cup of coffee, make a power shake and check my email before I’d have to head out to my 8:25 class, twenty minutes from home.

Everything felt off kilter. I spilled protein powder all over the counter. The leggings I’d put on were too damn hot—after two cool days, the heat is back. John and I were edgy with each other over breakfast. Somehow the time got away from me. When I looked at my watch, it was almost 8:05.  I should have left ten minutes ago. I barked at John to move his car while I grabbed keys, water bottle, phone.

Wait:  Where the hell was my phone?  I keep the playlists for my classes on it, or I would have just bolted out the door sans ITunes. It was set to “Do Not Disturb”, so it would be no use calling it.  I raced up to our bedroom on the third floor, no phone.  Down to the kitchen again, maybe under the newspaper? Nope. Not in the bathroom or on the kitchen counters or the porch table.  Valuable minutes were ticking past. It was almost 8:10 when it came to me:  I had put the phone in the laundry bin. I had put the laundry in the washer. Oy vey.

You know where this is going.  My phone is now extremely clean. Non-functioning, but sparkling.  It’s sitting on the kitchen counter in a mug-full of rice, in the hopes it will dry out and the home button will start working again. Fifty-fifty chance of that.

So where is the mixed blessing here, you may be wondering?

I have to confess, I had a lovely day without the dang thing. My class was relaxing and playful (I used my laptop for the music.)  A few students were also running behind, so it didn’t matter than I came screeching in to teach five minutes late. I’m certainly a far less distracted driver without my device. Even though I have a hands-free interface, it’s tempting to take a peek. It was relaxing to go about my day secure in the knowledge that no one could reach me.  No one really needs to all that badly; I’m not a trauma surgeon. It felt good to reclaim my independence. Presumably, I’ll be back to my old bad habits in no time.

Then again: maybe not.

Gratitute #8

I’m so lucky I married someone who shares my faith. Let me assure you, we have our challenges, like any married couple (see my post “Floss Picks,” for example), but spiritual incompatibility isn’t one of them. I’m not talking about the doctrinaire kind of faith, as in adherence to a particular set of beliefs or a strict set of teachings.  I mean the quality of faithfulness, the desire to connect to a power or value greater than ourselves in the full expectation that whoever or whatever it is matters and cares, loves us all, and will respond. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary – corrupt, mean people, bad days, undeserved illnesses of our friends and families, great injustices all around, loss and heartache, car accidents and malware and all the other shit that happens to us, Love is our source. Fred Rogers (aka “Mr. Rogers”) says it so well (if you haven’t seen the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor, then I recommend you do so, STAT):  “Love is at the root of everything.  Love, or the lack of it.”

For me and John, we share an upbringing in the Episcopal church that has given us a shared vocabulary through the years, but I’m not talking about that. What I really appreciate about John, and our relationship, is that we can talk frankly about our spiritual lives, which often means about our doubts: Have we done right by the kids? Are we living up to our own expectations that we do some good in the world? Should we be spending so much money on landscaping every year? (There’s a one-percenter’s problem, if ever there was one…) It also means that when we have tough decisions or disagreements before us, we hold our fears and struggles up to God-as-we-each-understand-him/her/it in the expectation that this exercise will be illuminating – a new job, a difficult conversation, a worry about a family member, these are the sorts of concerns we meditate on together. And you know, it always helps, every time. Although not always in the way we expect, which I suppose is the point. He’s an unusually soulful man, my husband, and I love him for it. It’s made things easier, especially in the dry years, the periods of inattention or languor that are inevitable in a long marriage, that we “get” each other in something as squishy and otherworldly as a thirst for divinity and meaning. It’s not a quality the world prizes much, although I have yet to meet a person whose life hasn’t come up against the need for faithfulness.  And y’know, not to get too personal here, but it’s sexy.

On Sundays, we’ll often meditate together, using a reading as a jumping off point to ground us.  And then we talk or walk the dogs, and the layers of insight unfold naturally, like a flower in the sun.  Little blockages and thorns that we may be feeling around a certain issue ease up.  They don’t disappear, this isn’t magic, nor does it substitute for taking action. But a little daylight trickles in that helps us see something in a new light, and that’s all we needed.

Gratitude #7

 

Summer storms are the best purgatives, aren’t they?  We had a whopper yesterday afternoon, after a moody morning of fitfull, humid gusts. Out on the trail with the dogs, the air pressed around my shoulders like a heavy cape, and leaves danced spastically above as the breeze accelerated, then died, then accerlerated again. When we came to
the high clearing where the trail branches down in several directions, the sky to the west was battleship gray, steely-blue and foreboding.  I’d planned to walk a slightly longer route in hopes of beating the weather; local radio announcers had been bleating about heavy rains and thunderstorms all morning, words like “perilous” and “torrential” peppered the weather reports. As we looked west towards the approaching front, Cordelia’s ears pricked up at a distant roll of thunder. She’s not a fan. I don’t know the circumstances of her Tennessee puppyhood, but she is cowed by sudden loud noises – cracking branches, distant fireworks, a car backfiring. Her bold little spirit is undone by thunderstorms. Her tail curls between her legs and her ears flatten against her skull.  She freezes, standing, as if to avoid notice of this booming threat. We once had another dog who hated thunderstorms, Hobbes. When he got older and sick, he would run away if he sensed a storm was coming, and the entire panicked family would fan out in the driving rain to find him. I didn’t think Cordelia would bolt, but rescue dogs have unexpected layers, so I leashed her up and we turned back, Westley, unperturbed, leading the way. The woods grew darker and the thunder followed us as we alternately jogged and race-walked the mile home.

The storm broke over the house about five minutes after we got inside. Those radio announcers weren’t kidding: Rain slashed down in vertical sheets, so heavy you couldn’t see more than twenty feet out the window. Thunder rolled cathartically over the roof and the wind whipped the treetops into a froth. Cordie followed me like a small child from room to room as I showered and got ready to meet a friend for lunch, her expression wary and submissive. Westley, on the other hand, is impervious to such energetic surges: he phlumpheddown onto his bed in the mudroom and fell asleep as the sky crackled and boomed overhead.  I’m neither afraid, nor inured. I love a good thunderstorm. It’s like fireworks, the boom in your chest, the explosion of sound and energy, the anticipation of waiting for the next crrr-ACK!, the suspense: when it will come? Thrilling.

By late yesterday afternoon, the system of turbulent weather had moved out to sea. A sweet, cool front skipped in on its heels, the humidity washed away, the sky scrubbed a deep blue. This morning, the air is crystalline, the light sparkles, the sky is bluer than a baby’s eyes. Such a morning fills your heart right up.

I try to remember, in these tumultuous times, that the bombast of a big storm so often leads to a cleaner, healthier day.

Gratitude #6

My life has been revolutionized by the humble floss pick.

It’s terrible for the environment, I admit. My unappealing habit of flossing in John’s car and leaving my used Placquers™ in the cup holders has caused at least one near-shouting match, and numerous other tense moments between us. The picks multiply like a pestilence, in the bottom of my purse, the floor of my car, the bedside table, the kitchen drawers.  I promise I try to remember to throw them out.  I shudder to think what harms my discarded floss picks may be doing to the bellies of right whales.  On the upside, perhaps local birds use them to build plastic-fortified nests. Another benefit: if your dog eats a strand of actual dental floss, the kind that unspools from the plastic box, it can be muy problemo for your pup, and mucho dinero for you. I know this because Westley once ate a box of floss. Apparently, it could have wrapped around his organs and cut off his blood supply. So using floss picks could save your dog’s life. Just sayin’.

Post-college, when I had little money and no dental insurance, I had a come-to-Jesus oral hygiene moment. I still felt scarred by a dentist I’d visited when I was in boarding school: Lecturing performatively to dental students over his shoulder as he introduced the drill into my mouth, he whacked a molar, sending a chip flying across the room. I was a twinge dentist-averse as a result. But a massive toothache eventually drove me to my knees, and thence, to a dentist. The hygienist gasped when I opened my mouth. “Somebody hasn’t been flossing,” she said sternly. Of course not. I was twenty-something. A dazzling smile and healthy teeth were my birth right.  These should not require any highly specialized maintenance beyond daily brushing, I felt. In brief: the lady was a bit of a masochist. She went at my teeth with a vengeance, using every scraper, sharp crevice poker, and other torture device in her arsenal. When the dentist rolled up on his little stool to examine me, my gums aching and bloodied, she pursed her lips disapprovingly and muttered behind him: “Not a flosser.” As if I forged checks, or tormented small animals with barbeque tongs. I couldn’t even breathe comfortably, let alone chew, for five days after her ministrations. But now, thanks to floss picks, I’m a dentist’s dream. At my semi-annual cleaning last week, my hygienist Maureen barely took fifteen minutes before peeling off her sterile gloves with a snap: “See you in six months.”

Today, I went out for lunch with my friend Robyn. We both ordered the restaurant’s signature salad of shredded kale and brussels sprouts – vegetable slivers weaponized to burrow straight into the gum line. But thanks to my trusty packet of CVS floss sticks, which reside in the center console of my car for just such eventualities, I was clean as whistle before the stoplight even turned green.  

Gratitude #5

What’s not to love? It’s summer in a bowl. Not Massachusetts summers, where corn-on-the-cob, clams and blueberry pies set the tone, but Spanish ones: spicy, flavorful, meeting the heat with a cooling sizzle.  I was in middle school when a bowl of the stuff was first placed before me at lunch with my grandmother. I looked over the rim with dread: I hadn’t yet embraced the concept that vegetables might be a source of gastronomic pleasure.  My grandmother waited for me to dip my spoon into the bowl of suspiciously vomit-like chunks.  She perpetually needled me to lose my “baby fat,” which was so aggravating. Such a pointedly healthy menu item was bound to raise my hackles. “It’s like liquid salad,” she said, unhelpfully.  Wait, it’s COLD?  I thought.  I had been silently working to convince myself that I liked ketchup, after all, and I liked Campbell’s cream of Tomato soup and spaghetti sauce, so maybe this tomato-y murk would turn out to be at least tolerable.

“Is there celery in it,” I asked, bile rising.  I have lifelong celery-related PTSD after my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Ebbets, withheld chocolate pudding from my classmates because we are all going to wait for our dessert until HOLLY finishes her tuna salad.  On my plate sat a mound of celery-studded, purplish, stinky, institutional grade tuna salad larger than a regulation softball. I was a gagger. Mrs. Ebbets didn’t care for my “theatrics.” Duly warned, she insisted I forge ahead with “personal fortitude.”  About five mouthfuls in, fortitude failed me. I turned to my left and disgorged undigested tuna into Gib Chapman’s lap, beginning a chain reaction. We’ve lost touch since grade school, but perhaps Gib also suffers to this day from celery-induced trauma, his lovely wife wondering all these years why he blanches at the very mention of a Bloody Mary, the stalk garnish slashing though his equanimity, daring him not to regress to that awful day.  He was always such a nice guy.  I’m so sorry.

“No celery,” said my grandmother. “It’s healthy, dear, you should eat it.”  She fixed me with a steely, matriarchal eye. I’d better just get on with it. Thankfully, this story does not also end with me blowing chunks. Salad soup was surprisingly okay. Perhaps this bowl of gazpacho was the dawning of my adult palette.

My grandmother looked on with a self-satisfied air.  “If you ate more of that, you’d be thin as a rail,” she said, “like me.”  Ugh.

Still, I have to thank her for the introduction. I now take deep delight in a good-sized bowl of “liquid salad.”  For years, I’ve made my own gazpacho, experimenting with different recipes and textures, my kitchen strewn with tomato seeds and slivers of peeled tomato skin, smelling of August.  A food processor or blender is overkill;  it’s best when I work the ripe tomatoes through my fingers to get the consistency I like, crunchy-creamy.  It’s mainstream now, so I just buy it. The health food store in Concord makes a “green gazpacho” that’s loaded with garlic and herbs – your gut feels instantly cleansed one spoonful in. The local farm-stand has a nice, classic version: blended, peppery and refreshing. I had a bowl for lunch today, nourishing me as I write.  So good.

Gratitude #4