The architecture of toast

I'll say it again, I always burn the first slice of toast.

Though not so thoroughly it can't be resolved by a quick and firm knock against the kitchen counter to remove the carbon crumbs. Never apologize, Julia Child would say, just serve it forth proudly.

I often want to start over. To dismantle the beginnings of this blog, retract older, published pieces, forget past relationships, and begin entirely anew on the sketch that, erased too many times, inevitably shows phantom pencil lines etched behind the finished portrait. I might want to waste that first slice of toast in the name of a more golden hue. Except all of these are an essential imprint of the work it took to build the better, perhaps more polished, current state.

I'll decide it's not the perfectly browned bread that makes the day, but rather the spread, piled confidently on top.

Today's spread: Great Hills blue, sourwood honey, fresh black figs, whole-grain toast--burnt, of course.

For the birds

I liked feeding ducks. As a kid it was my most favorite outing—toting too old sandwich bread to the pond and pinching off pieces to feed the waterfowl. They were mostly mallards, I think, brilliant, green-necked males and the subtler but intricately patterned brunette females, still with that one spot of dazzling blue on the lower wing. There are all sorts of posted warnings now, that offering them bread makes the birds too dependent on human interaction, compromises migration instincts, and disrupts necessary flight patterns. For the greater good, you shouldn’t feed the ducks.

Weary of grandparents, and even parents alike, who begin stories with stale refrains of back in my time…

“...gas was less than a dollar,”
or
“...one always wore a belt with pants,”
or even
“...I walked to school, uphill both ways,”

imagine my dismay that at the age of twenty-seven I have become the sort of old-timer who says, “In my day, we fed ducks.” Except I’m too young to throw up my hands in absolved dismay of social obligation; the ducks and I have too much time left. I’ve learned to heed the signs.

I can’t be certain, but I imagine it was an extrapolation of childhood memories that lead me to my next avian endeavor. By senior year of college I had an off-campus apartment: two bedrooms, fifth floor, balcony overlooking the main drag. With quaint visions of colorful flocks alighting at my kitchen window, I started tossing bread onto the terrace—heels of the whole-wheat loaves I carried home in excess each afternoon following a too early bakery shift. And then I waited for my eco-urban bird feeder to lure in the exotic droves.

Expecting an exaltation of larks, imagine my surprise when five hundred pigeons arrived, set up permanent residence on the fire escape, and (no polite way to say it, really) crapped everywhere. The invasion was so immediate and dense that it prompted an abrupt visit from the building manager by the next morning. “Sooooo,” he began, “have you noticed the bird problem on the balcony?” I shrugged. “Any idea how it happened?” he continued. “Um,” I suggested, “global warming?”

Of course the truth was that it was my fault. That I’d intentionally thrown bread onto the balcony in a shortsighted attempt at bird bevy turned public biohazard. And I’d feel worse about it now, but I’m fairly certain I evened out any karmic debt by scraping mounds of bird feces into trash bags for the duration of my lease. Oh, and I named most of the pigeons too. Not with cutesy, feathery titles but real, adult names that I imagined matched their very serious and bustling schedules. Susan, Fredrick, Steven, Jonathon, Lorelei…the list goes on. It’s how I made the best out of the situation at hand.

Because I often pride myself on sound decision-making and risk evaluation, it makes me smile now to think that I was once naïve enough to expect birds of paradise when pigeons were the more obvious reality. I’m fairly certain it’s the sort of memory enduring optimism depends upon.

Lagging Journalism

Let’s talk about writing for a bit.

I have been told that I’m a good writer. It’s a phrase that seems misleading. What people are commenting on is my work, in it’s already written form. The writing, they say, is good.

To describe someone as a good writer, however, could also imply that you think the person is good at the act of writing itself, not the creation of the words, but the actual job of getting thought to word-processor, and then to reader, all in an orderly manner. And in my case, I’m afraid, this statement could not be further from the truth. What I am good at is staring at the wall, searching the Internet for inane trivia, and accomplishing household tasks that include, but are not limited to, rearranging the freezer and dusting off major pantry shelves. The actual writing part is hard to come by.

Let me be clear, this is not writer’s block. Writer’s block is that thing I suffer mid-semester when my brain is so maxed out on logarithmic functions I cannot remember what my watch says no matter how many times I check the hour, never mind deign to dream up some inspired article. This particular brand of waylaid creativity is called productive procrastination, that is the process by which you accomplish many, smaller, and seemingly less appealing tasks instead of tackling the one order of business you actually set out to fulfill. It can apply to nearly any scenario I imagine—filing your taxes or cleaning out the attic. For me, it refers exclusively to writing.

Actually, I have likely done all the before mentioned tasks instead of tether myself to my desk as intended. I do not like electron orbital theory, yet it has a system to it, a way for me to scan a textbook repeatedly and eventually, with enough perseverance, come up with some sort of answer. There is in fact an answer: a right or wrong solution to the problem at hand. Such is not the case with the creative, written word and story. The start and end are both elusive, and the middle could meander anywhere in between. And that is a thought so daunting I’ll need to take a break, often before I’ve really begun.

Yesterday alone I took a spray bottle and scouring pad to several surfaces of my kitchen and bathroom. That’s right, I spent Monday willingly scrubbing out the inside of the toilet in place of writing this blog post. This is that brief moment of summer when I am in a lull between classes, working only part time, and supposedly stock piling valuable articles, editing past quips, and sending out resumes and writing samples like my livelihood depends on it. My livelihood could depend on it. And still I have spent the afternoon taking a Q-tip to the greasy crevices of the stove and cleaning crumbs out from under the refrigerator. I have become the sort of writer who vacuums reliably.

I am a planner. I do the research, I make informed decisions, I never miss deadlines. Yet I seem to have developed some system wherein I base all my creative decisions and projects on unknown cosmic forces, mysterious even to myself. I arrive at my desk each afternoon with ample time to get to work and decide quickly that something in the mood is not quite right, the lighting is off, the chair is much too hard. I am the goldilocks of the literary profession.

I have performed strange rituals of urban Feng Shui in which I shove the furniture around my room until something feels right. I have decided that the vibe will be better after I go for a walk, bake cookies, or catch up on some correspondence. I have probably made lunch. I definitely made lunch.

Prosciutto, arugula, and olive oil toasted baguette, rubbed all over with garlic while still hot front the oven.

And then I likely lunched leisurely, reading someone else’s scholarly work, marveling at their willpower to crank out such a tome and all the while prolongedly chewing spicy rocket greens in the name of literary hesitation.

It seemed at first shocking to me that I should be so orderly in much of my daily life yet still leave so much up to chance and good vibes in my creative endeavors. And then I realized the source of this seeming personality divide. For all the jokes I make about my hippy parents, they are particularly meticulous people. For instance, our vacuum cleaner bit the dust two years ago. I know what you’re thinking—so, just order up a new one. It should be so easy. Instead we went, all three of us, to the local vacuum mart, armed with print-outs of online research, consumer reports, and stories from other friends and family of their own vacuum woes and triumphs. I understood that my role on this particular field-trip was not that solely of consumer but of inheritor—the appliance surely written into the family will such were the thoroughly researched and lofty expectations for this new machine.

It’s kind of like a bad joke really—what do you get when you mix together two people equal parts teacher, interior designer, anthropologist, and contractor? Two artist parents who say things like do what makes you happy and also decidedly drive you around the East coast's more than than two dozen distinct colleges so you can make an informed decision based equally on enrollment statistics and whatever groovy vibes of the locale. It's the sort of road trip that is filled with opportunity and will bring each of you to tears of frustration at least once. But, then these are the sorts of parents who will make sure you have the creative ability to believe in almost anything, and then the meticulous skillset to make sure those dreams become weight-bearing structures. The joke is actually on me then, I suppose, the kid who could have walked away quietly with a liberal arts degree in languages and literatures but is slogging through collegiate round-two for a Master of Science.

And then it’s not so far fetched either, I guess, that I’ve ended up here, in the early hours of the morning typing hard at the document I ignored all of yesterday, and most of today, because there was laundry to get done and my desk was facing a bit too much towards the southwest.

On my walk to the gym this morning I passed a police officer. One of Brookline’s finest. It took me a moment to understand his purpose, stationed prominently at the corner of Harvard and Beacon. He did not seem to be investigating any local shenanigans, nor directing traffic. And then it struck me: he was there to protect the pavement.

Let me explain. The Brookline sidewalks have been a mess for weeks, large sections torn out for regrading, and the walking path whittled down to a mere strip of cement on which neon-cladd joggers, grocery bags laden seniors, and tired parents with multiple children in tow, all must vie for space. So, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, I suppose this officer did have a purpose. He was prominently positioned to protect the freshly laid laminate from impatient pedestrians, such as myself, cavalierly side-stepping this commuting clusterfuck to stride through fresh cement in the name of actually getting to work on time.

Except if we’re being honest, this gentleman was literally, physically, watching cement dry. Tax dollars well spent, indeed. That was his job for the better part of the day. And it occurred to me that even though I was currently circumnavigating my own afternoon task, no matter what little, menial work I produced, it could literally trump staring at the ground, with ease. Some sort of creative pressure deep within me relaxed.

So here I am, typing too long and too late to the point that tomorrow morning’s wake-up alarm will sound too soon, but something in the air, the evening breeze, the glass and a half of wine I’ve now worked through, any of the above, really, have all magically shifted into place to craft this piece that starts and ends completely inconsequentially. But it's the writing, not the subject, that matters in the end.

What's on the plate

Last week, a second grader told me the tamales we’d made looked like puke. Last month, a coworker told me the cookies I’d baked were dry. This next part may be hard to believe: the former comment (yes, the one about vomit) is actually the less offensive.

“But, second graders LIKE puke” my father reassured me in an email earlier this week. He’s right too. Not in the sense that any child likes to be sick, but disgust in not inherent, rather inherited from our surroundings—taught and passed down. A child is not fundamentally opposed to all those things we deem uncivilized with age. Think of your own youthful self, likely runny nosed and carefree, eating lunch hungrily with your inexplicably but perpetually sticky fingers.

As a kid, you probably ate dirt. I did, although only once. The chocolate muffins I’d mixed from mud in my parents’ front yard for a moment so mesmerizing that I completely lost track of reality and dug in with the biggest bite.

The point is, the kid’s comment was an innocent observation; a child racking his brain to align the sight of this new, foreign food in front of him with anything, some sight or texture, that would be familiar. That he landed on puke was not really insult so much as happenstance. The coworker comment, however, that one was premeditated, not a helpful critique rather an exertion of power. Fittingly, I asked the second grader to elaborate for me why he thought the food reminded him of this particular bodily fluid. I didn’t offer my coworker a second cookie.

When I first started assisting with the kids’ cooking classes, I was acutely aware of the physical obstacles. Often several of the students couldn’t reach the stovetop without the use of a stool, or rather energetic teaching assistant. But there were less tangible obstacles too: unfairly, ingrained opinions about food, specifically what one liked, or didn’t like, to eat. And because the goal of the curriculum is to expose kids to a variety of foods, exploring different ingredients, recipes, tastes and textures to inspire interest in diverse cuisines, there were inevitably many foods identified as enemies early into the lessons.

I anticipated that my job was to change their minds; to spend the day convincing kids to devour whichever ingredient had piqued their distaste. That is counterproductive effort. What I do instead is teach these kids how to transform the components before them into a meal. I teach them how to cut the vegetables so they’ll cook uniformly, how to brown the meat so it’ll let off the most flavor for the stew, and so on. And by offering the students the responsibility of participating in this kitchen environment, they return the trust with an enthusiasm for cooking, and then tasting.

The kids’ cooking classes all end the same way: a meal prepared and shared by the students. They arrive at the table hungry from the morning’s culinary adventure, but they also arrive tableside with a genuine excitement to taste, and discuss, the meal they’ve made. The desire to sample their work can even trump any initial ingredient skepticism.

My goal was initially to offer this group of students basic cooking lessons, to make sure everyone left well fed, and with all their fingers. (They always do, by the way. The single hospital trip I’ve ever taken was with the 25-year-old culinary student whose cavalier ego was briefly cut down to size along with the tip of his thumb). The actual accomplishments of my work in the program are subtler, but also further reaching. It’s thrilling that the lunch-table chatter becomes a fuller story of the ingredients, the work that went into transforming them into the meal, and which parts the kids want to recreate over and over again. And sometimes, that conversation is all thanks to that one ham who stands on his chair, fork in hand, and declares that the meal looks like spew.

That kid, after being gently reminded about table manners, offers his peers the very important opportunity to talk about what they’re eating. The tamales looked like puke because the texture of the masa we’d mixed and packed into cornhusks was nearly, entirely exotic as a food to this group of adolescents from Brookline elementary. This kid was just begging for a better understanding of his meal.

Loving every bite is never a requirement, but it is important to taste everything, to be able to participate in our conversation about the meal. I don’t teach kids that they have to like certain foods, but rather give them a way of expressing what it is, exactly, that they don’t like, or do in fact, want seconds of, pretty please. I don’t reprimand the kid who announces he doesn’t like the lamb curry, I only ever ask why. The same goes for the fourth grader who thinks she’ll impress me just by saying the gazpacho is delicious; I’ll need to know the reasoning.

Texture, temperature, mouth-feel, aroma. Maybe these things seem beyond the eating experience of the average elementary-schooler, except they are actually the most basic understandings we have of our food, and they are at play even in the minds of the youngest eaters. It’s why I’m so continually disappointed by youth cooking curriculums that emphasize “kid friendly” as synonymous to “fried with cheese.” Macaroni leaves little room for dynamic discussion of what’s on the plate.

None of this is to say that I haven’t seen several, well seasoned, chefs brought to the end of their patience by a group of high-schoolers vehemently voicing their opinions about the meal being prepared before them. “Before you say anything,” announced our chef-instructor lecturing on the cuisine of southern china and tipping the fermented black bean paste into the wok, “remember that I grew up in Hong Kong and when I first came to this country, I thought your beloved Doritos tasted like feet.” Taste, is relative, she’d deftly pointed out. And everyone had laughed, and then, albeit cautiously, tried the dish.

By talking about food—the good, the bad, and even the pukey—the meal becomes more valuable.

To protect the innocent, and the not so innocent too, no photos of kids, but fresh ingredients, washed, chopped and waiting patiently for their turn in the wok.

Figs

These are figs—“The fruit of the fig-tree, a tree or bush which seems to have come originally from the East. It was certainly known in the very earliest times,” says my 1961 edition of Larousse Gastronomique, I think referring to the edible fruit’s history as one of mankind’s first cultivated plants, and possibly also the popularity of the strategically placed fig leaf in ancient arts and literatures. These figs, in particular, arrived in my kitchen via snail mail and a well-packed box sent by my mother along with tales of our neighbors’ fig orchard filled with bulbous fruit ripening simultaneously and in such quantity it nearly rained down from the trees.

I have lots of great recipes for figs. I used none of them. Because figs happen to be one of my most favorite things in this world. I ate these figs straight from the box moments after their arrival, stuffing one juicy fruit into my mouth after another in pure gluttony. They were so perfectly ripe and tender and lightly effervescent, nearly fermenting in their own skins during the two-day trip through the USPS. I didn’t really share them. I didn’t really even offer. I just bit in and savored every, beautiful, dripping bite.

Around the time these figs showed up last year, I was already dealing with figs. of a different kind. Sig. figs. to be exact, which is an abbreviation for significant figures, and which are the most obnoxious invention of the collegiate chemistry system to torture students who are already flailing their way through introduction chemistry and just. don’t. get. it. The idea is that significant figures determine a reasonable point at which to round off your data, which is likely some unwieldy decimal, produced from some fantastic calculation off some experiment that you still don’t quite understand. How to determine how many significant figures should be present,—or sig. figs. or SFS for super short— depends on how many decimal spaces were in your calculation, and whether you were multiplying or adding, and how many numbers your started with, and probably what you plan to name your first born child.

The important point is that on an introduction to chemistry final exam at the university level, you can do all the math correctly, figure out all the equations, and even include the correct, obscure units. But if you entered the wrong number of SFS in the final answer box of doom, you will get the whole flipping question incorrect. And I did. Over, and over again. While advanced electron mass spectrometry finally came into focus, this intricate system for divining how many numbers to stick on after the decimal point remained elusive. I did however come up with some pretty good acronyms for SFS in my frustrations including seriously feeling sad, super frustrating statistics, and stupid f***ing science. You may choose your favorite.

I took oceanography as an undergraduate. For a good reason. I believe I’ve mentioned before the difficulty I’ve had in returning to college to make up the science prerequisites that my own undergraduate education conveniently omitted. It’s been a test of intelligence, will power, and self-esteem. That’s pretty much all I did last year while entirely ignoring my blog, most of my social life, and good housekeeping habits—I did science, slogging my way through several rounds of chemistry prerequisites, GRE practice tests, and graduate school applications. And I’m sure it sounds like I’m exaggerating. In fact I hope it does, because that would be less embarrassing than the truth that daily, timed quizzes, advanced conceptual electron theory, and freshmen classmates who repeatedly said things like “you look old, what year are you?” never really felt any easier. Not to mention that sinking fear that if I didn’t snap the whole chemical schebang into focus for myself but quick, my dream would be dead.

So I cried. Kind of a lot. I didn’t eat very much either. And I went to a lot of tutoring sessions with teaching assistants who were younger than me, who didn’t get why I didn’t get it, and really needed to meet Jenny at swim practice and wanted to go to the dining hall first to grab some dinner with Susie and John, so could I just wrap up already, ok? By the time I’d clawed my way out of the academic gutter to get a grasp on the concepts being presented to me I was exhausted. I was studying more hours a day than I care to admit, at weird hours of both the morning and evening. And I even did things like read books about the brain to try to understand how mine worked, how I could possibly make it understand chemistry, and how to avoid inducing a stroke in the meantime.

So that brings us to here, I suppose, which is probably the moment where I should make sweeping promises of writing to this blog more consistently again now that chemistry has ended. But I assume even the most dedicated of my readers has shriveled up and died waiting for a post, so I’ll withhold sending any false hope into the abyss. It’s laughable that the last post on this blog until now was about the mouse that met his end in our Brookline kitchen nearly a year ago. Now we have pantry moths, who wants to hear about that adventure?!

But by here, I guess I also mean the current state of life and things in general, which are calmer, cheerier, and actually, by some miracle, more on the correct wavelength to absorb conceptual chemical theory. I still live in my same, humble and happy Brookline apartment and continue to work in the Boston University kitchen as a teaching assistant, stirring up fun most days with kids’ cooking classes. And I love it. I was also accepted into my first-choice graduate school program from which I will graduate in three years with a Master of Science in Nutrition and license to practice as a registered dietician.

And it’s almost fig season again here. Every time I try to describe the taste of a fig to someone, my account falls short. It’s juicy? I might suggest. “I’ve never had a fig that wasn’t dried,” one acquaintance ventured. “I’ve never had a fig that wasn’t in Newton form,” another friend proposed. Faced with the reputation of one of my favorite foods as reduced to that gritty filling to a rather ambiguous cookie, I tried so hard to elaborate on the unctuous texture of the fresh fig with its rough but paper-delicate skin, and fleshy inside, which tastes like flowers, and pears, and perfume, and like something else altogether. I’ve read other people’s descriptions of figs, hoping to glean a bit of their fruitful prose. But truthfully, I can’t find the taste in others’ writing either, and I’m startled even by the flavors they think the fruit has evoked, ever so subtly, on their own palates. The taste of the fresh fig belongs to the individual I suppose, more as a memory than an actual flavor. The fig, I think, might taste like happiness.

What great luck, and happiness, to have returned to Italy too this year, to take a picture again of my very favorite market stand in the heart of Venice.

Good Morning, Neighbor

I don’t take out the trash. I feel that phrase implies a calm, orderly procession in which I would remove the refuse from my apartment to the appropriately labeled bins outside of my building in a predetermined manner. What I do is more of a chaotic flailing—carrying far too many boxes and bags at once, and usually littering the stairs with debris as I make the mad dash from third floor to first before the garbage truck rumbles through every Monday morning, early and prompt.

I consider myself a fairly organized individual. I am blessed with the capacity to consider the pros and cons of hypothetical situations and to make informed decisions based on my advanced ponderings. I can plan ahead and both get the job done and reassess prior arrangements on the spot to bend to unforeseen but now omnipresent circumstances. But to actually get the trash to the truck in a timely fashion, well, that’s where this system breaks down.

Last Monday morning, like all other Mondays previous, started with exactly this sort of bustle. Except this time, in my haste to collect the recyclables, I accidentally knocked over the mousetrap nestled at the far end of the kitchen. Correction: I thought I knocked over the mousetrap. When I reached to quickly right the overturned trap, however, I suddenly found myself holding not only the contraption, but a mouse too. Correction: A dead mouse, too. My beautifully diligent landlady, due to the untimely sighting of a little grey mouse the night before, had strategically placed the trap.

I was really not so much upset by the mouse (the live one) as I was at first offended. A mouse, I had come think, was a sure sign of a shoddy abode, and I had never until this moment shared my residence with such a creature. My apartment is a happy and clean little home. Sure, it has the usual cabinet dings and water stains here and there, but in general my two roommates and I are women of good housekeeping. Therefore, I could only assume that this mouse must not be an omen of filth, but rather a critter of good culinary taste. Still, you don’t want to be the tenant who ignores the occasional mouse and is later blamed for the rodent colony infestation that overruns the building. So we emailed the landlady, and she responded promptly.

It never occurred to me that a mousetrap would actually catch the mouse. My entire knowledge of mousetraps comes, I think, from old Tom and Jerry cartoons, and maybe that childhood boardgame, neither of which paints a particularly realistic picture of functionality. Except in the real world, traps actually do nab the critter—the evidence of which was now nestled in my hand, which I would wash repeatedly (my hand, not the mouse) all morning and still never feel quite good enough about it to want to eat breakfast. This post was originally about a new cornbread recipe. Prior to the garbage incident, I’d assembled the final slice on the counter, ready for photographing and eating. I threw it away without proper documentation. You’ll just have to wait.

After disposal, I of course emailed my landlady quickly to let her know the traps were a success, and she, the ever efficient lady that she is, responded immediately, and with this one line of wisdom: Did you through it away? If left around, it might smell.

It might smell? Welcome to my Brookline apartment—my third floor, non-airconditioned apartment. We’re approaching the first full week of July and already I took a shower twice yesterday for fear that I, an upstanding citizen with respectable hygiene, might smell. I’m guessing the rotting rodent carcass incubating in my kitchen definitely would smell.

So, I emailed her back, fairly quickly, to let her know that, yes, the mouse had left the building. What I didn’t mention is that I was so panicked about this inevitable stink issue that I all but chased down the city garbage truck in my zeal to remove the rodent from the premises. I mean I hit the pavement with keys and bagged mouse so fast I didn’t even change out of my pajamas. And then, when I reached the street and realized the truck had already passed our apartment, and that meant tipping the deceased into the bottom of a barrel that would sit outside our open windows for the next week, in city summer heat, I thrashed through the back streets of Brookline, scantily clad, and whipped the bag into a neighbor’s trash that had yet to be collected.

Let me just end today’s post with this thought: I’m not offended by the words of my landlady. They don’t imply a naiveté on her part, nor necessarily do they suggest her insufficient faith in my mouse-disposing capabilities. No, what’s truly upsetting about her seemingly senseless warning is that it is likely the fossilized conversational remnants of past dialogues with past tenants who assumed that the landlady herself should cross town in the middle of the day to dispose of the critter, and that they and the deceased rodent should just sit tight until then and wait. My email response then was not a snide remark either, but rather my reestablishment as a tenant in good standing. Don’t worry, Landlady, my e-reply implied, I’ve got this.

 

Better luck for a breakfast recipe next time. For now, enjoy these pomegranate photos. Out of season, they're now a market oddity. Still, they’re just the best sprinkled on salads, over pancakes, or simply eaten as is, peeled from the pith and consumed, so sweetly, in the same moment.

Italia

I went to Italy. A month ago. Believe me, I’m just as disappointed as you are that this post is only popping up now. Before I left, I was urged by several friends, acquaintances, strangers even, to take many, many pictures while abroad. Such urgings were frequent, and emphatic, and, on several occasions, ended with these individuals offering up their own cameras to do the job. I can only conclude such gallant efforts stemmed both from their own desire to later see these photographs, and from the fact that they had already seen my cell phone and made the assumption that surely my camera too was technologically out of date. I did go to Italy, and I did take photos.

The truth is, I don’t really take photos. Yes, my also out of date computer hard drive is overflowing with food photo-shoots and artifacts of culinary school recipe testing, with most of the virtual film from these events serving as surplus and useless; documenting my lunch that is rapidly going limp. These photos are staged; they’re preplanned, and they take me a reasonable amount of time and arranging. I’m not claiming to have posted any monumental bits of photography on this blog, but let’s just say it’s not for lack of effort. But, out in the real world, I’m just not the person who photo-documents the better part of her day. I currently have classmates who update their virtual status both to show what they had for lunch, and then their facial expressions to demonstrate how they felt about it, all under the guise of typing down class notes in our afternoon biology lecture. I take down notes in a notebook; a collection of paper gathered and connected with a cloth binding that, until now, hadn't seemed quite so disconnected from everything else.

I feel I should preface this next part by saying  that I think photography is an art, a beautiful one, and a craft I admire in many friends, in fact. It’s simply not my own. I’m a writer, or at least I pretend to be in those few moments when I find the time to type things other than homework assignments. I don’t take photos because I don’t need them. I’m a storyteller—my memory isn’t tied up in the image, it’s tied up in the moment. That’s the thing about memory that makes it so unique—it’s not an exact copy of what happened, but a translation. I don't need to the see the image, my brain recreates it two-fold with characters, and plotlines. When I take a photo, it never quite captures the memory for me in the same way. It’s not enough. It’s a static representation of something far more dynamic. I have photos of Venice’s Grand Canal, for example, as seen from our hotel room. Except when I look at these images now, as they are, all I see are the flaws—the scaffolding obstructing the beautiful, ancient façade across the waterway. It lacks the emotion that is so entangled in my memory of the moment when I climbed into the window sill of our 3^rd story hotel room, knocked my shins against the too low guard rails, and hung my torso out over the water to take the photo. Nor does the picture actually capture the gasp my mother let out, high pitched and long, with only her nose protruding into the window directly to my left and the rest of her body grounded a solid few feet back inside the safety of the room. There is a pretty good mother-heights-issue story here, but I’ll save it for another time. The point is, the moment was profound; the photo is ordinary.

So, it may surprise you that I have few photos of the food in Italy. I have a couple shots of an outdoor market in Venice, and one plate of scrumptious risotto consumed on a back street in Florence. The thing is, this trip was my vacation. The only vacation I’ve taken in many years, and living in the moment was key. Oh, and there were also several occasions in which blood-sugar issues got the best of me and by the time we were settling down to lunch I would have eaten the tissue paper wrapping around my prosciutto sandwich before I would bust out my camera and stall ingestion for photogenic conquest. More importantly, what I ate, I ate out of pure love of the moment. Humble sandwiches eaten squatting on the stone steps of a side canal in Venice watching the Gondaliers paddle by. One of my favorite meals was actually at the house of friends—a couple—who placed a huge colander of baccelli—fava beans— directly on the table. And we ate them raw, snapping the pods open over our plates, and popping the crisp beans into our mouths, followed with a softer Pecarino cheese and the most wonderfully salty bread, and all washed down with enough white wine. There are no pictures of this humble but entirely perfect meal as I was too busy playing with their cats and stomping through the garden on the patio to bother digging my camera out of my purse. Still, I left the evening full.

Venice, Florence, and out into Tuscuny in two weeks. When friends ask me now what I loved most about the trip, I don’t really know what to say, because there was so much. Too much, really. I had to ask my mother to stop calling me for a few days after our return—she was continually reminiscing and asking me what I would like to do on our next trip. I was trying to find my footing back in my real life and the intensive summer science course I had crash-landed into. Italy made my real life seem, well, somehow less exciting. But when I do think back to Italy, there really was so much I adored; it’s overwhelming. I loved watching the Gondolas, and climbing the hundreds of steps to the top of the Duomo. I loved entering churches that were older than I care to count, and standing in front of works of art I’d only every dreamed of seeing. And more than anything I loved stomping miles through an ancient, urban settings that unfolded anew everyday.

And then, well, a lot of what I loved about the trip is a lot smaller, too, in many ways. I loved falling asleep every night in Venice at around 2am in an argument with my mother over who was on breakfast duty the next morning. That jetlagged individual would have to wake, dress, and put of the façade of worldy perkiness to greet Stefano, the innkeeper, and our breakfast that arrived outside our door every morning, promptly, at 8am. The other person got to stay in her pajamas, and hide under the covers like a child pretending that if she couldn’t see the innkeeper, he couldn’t see her. Surely we could have requested a slighter later arrival time for our first meal of the day, but we feared it would make us seem sluggish. And I loved breakfast—just orange juice and an apricot jam filled croissant, and two more little rolls that we transformed into lunch with a bit of cheese and cured meat from the local grocer, and ate at water’s edge in the high heat of Venice spring afternoons, and it felt so good.

I suppose that’s the trick to loving vacations—finding those tiny moments, along with the momentous ones, that are whole heartedly special, and have a better chance of migrating back into your real life as well. Tonight, I’m sitting in my room in Brookline, both windows open, homework done for the evening, and the frothiest beer sitting at the end of my desk. The photo is mundane. But my memory of this moment, well, that’s a much better story.