I Have So Much Rattling Around in My Head

I have so much rattling around in my head lately that I’m not even sure where to start, so I think I’ll just start anywhere and trust that it sorts itself out along the way. That’s usually how it works for me. I sit down at this little table by the window, coffee going lukewarm beside the keyboard, and the thoughts arrange themselves into something resembling order somewhere around the third paragraph.

Summer is doing that thing it does where it starts to lean toward fall without anyone officially announcing it. The light comes in lower in the afternoons now. The tomatoes in our little garden patch are finally, finally coming in all at once, more than the two of us can reasonably eat, which means I’ve been giving bags of them away to neighbors and have at least three different ideas for what to do with the rest before they turn. Patrick keeps threatening to build me a proper raised bed next spring so I stop complaining about the soil, and I keep telling him I’ll hold him to that.

I started this blog almost a year ago now, mostly as a place to keep track of the recipes that mattered to me before I forgot the details, the ones my grandmother used to make and the ones Patrick’s family taught me, and somewhere along the way it became something more than a recipe box. I find myself wanting to write about the in between things too. The drive up to Michigan that first winter. The way a kitchen can hold a whole marriage’s worth of small arguments and small triumphs. What it feels like to be far from where you grew up and slowly, without quite noticing it happening, start to call somewhere else home.

I don’t know yet exactly what this place wants to become. I have ideas rattling around, a few new recipes I’ve been testing, a trip Patrick and I are quietly hoping to take before the year is out, some thoughts about what comes after Michigan that I’m not ready to put into words yet. For now I think I just wanted to say that I’m here, still cooking, still writing things down, and grateful that anyone stops by to read them.

I’ll have a new recipe up soon. There’s a pot of something good already simmering on the back burner, in more ways than one.