A New Year

Tonight a new year - 5775 - begins on Rosh Hashanah (literally, the head of the year.) Yesterday we entered a new season, and for the first time in a while in Connecticut the weather appears to be cooperating with the calendar. The mornings are colder, and each time I drive down Route 2* I notice a few more leaves bursting into what look like red flames.

And once again, though I've never had a pumpkin spice latte or bought an autumnal Bath & Body Works candle, I'm completely falling for (sorry) all the fall propaganda. I'm thinking about those leaves, and when they'll tip from spectacular to sad. (I don't want to miss it.) I'm also thinking about sweaters and boots, about hot cider and fresh apples and turning those apples into cake.**

And because it's fall, time of new beginnings and new years, I'm also thinking about change.

I read a blog post recently, written by Kristen of Milo and Molly. (Check out her shop, if you haven't yet. Warning: you might want to buy everything.) The post is about blogging, and wondering what the point of it is, or if it has a point at all. Though I write a different sort of blog, I found the post very relatable and thought-provoking. I have no desire to stop blogging, but I do occasionally question whether it's worth it, when so few people read. And I always wish I was doing more to improve this blog. I get mad that I don't have the time to do that, and then I realize that's just an excuse.

I'll be taking a short break and resuming blogging in October. Hopefully by then I will have come up with some ideas on how to make the blog better; at the very least I will have eaten too much apple cake.

*Route 2 is the best for seeing how the leaves are changing. It doesn't get photo shoots in magazines, like certain towns in the Litchfield Hills, but it's the best. Trust me.

**Apple Cake:

2 eggs
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup orange juice
1 tsp vanilla
4 cups thinly sliced apples
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

Slice apples.

Pre-heat oven to 350F.

Beat eggs, 2/3 cup sugar, and oil together.

In separate bowl, mix flour and baking powder.

Add to egg mixture alternately with juice; add vanilla; blen.

Place half the batter in greased 9x9 pan. Add apples. Mix 1/4 cup sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over apples. Add remaining batter on top.

Bake at 350 for 1 hour.

(Pareve. Adapted from Bubbe's Kitchen: Cherished Dishes from the National Council of Jewish Women of Canada, Vancouver Section.)

Vintage Connecticut

Yes, this happened. Hey, not everyone was fighting the power in 1989. And yes, that is a Laura Ashley dress and a strand of pearls and a puffy velvet headband. I don't remember what kind of coat went over this little ensemble, but that's probably for the best.

Another thing that happened: Where We Live on NPR was kind enough to invite me back for a follow-up to this show about Connecticut's eccentricities. The audio is available here. I don't remember exactly what I said, but hopefully none of it was as embarrassing as this picture.

Wind Rain Sirens Chimes Bells

Look Down

Seventeen was a long time ago, and I recall very little of my university orientation week. But I remember two things. One, being part of a small group of freshman, sitting in a booth in some restaurant in the Village, and being told not, under any circumstances, to buy our drugs in Washington Square Park. (The drugs sold there were either more expensive or less pure, I don't know which, since I didn't want any anyway.) And two, being given a booklet full of helpful hints and tips, aimed mostly at students who had never been to New York - or possibly even any large city - before. One was a note on the correct pronunciation of Houston Street ("You're in New York, not Texas!") and one was: Look Up.

It was a good tip. New York architecture often saves its most surprising gifts for high corners and rooftops. I still try to remember to look up, and not just in New York. But I've found, walking around Connecticut on sidewalks and boardwalks and trails, that looking down is also more interesting than you might think. (Sometimes just because your shoes look good with the steps, but sometimes necessary for safety.)  Maybe because the ground is covered with snow or leaves or rainwater so much of the year, it's easy to ignore. But summer reveals the textures, the variety of grounds and floors and paths, just hiding down there, waiting to be noticed.

Summer

It's been summer for one day, and already I'm feeling behind. It's like I have a 200 item to-do list that I haven't even written yet. Maybe it comes from childhood, when summer was a brief furlough from the prison that was school, and you had to get in all the enjoyment you could before the opportunity disappeared for another nine months. Or maybe it stems from the adult-world change to that schedule, when it's hot outside but you have to work all the time anyway. In any case, summer comes with a lot of pressure.

Every year I want the summer to be extra summery. I imagine I'll eat nothing but iced coffee and homemade popsicles and produce purchased at farm stands. I vow to either get a real tan or use SPF 60 perfectly, but to avoid - this time, finally - that cheesy left-arm-only driver's tan. I want sundresses, but different ones from the sundresses I already have, and beachy hair, and pop music, but the exact right kind of pop music, and a nightly supply of refreshing cocktails. But except for the iced coffee, most of this never happens.

This year I started thinking about summer a bit early, because of all the honeysuckle. I don't know if it's a particularly good year for honeysuckle, or if I've just been spending more time outside lately. But the plants seem to be all over all of a sudden, overpowering every path with their scent-induced memories, like something from a Stanislavski textbook. I smell them and instantly recall being young, and carefully extracting that drop of sweetness from each flower, and spending whole days happily covered in sand and salt, and crossing evening roads through what seemed like curtains made of fireflies.

You can't get that back, I don't think, that kind of childhood summer of pure optimism, of pure faith that despite what all previous experience has demonstrated, this summer - and by extension next fall - will be better than the last. But you can possibly, hopefully, arrange for there to be more sundresses and cocktails.

Ambivalence

Usually when I read books I underline passages and write things like "!!" and "ha!" and "?" in the margins. Sometimes I write snarky little comments which embarrass me when I re-read the book years later. I have a few books containing descriptions of weather conditions endured by people of the past. They'll recount entire winters spent huddled inside tents or huts or insufficiently insulated houses, difficult hunts for frequently non-existent game, people freezing into massive icicles while walking home and being found beneath the drifts in the spring, etc. And most of those have little scribbles next to them that say something like "why do you live there?!?"

I ask myself this too, every winter. When it turns colder, then again when the first frost glazes over my windshield one morning, and again, louder, every time it snows. Clearly - I dug through old pictures to prove it - I sensed from an early age that Northeastern winters were maybe not for me. And yet, though I've spent a few years in a few different places where winter isn't entirely horrible, I've always come back. And I don't know why. I can make a list of good things about winter, about snow even. But the prettiness of gently falling snowflakes doesn't outweigh the fact that they render streets impassable to all but snowplows and children on sleds. The crisp smell of winter air doesn't make up for the way it ruins my skin and closes my lungs on contact.

And yet here I am. Still looking at the winter with mistrust and confusion, as I was in 1979.

This Is Every Kind Of Wrong

I guess Fall is going as Winter for Halloween, or something. I don't approve.