Things to Love About “Home”
July 16th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
As I’m preparing to leave my place here — packing up the apartment, eating as much brunch as possible, hanging out with friends with dive bars — I’m realizing that there are so many things about this summer that highlight my love for the life I’ve made for myself here. Yes, it’s a rather circumscribed life; Chris and I don’t go up to San Francisco (also known as The City) much, which is considered sacrilege to many Bay Area folk. (Once, at a party, someone I’d just met commented to me: “I’d think that you, of all people, would be living in the city.” I didn’t know what to say to that.)
A luxury that Chris and I like to partake in is purchasing flowers at the farmers market. I feel strange nowadays when there aren’t fresh flowers around. We put them in vases and mason jars and any bottle we can find. Right now we don’t buy flowers as much because the rose bushes in our front yard have been exploding and the landlord has told us to clip them as much as possible. Chris makes brilliant arrangements.
Home also means making lots of meals out of fruits and vegetables. I rarely cook meat (& only fish) at home; it’s my way of trying to make sure that I eat a lot of stuff that grows out of the ground. This summer I’ve been trying to take advantage of the fact that I’ve been at home a lot and can cook, not to mention the wonderful array of produce that is available at the Mountain View Farmers Market every Sunday.
(This a picture I took of my old university library, not of the local public library. But I didn’t have any pictures of the local public library, so this will have to do.) The local public library has been yielding all sorts of wonderful things lately. I dread buying hardcover books and will actually dislike the experience of reading a novel because it is in hardcover — therefore resulting in the ownership of two copies of a book, sometimes — but the library has been wonderful with this lately. Today I scored The Maytrees (Annie Dillard), American Food Writing (ed. Molly O’Neill) and A Writer’s People (V.S. Naipaul). Chris got a bunch of CDs, including Muddy Waters and Neko Case. And we’ve been listening to Patsy Cline all day.
Other summer/”home” loves: barbecues, sweet corn, brunching in places from Montreal to Palo Alto, writing every day, jogging multiple times a week, developing the fashion blog and meeting new people via the blog, wearing summer dresses and soft white t-shirts, spending hours in our local beloved coffee shop…
