Something I Ate

February Photo A Day

Thanks for playing along with the February photos. They allowed me to feel like I was doing a bit of creative work when every part of me wished to be creative but time seemed very slippery.

I missed a few photos this month, not because I failed to post, but, because I often didn't find the theme inspiring (inside my closet? inside my bathroom cabinet? money? they just seemed strange to me.)

But, something I ate? This. I can handle. Let's face it. Food inspires.

So I share a final few photos from the meal of a lifetime.  All in all there were 16 courses. Two tasting menus at Akelarre in San Sebastian, Spain. I feature the most beautiful here.  We were on our honeymoon. We splurged and ate like royalty. We ate food that should have been art.

Prawns and French Beans cooked in "Orujo" Fireplace

Roasted Suckling Pig with Tomato "Balao" and Iberian Emulsion

Turbot with its "Kokotxa" 

"Xaxu" and Coconut Iced Mousse

Layered Strawberry and Cream

Night

February Photo A Day

When I found this photo to go with the theme, I thought of a quote from A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee. I spent the evening searching for it, endless googling, and then sorting through old journals, so certain I had written it down at some point.  But I can't find it. 

It's about the transition from night to morning, what each period of light and dark brings out in ourselves. But I can't remember which is what or which state brings out a kind of knowing, and I thought that might be an interesting enough thought. So I pair it with a bridge, a smudge of turquoise in the window, and a stretching steeple in the night. 

Green

February Photo A Day

Well, I had no choice. Green is Ireland. And I couldn't pick just one.

 

Your Shoes

February Photo A Day

This odd exhibit was on display in Laguardia, Spain. The bare feet or the tall boots on the left are my style. I long ago did away with heels.  And I'm still not sure how I feel about the ankle boots.

Which would you choose? 

Something I Hate To Do

February Photo A Day

I try to be positive on the blog but...

The theme was posed. 

I thought about it.

I found the photo.

And so it goes.

I strongly dislike waiting for the subway.  

But I really like this platform poster. 

Time

February Photo A Day

Moving around the seasons. 

Heart

February Photo A Day

My heart is full this Valentine's Day. In the past few weeks, since Little O's birth, family and friends have reached out to our little family with such kindness and love. There have been gifts, notes, texts with colorful emoticons, phone calls, and visits.

For me, to know I am loved is always a most surprising gift. And the greatest.

I can't believe that someone I did not know five weeks ago could make my heart swell this much. It reminds me what is possible. That one day you could be alone and the next day, someone can come into your life and change it and then change you. It happens. I've been one person and walked into lecture halls, stepped on to trains, climbed up to the roof, stood at the walls of gatherings where I didn't belong and stumbled upon the words and conversations and people in my life that I did not know the moment before, and they become part of me and then I am someone else.

I read this the other day, because I read all the books in the house out loud, children's books that have filled our home, and hope the sweet boy who doesn't yet understand, but perhaps is listening, can hear the words. It wowed me. It made me teary. Made me close my eyes and nod and 'yes' it.

In the green of the grass...in the smell of the sea...in the clouds floating by...at the top of a tree...in the sound crickets make at the end of the day...

"You are loved. You are loved. You are loved," they all say.

--From Wherever You Are: My Love Will Find You by Nancy Tillman

Blue

February Photo A Day

It's snowing here, again, and we're watching the world from the window, looking past the huge flakes stuck to the screen as they create a permanent snow-scape. There's a frantic toe-point ballet of ice at the roof and even the trees seem weary of winter, shaking their limbs free of snow.

Here, inside, it's all blankets and television, hot tea, a baby who smiles in his sleep then cries and fusses in wild frenzied intervals.  I'm grateful I have no where I need to be, that I have this sweet boy who, when he decides it is appropriate, is wide and blue-eyed, pressing a warm head against my chest.

We painted the walls of his room a fairytale blue. Not because he's a boy but because it's the color of a technicolor movie sky. Hyper-real. In a way.

Sometimes we are all lucky enough to see a sky the color of the wall and I'm thinking of this particular coat of blue, and the way they soared, just before dusk, on a summer day in Coney Island.

Makes Me Happy

February Photo A Day

This is Plaza Mayor in Laguardia, Spain. It is a fairytale of a place and we sat for many hours watching the people of this village pass through. If I close my eyes, I am there, sipping this wine, feeling that leaning sun, listening to the surprising notes of song.

Self Portrait

February Photo A Day

Contemplative and half-shadowed. Not quite reflected but reflective. Sometimes colored. Sometimes muted. Sometimes veiled. Against brick. Behind glass. Always wishing to be good, to be kinder, to be brighter, to be alive to the world. Protesting a tendency to wither. Unfurling. Becoming. Happily caught in a moving, storming, windswept swirl.

Front Door

February Photo A Day

Taking the theme quite literally today. This is our front door. And an engagement portrait from a few years back. 

Photo Credit:

My amazingly talented friend who photographed our wedding, Katie Burnett

Sun

February Photo A Day

Button

February Photo A Day

I save pretty things. Ribbons. Buttons. Flowers. They come from gifts that have been given to me where care has been taken in the wrapping. I always think I'll use the silken pieces of others generosity to gift my own presents. But they sit together in tangles with the yarn and thread and knitting needles, the tools of all the abandoned projects that looked more beautiful when they lived inside my head. 

Still, I save them, for a someday. 

Dinner

February Photo A Day

Since I've been photographing every move Little O makes these days, I haven't been photographing my dinners as often as I used to photograph them. Tyler, however, still busts out the complicated recipes. We just eat them very quickly in between screaming fits or feedings or diaper changes.

We ate this lobster dinner on New Year's Eve, before the little one came. We cooked the live lobsters ourselves. We put one lobster in the pot, placed the lid on top, and just when I was about to turn away...the pot moved. That was a precarious moment.

It all turned out okay.

I apologize to all my vegetarian friends.

10am

February Photo A Day

10am. We dream of spring. 

A Stranger

February Photo A Day

These two children are not strangers to me but I caught them one day in matching blue plaid, their bare feet against wood and dirt, and there was something magical about the conversation that happened, how it overcame the fence that separated them and the green that blocked the way.

Hands

February Photo A Day

Well, I posted baby feet, so it seems only right that I post baby hands today. 

And a repost of something I wrote a few years ago to go with the theme of hands. 

Sunday, April 1, 2012

I found peach blossoms at the market.  I bought them too early, at the beginning of a morning full of errands.  So I carried the branches through the neighborhood, snuck them through crowded sidewalks.  They brushed past boarded construction sites and I raised them to avoid strollers, street lamps, stray passersby. 

The hunchbacked butcher, who I love, who moves slow and steady behind the counter lugging meat in his blood-stained coat, asked me if I had brought them for him. I held them out and he laughed and told me he has his own tree in the yard, how beautiful it is, though he worries about the cold snap, how many blooms he'll lose.

Later, we rode our bicycles through Williamsburg, to Greenpoint, and an endless string of cars lined the streets to Steiner Studios.  An open trunk revealed giant sacks of potatoes and carrots.  Men in suits, with wide-brimmed hats and payot, slung them over their shoulders and moved through the procession to an event we wondered about, one we could not possibly know.

As I pedaled, I saw many hands clutch leafy palms as church let out. I was reminded of Sundays as a little girl, sitting restlessly in wooden pews. I'd kick my feet against the sturdy pew in front of me, snatch a bundle of palms when they came my way. 

My mother, a talented knitter, would effortlessly weave them together in delicate designs. I'd bend and twist and curve my palms and it frustrated me that they never looked like hers.

Do it to mine too, I'd pout.  And she'd take them from me in the car on the way home, braid them the way she braided my hair.  I'd sit in the backseat and she'd hand them back to me, something newer than what they were, the green ends dangling like delicate ribbons of silk.

Words

More of February Photo A Day.

As far as the theme of words, this is what I think it's like to be a writer. To make sense of letters and words. To arrange them. To fit them where they don't belong. To squeeze them into a space. To eek them out in the dark when no one else is looking. To help them find their places. 

View Today

It's been a little over three weeks since we welcomed Little O (as he shall be named) to the world and things have been going well.  There have been many sleepless nights but it's an adventure each day. We learn about one another. I figure out how to add mother to the roles I've assumed throughout my life.

I love to hold him in my arms. I love to watch him sleep. I like to dress him -- a real life doll, squirming, squeaking, as I fit a tiny arm through a sleeve.  Right now, I am simply amazed at the way he moves from sleep to waking and reverse. Then I wonder what he might see when he is awake, wide-eyed and staring out into our world. His eyes are big and, right now, blue, and I like to watch them look. I try not to think too much of what's to come but it's hard not to wonder who he will be.

This month, I'm going to attempt the February Photo A Day Challenge which I discovered, during a late-night, bleary-eyed feeding. I thought it might be a low-stress way to be on the blog a bit and work creatively in small patches of time.

I missed the first day but I have a few photos that I believe fit that theme of a view today.  I love the foot bridge at the end of our street.  It takes us over the highway to the subway, to our neighborhood of shops and restaurants and tree-lined streets and stoops.

To me, this is what it looks like to live where I live, on the waterfront. If I were to close my eyes and imagine our neighborhood, these are the first structures I think about, the movement of shipping containers all along our ribbon of street.