This Demented Life: A Flash Blog

riding the waves of summer

There were fireflies and stars. The sky stayed light forever.

The walk across the footbridge to Barrett’s Beach. Fireworks over the harbor. A crab roll, sweet and delicate. The view of the cove from my bedroom window. Paddling the kayak to the trail on Indiantown Island. Breakfast cookies under the red umbrella, the other dog named Max, mussels swirling in white wine and garlic at the Wharf. The guy who mows my lawn and his dog Scout, still damp from a swim. Potluck suppers. The hermits I baked and how they smelled like Christmas. A heavenly hash ice cream cone by a duckpond. A dip in the cove, the icy embrace of the sea. The library’s Annual Book & Bake sale. Campfires and thunderstorms. Morning run to Pratt’s Island, sand in my socks. My tiny kitchen where magic happens. The attic archives on a rainy afternoon. The sea pups surrounding my paddleboard. Black-eyed Susans and day lilies. The Appalachian Trail. Seeing old friends at the hardware, the beach, the grocery store. Vintage crockpots. My mother’s cast iron skillet. The books my grandparents wrote. The entire month of July. The rush of the brook after a rainstorm. Oysters. Lobster. The last of the June strawberries in a summer cake. A swim in Lucerne Lake, the last place I lived before I moved west. Winning at cornhole. Marshmallow Fluff from the jar. A trail map from Katahdin Woods and Waters. How the blueberry cake melts on my tongue. Riding the ski lift to the top of Sugarloaf. The black-and-white snapshot of my parents before I was born. Diving off the dock. Dusty boxes filled with my mother’s journals. Smore’s, s’mores pie, s’mores brownie squares. How silence seeps into the soul. Camp week at the lake, my niece yelling “YOLO, Auntie!” as she cannonballs off the boat. Molasses donuts from Moody’s Diner, thick and rugged. Swimsuits dripping on the clothesline. A stack of old cookbooks and a dystopian novel. A surprise birthday party for my stepmother, party hats and noisemakers. Ketchup chips, tangy and crisp, from an unplanned road trip to Quebec. My 23-year-old Volvo wagon. A soggy ice cream sandwich on the ferry ride back from Islesboro.

In my first herb garden, I planted thyme. Because we always need more.

old-school and offline

The recipe journal arrived not long ago, brought to the front door by a harried Amazon driver. His uniform, drenched with sweat, matched the gray and baby blue of the delivery van. Our transaction was silent and rapid. He did not smile. In my kitchen studio, I tore open the package, as excited as nine-year-old me had been when my new corduroy gaucho pants from the Sears catalog appeared in the mailbox one autumn afternoon. The same shade as the cinnamon sticks in my mother’s spice cupboard, the ones she used when she made hot cocoa.

It seems right to start a new journal, to create a new tradition hatched from another beginning: the recent revival of the foodletter my mother created nearly 40 years ago. This recipe journal is a scrapbook of sorts—clippings and photos, index cards and sketches. Stories held together by the glue of generations. A chronicle of my own cooking journey, brimming with time-honored family recipes and future plans for new dishes to savor. Every recipe an exploration.

Create Your Culinary Legacy, said the Recipe Journal’s wrapper. Store Your Recipes Offline.

Old-school and offline. In my world of words, handwritten pages always triumph over digital documents. In longhand, I can’t lie. Pen to page is head to heart. My truth found in blue ink on a paper page.

And as I cook, I discover more truths. Food, I find, is memory’s home movie. Baking a batch of granola magically transports me to the tiny kitchen of my youth, immersed in the aroma of warm coconut and peanut butter. My mother in the flowered apron she sewed on her old beige Singer.

Cooking shapes unexpected legacies.

Amid the grainy swirls of texture and the flutter of flavors, recipes become stories, connecting family and friends, present and past. Ingredients and instructions for a life worth relishing.

On the lined pages of this little hard-bound book, in handwritten ink matching its navy-blue cover—embossed in gold like a passport to different time—I tell my stories. And I share this culinary legacy with you, my new family. The readers of my words.

Preserving an experience made entirely by hand.

days of future passed

We loaded our cars with baking racks and farro; an omelette pan; some ginger. All the ingredients for a potluck weekend of cooking. The little ranch home we scored for a getaway weekend in Joshua Tree was not part of Airbnb’s gleaming and somewhat intimidating Chef Kitchen Collection, but rather an unexpected salute to mid-century modern memorabilia from the moment we opened the lime green front door: macrame wall hangings, ceramic owls, an old turntable and crate of vinyl memories; a basket swing suspended from the living room ceiling.

This wasn’t the first time Cindy and I had met up in Joshua Tree, the eclectic artist colony nestled in Southern California’s high desert. Bounded by a National Park, it’s the not-quite midpoint between our respective beach and desert dwellings. We’d camped in the park on a frosty weekend three years ago in an RV with a broken heater, surrounded by tumbleweeds and pink sherbet sunsets and boulders as large as mountains. Empty space, few people.

“It all began in Joshua Tree,” I wrote in my journal that weekend in March, days before my mother lay in a tiny Maine hospital with a fractured hip. A week after my husband received a new hip in Arizona. Two years before my father fell on his hip for the fourth time, plunging into his final descent.

Then, Covid was just a whisper.

***

I have known Cindy since I was nineteen. We worked together, data entry on clunky computer terminals at a Miller Beer distributor in the days when mainframes took up serious real estate and fax machines were not yet a thing. We have been roommates in various apartments and houses from coast to coast. We have worn leg warmers to aerobics classes, watched Raising Arizona and Ferris Bueller‘s Day Off probably a hundred times, danced and drank our way through riverfront nightclubs and beach bars. And we have cooked. Yogurt dip in our Bangor kitchen with the chipped white Formica counters. Her mom’s Mexican casserole on Cinco de Mayo when we lived in Newport Beach. My mother’s peas and pearl onions on Thanksgiving. And now, a potluck picnic of random recipes.

***  

Saturday, first light. The sky melting from aqua to shell pink to eventually a band of orange above the rock formations in the backyard of this little house on the edge of the park. The high desert stretches for miles, spindly plants and scrub; a tree, barren. A handful of Joshua trees aglow in their spiky armor. Wooden Adirondack chairs, dusty and out of place. The obligatory metal white-and-yellow porch chair everyone’s grandparents had, spotted with rust stains.

It’s windy, of course it’s windy, it’s always windy in the high desert. A baby hummingbird dive-bombs the picnic table and already, fine sand embedded in my fingernails, my notebook pages crunching with grit.

Cindy slips into the sunrise through the sliding glass door. When you write, you sound just like your mother, she says.

It’s a gift, I reply. An embrace, a kiss, two voices becoming one.

The wind groans, the morning unfurls. A pair of jackrabbits. A disorienting trail run along the sandy wash. A loop that wasn’t a loop, seemingly mapped by someone either lost or stoned. A trip into town, scavenging thrift shops for vintage cookbooks and old jewelry, an antique bolo tie. And when we return to this museum of a home, the juxtaposition continues, the curious comfort found in artifacts from other peoples’ lives: The wooden bowl on its stand, waiting for a tableside batch of guacamole, a mushroom lamp in avocado green, the wrought iron owl trivet, a gray enamel coffee pot.

In the retro kitchen, Cindy preps her Farro Salad, using the saucepan she brought along from our early days as roommates in Maine, its copper-bottomed sheen long gone. She asks if I remember and I do, of course I do. An event I have wished to forget yet forever stitched in the fabric of memory. I think that was a wedding present from my in-laws, I say. I’m glad you’ve kept it all these years.

She sautés shallots and I flip through the homeowner’s record collection: Merle Haggard. Joni Mitchell. Johnny Cash. The Moody Blues. We roast and bake and savor; we listen and languish in the hot tub. A shooting star escapes into the darkness, the sky’s teardrop. I love desert nights, Cindy says. The sky is so big.

And we speak of our fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, and we begin to see that all the departed souls, known or unknown, who cling to the corners in this house and in our minds are the true mementoes in our collection–intangible, everlasting delights.