Labor Day is over, which probably means summer is, too. The last week and a half have been cloudy and cool here. I’ve been closing the windows at night. Things are changing.

I don’t want to say that. I always have a slight temper tantrum at the end of summer, kicking and screaming my way into fall just until I breathe the first lungful of burnt leaf crockpot cooking incense fresh breeze. Then the fight goes out of me.

This summer was my first in Washington and it felt sun-dappled and too short. This summer was walks by the canal and Green Lake, huge hashbrowned omelets at Beth’s afterwards. This summer held weeks of cherries, all sweet, and one generous quart of sour pie cherries, which I should have horded more carefully. Maybe, as the name implies, you’re supposed to put them in a pie, but mine never made it that far. I ate them by the handful. Ditto peaches, which, until the last month, never made it further than the kitchen sink where I stood slurping, with juice running down my chin. Then, two weeks ago, I made peach buttermilk ice cream. With cinnamon. And pecans. And bourbon.

This summer, I figured out how to deal with fava beans, because they grow here. Ditto nettles, morel mushrooms, fiddleheads, huckleberries, and dragon’s tongue beans. It’s likely that many of these things grow in Minnesota too, but less prominently. Everyone in the Pacific Northwest seems to be an artisan of some food creation, so the more quirky the produce, the better.

This summer was drinking wine on Vashon Island, kicking around Port Townsend with no agenda whatsoever. It was writing on Whidbey and starting my second semester of school. I enjoyed feeling like I knew what I was doing this second time around, maybe, possibly, like a real grad student.

This summer was showing my friends and family around Seattle, walking the hills of my neighborhood, trying to get a job. Not getting one, and having multiple opportunities flounder. (I may write these up in future posts, if I can muster the energy.)

Now that it is almost over, what did this summer feel like to you?

Someone on the bus the other day asked me if I had been “born that way.” I assumed she meant blind. I assumed this because she’d just spent the better part of the previous 5 minutes telling Kiva what a good dog she is and how good she is for “seeing for your mommy.” I ignored all this, because I haven’t figured out a good way to end this line of monologue yet. So, I just pretend it doesn’t exist, like a good Midwesterner.

After she said, “Were you born that way?” I figured attention had shifted from dog to human. Benefit of the doubt, I somehow figured she wasn’t actually expecting the dog to answer.

I very politely told her, “I’d prefer not to answer that question.” This is a new thing I’ve just started doing. I used to feel compelled to answer all the questions lobbed at me on a daily basis by semi-bored bus people: “How much can you see?”, “How did you go blind?”, “How do you pick out your clothes?” I thought it was my “job” to “educate.” Whether it is or isn’t, everyone with a job has the right to time off. So sometimes, especially when I’m on a thickly crowded bus, sweating, trying to keep myself contained and compact, I take my vacation.

She didn’t get that memo, because she spent the next several minutes until I reached my stop, complaining to whomever would listen, about how if “people” expect respect, and expect opportunity, then they should have enough decency to answer a perfectly innocent question. After all, how is she supposed to know? She doesn’t know any blind people. She’s just trying to show interest, to be educated. How can she try to understand when people “refuse” to answer her perfectly logical questions?

Yup. I’ve heard this before too. I’ve probably been guilty of at least having some of the same thoughts, about people whose experiences I don’t understand and am ignorant of. Of course, I too want to learn and to hear perspectives different from mine.

I also totally get that, for instance, “my trans friend” is not under any obligation to answer all “my trans questions.” “My Latino friend” is not obligated to answer everything I want to know about being Latino. “My hard of hearing friend” owes me no explanation, ever, about what it’s like to be him, if he doesn’t want to offer one. Sure, I hope he will, but I’m not his victim if he declines. I don’t get to feel cozy with my ignorance, to sit back and say, “Oh well, I tried, guess I get a free pass now.”

There are other ways to learn. There are countless things to read, free, on the Internet. There are other people to talk to, if someone isn’t up for it when you’re bored and it’s convenient.

I’ve often thought that in recent years, I’ve noticed increasing awareness and embracing of differences. Things are, obviously, far from ideal, but I’d like to think, however tentatively, that they’re improving. No doubt social media has a lot to do with this. It’s now easier than ever to have a voice online, to speak of diverse experiences for those who want to listen. And, we’d like to think we’re good listeners, enlightened citizens. But our ears should also be attuned and accepting of a “No”, a “I’m not comfortable discussing that with you”, a “let’s talk later when I have better focus.” Just because you ask once and perceive you’ve been denied, you don’t get off the hook for not asking again.

I’m a passable cook, some of the time. What’s “exciting” about my particular combination of following a recipe up until the need for rebellion overtakes me and I fling following orders into the figurative fire is that, just like Forrest’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get. Sometimes I turn out a gorgeous coffeecake studded with puddles of fresh sour cherries, or a perfectly spiced curry in silky coconut broth, and then I make the exact same dishes, (sort of), the next week or month or year and they’re disastrous. Cherries oozing all over the oven and a cake that’s rubbery and deflated. A curry so scorchingly spicy and otherwise devoid of flavor that everyone’s sinuses explode within 50 miles of my kitchen.

Up until recently, it was in this same vain that I’d always made ice cream. Sometime in college, I think after returning from an Ecuador winter to a sticky Midwest heat in late July, I bought an ice cream maker. It was obnoxious. There was a giant bucket, which you placed the canister in, then filled with alternate layers of ice and salt. It was loud. I would put it on to churn and then go take a bath, shutting the bathroom door between myself and the horrible grinding of machinery.

I tried a bunch of ice cream recipes, with varying results. I scrambled custards at the last minute, because I got distracted singing along to Joss Stone (she was so rad in 2008!). Or, I just let them cook too long, because though I told myself I could “afford” an ice cream maker, I sure as hell wasn’t buying an instant-read thermometer. Even though all the recipes told me to. But that was just one of the parts I ignored.

Two years ago, I had a summer flingy type courtship with someone who was bound and determined to teach me to make ice cream, consistently and without rebellion. He was one of those church of Alton Brown types, who go around making finicky food preparation demands all in the name of science and chemistry and testing and blahblahblah. You can see how his methodicalness and my need to stray could potentially crash and burn just out of reach of the ice water bath. (I’m already freezing a thousand ice cubes for the actual ice cream churning, must I really cool the custard in an ice water bath beforehand? That’s just more ice and another bowl to wash.)

I must admit, though, that despite his Alton Browniness, Summer Fling did coax me and my kitchen into churning out some fine ice cream. Once I saw how the instant-read thermometer really DID reduce custard scrambling, and how actually paying attention to ice and salt ratios instead of just throwing things willy-nilly into the bucket helped freeze the base more evenly, I was willing to concede to a little methodicalness. I still held, though, that even a “premium” vanilla ice cream is boring, and I insisted that it was perfectly acceptable to add cookie dough, brownie chunks, AND chocolate shavings to my freshly churned batch, instead of just settling on one of those. We made phenomenal mint-chip, and even as I complained about how mint-chip shouldn’t be eaten outside of December holidays, I was shoveling half a pint down my shivering throat the whole time. We made sour cherry, which was disastrous, because as it turns out, even the Alton Brown Wannabe didn’t realize that if you mix in the cherries while the custard is still hot, the cream curdles from the fruit’s acidity and freezes into little grainy pebbles. More important than success and failure, though, is that we made compromises. And though you could say, “it’s just ice cream”, it’s not just ice cream. It’s life.

This year, my ice cream maker began showing signs of old age. Even though the reviews on Amazon overwhelmingly insisted that theirs had lasted for years, the motor in mine sounded more pained and geriatric with each new slurry of ice and salt and cream. I offhandedly, grumblingly, mentioned this to Pat and forgot about it. Until my birthday and the first day of summer coincided on the calendar and, like some frozen treat fairy godmother, he sent me a shiny new freezer-canister ice cream maker. No ice and salt. No giant bucket. No shrieking machinery while I hide in the bathtub. Also included: a spare canister, for when one quart of ice cream simply isn’t enough. Which has been the case, every time, during this above-average-temperature Seattle summer.

Now, you still might be saying, “It’s just ice cream.” But it’s not just ice cream. It’s love.

She squeezes in next to me at lunch
this woman, almost graduated, MFA nearly done
manuscript ready, pitch pitched,
book unfurling on its own winged pages
“Your thesis,” she says, “what is it? What are your ideas?”
And she hunts me like a bulldog
ramming its head against my hand, but instead of “pet me” it’s
“Thesis thesis thesis. What are you doing? What are you thinking? It’s coming, next semester, on the other side of solstice, in the cold wet of January
what’ll it be, chickadee?”
She’s eating and haranguing, badgering, slurping up my noncommittal “I don’t knows” but not swallowing
And I DON’T know except to say that I want to tell the stories that aren’t getting told
I want to take what’s outside of me and bring it in
give the solstice birds room to roost and talk and tell
the stories they never dared
the things I have never said
together, maybe we can shoulder our grief
and figure out how to reframe the things we’ve lost
or reconcile that they were never ours to begin with.
I want to stretch the edges of my curiosity
though I hope they go on forever.
I want to tell the stories
that set my teeth on edge
and pull my tears from drought
I always want there to be something that I don’t know.
“Thesis” beats in my brain like the heart of a hungry hawk
I’m listening
She laughs, satisfied.

It started about two months ago. I gave my birth date to someone over the phone and she immediately paused for dramatics. “Oooh,” she said, “not too long before you’ll be the big three o.”
She said it like that, too, “three o.” Not “three, zero” or “thirty.” But two giant syllables, with space in the middle for all the emphasis and implication in the world.

“Yup,” I said, “anyway, about that appointment.”

This has continued to happen way more than I care to think about as the weeks approaching the big “three o” fall away. I’m a little shocked at how many strangers make the connection and they the declaration. It’s always “big.” It always feels way more important than I feel. And even though I know it’ll come and go, and I’ll be 30 instead of 29 and not feel any differently, I do have to admit that it’s unnerving me. A lot.

There’s no non-humiliating way to say this, so I’ll just say it: I haven’t done anything conventionally “right” or “successful” with my life. I’m so far from having a career, getting married, and having kids it’s laughable. I don’t even have a couch. I can’t afford a couch. A couch is literally too big of a financial commitment for me.

And honestly, I don’t want a couch, and I don’t know if I want the other stuff either. Whether I want it or not isn’t even relevant. It’s that I’m “EXPECTED” to have it already. My peers are busy buying houses, hunkering in, having babies. Whereas I’m feeling embarrassed and slightly ashamed when my parents send me my rent check every month. Sometimes I feel like I’ve disappointed them, like I’ve disappointed everyone who believed in me when I was 6 and gobbling down knowledge like it was better than cookie dough, which was the best. But, maybe I haven’t disappointed anyone but myself.

The other day I told my friend Arlie, “I don’t have any career goals except that I’m poor and need money. I’m doing the writing thing, but that only makes me happy.”

I didn’t even realize how I’d put my happiness in an “only” category, below my “success” and “career goals” until he pointed out that I had. Apparently, even though in my soul I believe that happiness is important, my brain has been convinced that success is better. That conventional is better. That I’ll get rewarded if I do what I should because it’s better. To all this I KNOW, I should know better.

As I’ve been thinking about this over the last few months, I’ve remembered feeling the exact same way when I turned 16. I felt (and wrote at length and with great drama) that life was passing me by, that I was sitting around waiting for it to begin. At the time, my friends were doing things like dating and driving. I felt (again, dramatically) very left behind and very unaccomplished.

I never got to drive, but I did figure out the dating thing eventually. (Ok, maybe “figure out” is a stretch. Let’s just say I muddle through as best I can.) And yet, I’m still here, feeling like a straggler, like I’m schlepping behind everyone else. When I was 25, I thought I’d have it all figured out by the time I was 30. Or, I’d at least have paid off my college credit card.

Maybe by the time I’m 35?

I don’t really “dream big.” I don’t want to be famous or anything. I don’t want “the best” this or “the most perfect” that. What I do want is to be able to stroll a farmers’ market all by myself, for as long and leisurely as I want.

I admit I’ve been drinking the farmers’ market (locally roasted) coffee for years now. I am on board with crunchy, heirloom-varieted locavorism. If it were convenient, I would be at the market every week chatting up all the produce vendors with provocatively sexy questions like, “What type of irrigation system do you use on your delicious Sun Gold tomatoes?” Every time I go to the market, I frolic in a happy, (boarding on giddy) haze of salsa samples and ukelele music and popsicles. (There better be popsicles.) And everything I eat (including the sticky-sweet-crunchy-still-warm kettle corn) is “healthy” because someone made it with their own tireless hands.

The only thing that dampens my enthusiasm is that I can’t just show up. I have to coordinate. I have to have a “market buddy.” Procuring a market buddy (especially if one is difficult to procure), can sometimes take the whimsy out of my sails. If I do manage to procure a buddy, I seem to turn into the world’s worst nag.
Buddy: (as we stroll leisurely): “And let’s see, there’s bread at this place.” (buddy keeps walking)
Me: “Wait wait wait wait. What bread?”
Buddy: “Oh, you know, white, wheat. There were some baguettes maybe. Sourdough?”
Me: “Well we have to go back and look.”
Then, I am ashamed to say, I proceed to make everyone miserable by wanting to know every last option ever offered at a farmers’ market bread stall. Ever.

I am this way with jam. I am this way with salsa. I am this way with pickles, produce, popsicles, pie, and possibilities. I want them all. I want to mull over everything. I want the leisure and the space to look and look and look and ponder, and even go home if that’s all my ponderings get for a day.

When I have a buddy, through (mostly) no fault of the buddy, I can’t do that as much. It gets crowded. People want to have an agenda, get it done, and leave. I want to have no agenda and just see what the weekly offerings inspire me to want to cook. I want to stay for hours. I want to buy all my things, and then maybe an omelette and iced coffee and sit in the sun and read or listen to people or both. I want to get so comfortable that I take off my shoes.

And when I’m done, I want to get up and buy the last, tiny leftover bouquet from a flower vendor with the change in my pocket and walk the mile home with my bags and my dog. On my own terms. Having never wasted or hurried a moment.

For several years after I moved to Minneapolis, I’d be out with friends, native Minnesotans who seemed to know everybody. Their high school track coach, their mom’s high school track coach, their uncle’s neighbor’s hair stylist. I found it profoundly annoying, if I’m being honest. There does seem to be something inherently braggy in Minnesotans (and maybe in all of us) that gets a particular pleasure from knowing everyone.

Something happened, though, about five years into my Minneapolis stint. I started knowing people, too. I’d run into a college professor at the mall, where they were clearly not supposed to be because professors should always be professing. Or, eventually I’d go to a coffee shop enough that the barista wanted to remember my name. When I started running into exes while with my current loves, I knew I’d officially made it into awkward Minnesotan know-them-all territory.

Here, I pretty much don’t know anyone. I haven’t claimed a coffee shop yet, (too many new ones to try!), and I don’t have any exes. So yesterday, when I was walking down the “main drag” of my neighborhood, I paid little attention to the person yelling my name from across the street. I figured it was a different “Lauren.” No one knows me here, not even my neighbors really know me, because many of us are in our 20’s and antisocial if it’s not via a computer. But the yelling persisted, and I finally (reluctantly, antisocially) slowed down.

She was a writing classmate, a person from school, but also someone I’d had coffee with outside of school, so I think she counts as a friend. She doesn’t live in my neighborhood, so seeing her was a surprise. But she does live in Seattle, and so I think this counts as my first someone-I-know sighting. I was really happy about this. It felt like I passed some kind of milestone, like maybe now “I made it”, even for a minute.

I’ve thought about home the last few months, and started making peace with the fact that I have several, in different places and with different people. I think when you’re young, the idea society gives you is you’re supposed to have one home, one place where you settle and put down roots and stay forever. At least, that’s what I see happening with most of my peers. But maybe they have more homes too, homes I don’t know about, homes that are more intimate than their literal ones.

I feel at home with people, in different places, in different seasons. I used to worry that I’d never find my “true home.” But I’m getting cozy with the idea that I might not have one. “Not all who wander are lost” comes to mind here. Seeing my friend on the street, having her so insistently shouting my name as if to say, “You can’t hide from me girl!” made me feel like I just might have home here, too.