The Picture of the Peach

To be completely honest, I kind-of, sort-of, hate blogs. Especially food and lifestyle blogs, not wholly unlike the one I attempt here to write. Blogs are, by their very nature, completely self-indulgent, a quality I find universally boring even as I perpetrate it. Many of them are dull— not everyone who blogs can write, and not everyone who writes has something interesting to say. And when they’re not dull, I find them even more irritating.

The best blogs are thoughtfully written and laid out in the spare and elegant fashion of Martha Stewart Living, with wide white margins and brilliant images of everyday objects photographed by the blogger while the afternoon sunlight slants through the window and onto the table just so. They are gems produced by creative geniuses who live in places like Brooklyn, and Seattle and London; people who bake, and travel, and eat long lunches in charming little hole-in-the-wall places you’ve never heard of, and afterwards post beautiful photographs of the remains of said lunches: crumbs on white linen; an abandoned fork; the empty shell of an oyster enjoyed.

I am, of course, jealous of these people, and I write that with the full knowledge that it’s a ridiculous response. But it’s also the one that comes naturally. It’s the photographs that get me. A record of someone else’s supposed reality, they fill me with yearning for my own fiction, for a life where the refrigerator is full and cheerful, and I can pay the minimum due on my credit cards; where I regularly wash my hair, and don’t eat soup from a can, and never succumb to the compulsion to nap for hours when it’s light outside. Where no one in my family is ever ill, or broke, or depressed-- where we are, in short, none of us, human-- and I am inspired to document all that quiet content with my camera.

I don’t take pictures at all, really, and there are a couple of reasons for that. For one thing, I don’t like the distraction of the camera, which always obstructs my direct experience of the moment. But more importantly, the pictures I take are, for the most part, a failure. Photography, along with cartwheels and diving, seems to be one of those things at which I am not very good. Friends who have extensively studied photography, and who, it is generally thought, take excellent photographs, assure me that this cannot be true. Anyone, they say, can take a good picture. It is a skill that can be learned.

Perhaps.

But I maintain that, as my own worst enemy, I’m in the way even when I’m behind the camera. I think too much, and as a result, my photos always disappoint me. They always seem, to me, to have missed the mark, to have been taken just a moment too soon or just a bit too late, and when I look at them I fail to find the thing I was trying to capture.

I am reminded of a quote by Foucault, around which I based a term project for a Liberal Studies class during my final year of college— "Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"— when I think of all the modern means of display— the breakfast blogs and status updates— which allow us to create a virtual reality in which we posit ourselves as we would like to be seen, and which, in turn, leave us longing for the things we are not, even as we inspire that longing in others. All art is a narrative, after all, and all narrative is a fiction of sorts. The picture of the peach, all rosy and plump, is not the peach itself. But it makes me hungry, just the same.

Someone to Cook For

Josh and I had a ritual we performed every time we moved to another New York apartment: after a take-out dinner of Thai or Chinese with a celebratory bottle of good sparkling wine, eaten sitting Indian-style on the floor, I would head to the Laundromat to wash our bedding, and he would tackle the kitchen. To me, the bed seemed a natural enough place to start, considering we’d been awake packing into the early morning hours before the move, and were desperate for a good night’s sleep. But Josh couldn’t sit still, couldn’t even think of sleeping, until the kitchen was organized and he’d found a proper place for everything in it.

I’d return from putting the sheets into the wash to find him in the kitchen wearing his giant Bose headphones, rocking out silently to a punk band and unpacking boxes at a furious pace. I’d leave him alone with his solitary mission and wander through the other rooms, unloading a box of books here, arranging a cluster of pictures and knick-knacks on some table-top, making lists of all the things we needed to buy before the apartment could become a home (hand soap, a new bookcase, a rug). I’d accomplish nothing, really, aside from making a bigger mess, while he moved through the kitchen at rapid speed and with singular purpose. A few hours later, the bed would be made and I’d be lying on top of it, leafing through a forgotten book of poems, and he’d come to get me, to take me by the hand and lead me around the kitchen to show me what he had done.

Him, opening the cabinet above the sink: “Okay. I put pint glasses and water glasses on the first shelf, coffee cups above them, and up top, the cups and saucers, because we never use them;” then his smile would wrinkle around his eyes and his cadence would pick up speed, because he knew I was going to object—“orwecouldjusttakethemtogoodwillandthen—“

“Noooooo,” I’d say. “They’re a matching set, and they’re nice to use when we have people over for dinner.”

In the next cabinet: plates and bowls and ramekins; wineglasses. Wooden spoons, spatulas and whisks in this drawer, flatware in that one. Old wooden wine cases filled with platters and serving bowls and that set of ceramic wine goblets we got when we were married, stowed on the very top of the cabinets, beside the blender. He was always doing that, because he was tall: putting things up on the highest shelf where I couldn’t reach them. And on the shelves under the butcher block, within easy reach, the All-Clad, the cast-iron, the one requisite non-stick pan with the warped bottom that he hated but that we kept around at my request, for scrambling eggs.

I insisted upon certain things: the French glass jars that held dried beans and flours, the mint-green glass butter dish from Fishs Eddy, a pale-blue Ball jar of fresh flowers on the table beside the coffee-maker. But apart from those details, the kitchen, in a strange reversal of gender roles, was his.

We were on more equal footing before he went to culinary school. In the beginning of our relationship, we fumbled through dinner together. My latent vegetarianism caused me to gag when I touched raw meat, but Josh had a strange aversion to making salad—he hated to wash and spin the lettuce, which was one of my favorite chores, most likely because it was the first kitchen task with which my mother ever charged me. But after he learned how to properly hold a knife, to brunoise and make mirepoix, to whip up mother sauces and truss a chicken and cook fish en papillote, my meager skills were a little less necessary. I was still in charge of all greens—lettuce or kale or collards— of rinsing and washing and spinning them dry; and Josh was in charge of everything else. I found my place in the kitchen to be a comfortable perch where I could sip my wine and watch all the activity, and came to think of myself less as a cook and more as a consultant. I had a good palate, and I wasn’t afraid to give my input. “More salt,” was my most common directive, or “more acid,” or “What do you think would happen if you added chilies? Or pimenton?” Or, “Absolutely not. No curry.”

It was in this way that I came to be a good cook who didn’t really cook much of anything, and even if I did, he prepped it all for me. If you enjoy cooking, being partner to someone who does it for a living can be frustrating at times, because on some level you’re always forced either to defer to their expertise, or to turn a discussion about the best way to hard-boil an egg into some sort of enormous power struggle. (“Ashley, they come out better if you get the water boiling and then drop them in.” “But Josh, Alice—because in our kitchen we were on a first-name basis with Alice Waters—says to cover them with cool water and then bring it to the boil, and time it from there.” “Show me,” he’d say. “Show me where she says that.”).

But it can also have its perks. I did love to cook, at the heart of it, but I hated chopping things. And after Josh went to culinary school, I really never had to slice or chop another thing. I could choose something to cook, and do the shopping, and bring everything home, and while we spent half an hour sipping a cold drink and chatting, Josh would be like Edward Scissor-hands at the cutting board, and I’d wash up behind him as he went, and then everything was laid out on the butcher block in little bowls like you see on all the cooking shows on the Food Network. Then I’d cook the dinner, and usually he’d clean up. He never minded doing the dishes, which I loathed almost as much as chopping. I loved him for that.

But the biggest, most obvious benefit was that, during these years when we were broke—from the kind of broke where our friend Kelly moved into our junior one-bedroom in Chelsea to help us pay the rent, to the kind of broke where we could afford the parlor floor of a brownstone in Carroll Gardens but not much else—our kitchen became my favorite place in all of New York City to have dinner. And it wasn’t just, that, given what we could afford to spend on a typical evening out, we could eat better at home for less money than we could in a restaurant. It was that cooking was something he mostly did for me, and it was in this way that I felt most loved.

But I realized, also, that this was the way in which I was most needy, and I made up my mind to be more independent in the kitchen. Two weeks before he confessed he didn’t want to be married, I made Curly Kale and Potato soup with chorizo from Alice Water’s The Art of Simple Food, undoubtedly my favorite cookbook. I sliced the onions and cooked them slowly in the same pan from which I’d removed the browned chorizo. I scrubbed and sliced the potatoes and added them to the pan with the onions, threw in the washed and chopped kale, added chicken stock, salt, olive oil, and let it simmer all afternoon. It was a Sunday in early February, and Josh had a bad cold, and after the soup was on the stove I walked to the market and bought a few bags of oranges, and peeled them all and juiced them, and stocked the refrigerator with fresh-squeezed orange juice for him to drink. He watched TV, and lay in bed reading, and when the soup was ready, our friends Meryl and Chris joined us for dinner.

I remember that Sunday vividly because it was the first of the last of our days together. In hindsight, I see more clearly that he had begun to pull away from me toward a different life, but I had absolutely no notion of it at the time. He was grumpy, but that was understandable; he had a cold. He seemed anxious and agitated, but we were slated to leave the City three weeks later to move home to North Carolina, and there was a lot to be done. None of this phased me. Even then, only one thing seemed off, and even that I dismissed without difficulty. It was the look in his eyes— a bored, restless look, tinged, vaguely, by quiet rage. The kind of look you see on the face of a child who is trapped in time-out while all the other kids get to go out into the world and play. Which, as it turns out, is exactly how he was feeling. The metaphor is made even more apt by a metaphor he himself made later, in his case against our marriage, that he had hidden for years behind my apron strings, and I had mothered him, and he needed to be on his own to grow up. And like the petulant child he was, he got his way.

When we split up and I returned to the apartment in Brooklyn to gather my things and move them to Maine, the kitchen was the only room I left virtually intact. I took the flea-market table, the one that was homemade and not very sturdy but was perfect as a sideboard, and two 50s-era metal stools. But aside from those and my collection of juice glasses; the French terrines; the mint green butter dish; the blue Ball jar; the pale pink Depression-glass pitcher— I left everything as it was. I could barely stomach being in the kitchen— Lauren did all the packing in there—let alone the idea of ever again eating anything he’d touched. The room that had once been the happiest one in our home was now the one that felt most like a tomb.

I started working on this piece during my time in Maine, about this time last year, after Emily had moved from Rockland to Boston and I was living alone by myself for the first time in my life. I wrote:

My kitchen now—because for the first time in my life it is my kitchen—is spare in the most pitiful way. On a good day, the cabinets are stocked with cartons of chicken broth, two large cans of whole peeled tomatoes, with noodles and crackers. I have what I need to make egg-ribbon soup, or an omelet. In the refrigerator are a couple types of cheese from the Co-Op, a gallon of organic whole milk, plenty of Kate’s of Maine butter, Primo eggs, some kind of greens, and beer, or a bottle of wine. There is a loaf of bread in the freezer. On a bad day, I might be out of all but milk and eggs. And on the worst kind of day, I’ll awake to the realization that I don’t even have milk to warm for my coffee.

I’ve done a pretty good job of staving off the worst days, but the bad ones are frequent enough. On those days, I stare blankly into the fridge, then drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes, and the first thing I eat is family meal at Primo at 4 o’clock. It isn’t that I’m not hungry; there is just something about being alone that makes me lose my appetite. Which is probably why even when I do get a ride to the Co-Op or to Hannaford to stock up, I’m at a loss as to what to buy. I often wish I’d really learned how to cook. Not that I can’t cook, I can certainly manage, but really cook, the way he did. But even oftener, I wish I had someone to cook for.

In comparison to my kitchen now, in the little one-bedroom apartment whose large wide windows make it feel somehow urban even though it’s situated in sleepy downtown Manteo, the kitchen in Maine was stocked as well as the local grocery. I moved into this apartment—the first place I’ve lived alone by choice—just a week before we opened The Brine and Bottle. I look forward to the day I finally have time to pick up my glasses and plates and bowls, the French glass jars and the mint-green butter dish, which are all still at Lauren’s. I look forward to the day when the blue Ball jar will once again hold flowers. I look forward to cooking a meal there, maybe sometime this winter, when I can wrangle two days off in a row.

For now, I’m content in the kitchen at The Brine and Bottle, which will always be more Andrew’s than mine—the way the bar, perhaps, is mine more than his—but he’s willing to share it with me just the same. I’ve spent my whole working life tip-toeing around professional kitchens I had no claim to, and it took me a few weeks to get used to the idea that I was welcome there, but not much longer than that to realize it’s a place I want to be. I’ve gotten a little bolder about tying on an apron, and have graduated from peeling peanuts to actually helping make the deviled eggs. I brought The Art of Simple Food to the restaurant, and on Saturday evening I commandeered the stove to make a batch of Tomato Sauce with Benton’s Bacon and Onion, a head start on the lasagna I’d planned to make for Andrew’s birthday on Sunday. I’m determined to pick up where I left off a year and a half ago—to learn to be more confident in the kitchen; and maybe, along the way, to finally really learn to cook.

Knowing that his birthday was approaching, I asked Andrew last week if he had any comfort foods, besides General Tso’s chicken from Top China, or Chilli- cheese corn dog nuggets from Poor Richards, that he might like to eat. What I was trying to figure out is what I might be able to make him for his birthday. Which is tricky, as the intimidation factor involved in making Birthday Dinner for someone who cooks for a living is compounded by the fact that the Andrew doesn’t like cake.

“I don’t really have any foods like that anymore,” he said. We were standing in the kitchen at The B&B’s three-compartment sink, washing dishes together.

“None?” I asked.

He paused for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and said in his straightforward drawl, “I appreciate anything, as long as I don’t have to make it.”

“I know,” I said, nodding my head. “I know how that is.”

It is one of the greatest things we have in common.

The following recipe is an adaptation of the combination of two recipes from the aforementioned The Art of Simple Food. One of the best things about this cookbook is that Alice gives options for variations at the end of each recipe, and the result is always something new entirely. The bacon we use at The Brine and Bottle is from Allan Benton in Madisonville, Tennessee, and it’s this bacon that provides the sauce’s salty, smoky undertone. It’s crazy good bacon; I don’t refer to him as “The High Priest of Pork” for nothing.

Tomato Sauce with Benton’s Bacon and Onion

2 large yellow onions, chopped

10 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped coarse

4 large cans whole Italian tomatoes, hand-crushed, with juice

2 slices Benton’s slab bacon, cut into 1/4 inch pieces

2 tbs olive oil

small can (or tube) tomato paste

salt and pepper, to taste

Add 2 tbs olive oil to a pan, and heat over medium flame.

Add bacon to pan. (It is beyond gluttonous to cook this bacon in olive oil, but do it anyway. Trust me.)

Once bacon begins to brown, remove from pan with tongs, leaving bacon drippings in pan.

Add onions and garlic to bacon drippings in pan, and cook slowly until onions become translucent. Take care not to burn garlic.

Add 2/3 cup dry white wine and reduce over medium heat until almost all liquid has evaporated.

Stir in crushed tomatoes.

Season with salt and pepper as you go.

Bring entire contents to a low simmer, and allow sauce to reduce and thicken. When liquid has reduced by 1/2, add tomato paste and stir.

Then add browned bacon back to sauce.

Or if you’re like me, go ahead and add it back right after you bring the tomatoes to a simmer; otherwise, you’ll eat it all without meaning to, or knowing how it happened. A Bacon Blackout, if you will.

The Brine and Bottle

For the first time in ten years, I feel compelled to cut my hair; to really cut it-- to lop eight or so inches off the bottom so it falls somewhere between my chin and shoulders instead of halfway down my back, as it does now. Mama told me once when I was in my early 20s (I'd chopped my hair short on my 19th birthday in an attempt to gain some independence from the girl I'd always been) that if I wanted to have long hair again I should grow it out before I had my first child; the idea being that as soon as I was responsible for a tiny, helpless human being I would have no time for frivolities like hair, on the off-chance I still had an interest in such things.

On many levels, I imagine the birth of my first child will be a lot like the experience of opening my first restaurant. But for starters, The Brine and Bottle has been officially open for a mere twelve days and I’m having this urge to get rid of my hair—along with the realization that it will very likely be another two weeks before I’m free to sit still long enough to have that done.

On the first night we were open my dear friend Erin turned to me with a big smile and asked, “Well, do you feel relieved?”

And she looked so hopeful and certain that for her sake I wanted to lie, but I couldn’t. “No,” I answered.

My face must have betrayed how frightened I felt because she laughed her great laugh and sighed and threw her arms around me and said, “Oh, Ashley, I love your honesty.”

It was true. I felt nervous and excited; proud and happy—but relieved? I didn’t feel a bit relieved. All of that anticipation, all of the working and waiting—the months of jumping through hoops for the Town and the Health Department, of navigating building codes and rules and becoming proficient in terms like “BFE” and “knock-down” and “NSF”—all of that had culminated in one amazing, terrifying thing: we had a living, breathing restaurant, and now, all by ourselves, we had to keep it alive.

The experience must be similar, too, it its singularity—in the necessity of surviving the event in order to fully comprehend it. I’ve had numerous people tell me I should write a book about how to open a restaurant on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but the reality is that I couldn’t tell anyone else how it’s done; it’s one of those things you understand only after you’ve lived through it. And it’s better that way. I was blessedly naïve when we began this journey nine months ago, and determined, and without that combination this feat would have been impossible. Despite its immense challenges, opening The Brine and Bottle has been and continues to be the single most amazing experience of my life.

Our lives depend on our ability to take on trials at will, to endure, and then to happily forget them when we come out the other side. No woman would have more than one child if she could truly recall the pain of it. And I imagine that at some point, maybe not too many years from now, the memory of the hardships of these early months will have faded to the point where I begin to reminisce about the quiet moments when the space was still ours, before the world laid claim to it and turned it into the strong, thriving business it will one day certainly be.

“Maybe having another one wouldn’t be so bad?” I’ll say to Andrew. ‘In fact, it might even be fun.’

It should be fairly obvious that I’m ready, if you pay attention to the length of my hair.

Probably Needs Salt

It is 5:13 on a Sunday evening in April, and the line at the K&W Cafeteria in Rocky Mount, which snakes around like the line at an amusement park ride in order to accommodate as many people as possible, is backed up to the door. We'd set out from Nannie’s house in Tarboro at a quarter to five in an attempt to beat the crowd, but to no avail. Couples and families, some spanning several generations, line up to heap their trays with plates of food. I am astounded, having arrived the day before from New York, where the proper dinner hour is roughly 7 o’clock and a table at 9 p.m. is prime real estate, that this many people would so willingly dine out at 5 p.m. But I’m back in the South, where dinner is the after-church meal and supper is a smaller meal after dark. And judging by the number of patrons still dressed in their Sunday finest, church has just let out. So perhaps this counts as late lunch for more than myself.

The offerings of a K&W are both wonderful and terrible to behold. At the first station, they’re peddling cubes of cherry and lemon Jell-O, Waldorf salad, some sort of congealed marshmallow-cream concoction with coconut and maraschino cherries, a salad of shaved carrot with raisins. Nearly all of it is served topped with a dollop of whipped cream. This is nothing new to me, having been raised by grandmothers on both sides who loved cafeterias as much as they loved to cook. But still, there is something vaguely horrifying, something very Willy-Wonka about it: the commotion and bright lights, the ladies in their hairnets, friendly but stern, clouds of vapor rising from steam trays and hot hotel pans. I falter for a moment, feeling rude at the impulse to refuse the offer of the counter-woman, when she drawls, “What can I get y’all?”

I look from the rainbow of salads to her, and back to the food, and think, ‘I cannot eat ANY of that,’ and feel immediately ashamed. Because my grandmothers had instilled in me the belief that it was as impolite to refuse food, as it was to swallow without chewing, I panic. And then I remember, with some small consolation, that I am a grown woman and don’t have to eat anything if I don’t want to. I manage a smile, but before I can say “Nothing, thank you,” I see it, a huge glass bowl filled with fresh strawberries, and on the glass sneeze-guard, a small, hand-written placard where the standard plastic one should be, that reads: LOCAL NORTH CAROLINA STRAWBERRIES. FRESH!

Ye gods, as my Nannie would say, what a miracle.

Strawberries are just coming into season, and that the K&W bothered to buy them locally instead of out of California (and here, I picture a worn little old farmer pulling up to the loading dock, the bed of his truck filled with strawberries, unloading boxes of them and chatting with the receiver while the Sysco drivers look on with a bored kind of wonder) makes me happy. Truly happy. So I say, “Strawberries, please,” and feel not only relieved at having been able to accept something to eat but actually excited about what it is: Local North Carolina strawberries. Fresh! I place the small white bowl on my tray and slide down the line.

When I was a girl, strawberries in the fields were one of the first true signs of spring, and in mid-May, always, Mama would take us across the bridge to the Currituck mainland, to Maco’s Strawberry Fields. Lauren and I would fill buckets and buckets, as many as we could carry, getting sticky hands and sticky mouths as we moved down the rows, turning over the leaves, searching under, always searching for a bigger, the biggest, most perfect berry. Then we’d have them weighed at the small shed at the edge of the field and pay by the pound, dumping the strawberries out of buckets and into bags, racing home to wash and dry them, cool them for safekeeping. It was one of my favorite weeks of the year, as I could eat strawberries at every meal, with shortcake for dessert.

Inland two hours, in the fields around Tarboro, the season comes earlier by a few weeks. Unlike the Outer Banks, the ocean doesn’t moderate the temperature there, and it’s always warmer (or cooler in winter) by about ten to fifteen degrees. And so at Nannie’s you get early strawberries, like I did the year I visited from New York for Mother’s Day and carried a bucket of them back with me on the plane, all the way to my apartment in Manhattan.

The next station is protein. And again I have this pang of shame, because I have no intention of ordering chicken and dumplings, or fried chicken, or chicken-fried steak, or country ham. I’d forsaken my vegetarianism years before, when I really fell in love with the world of food, but I still had extraordinary standards when it came to meat consumption. The K&W, to put it plainly, doesn’t live up to them.

“Nothing, thank-you,” I say, and smile politely.

And the woman looks at me, astonished, and says, “No meat?,” to clarify that I do not, in fact, want meat, which in the South is a staple of every meal.

“No, thank-you,” I say, and feel a little less scrutinized when Nannie orders a plate of country ham and I take it from her and put it on my tray, and because of my triumph with the strawberries.

Then it’s on to vegetables, where I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there is no vegetable I won’t eat, even here. I ask for a vegetable plate and choose stewed cabbage, turnip greens, butter beans and corn. These, too, make me happy. Then it’s on to unsweetened iced tea, and I’m done, with Nannie and Mama trailing behind. I wait at the register as they catch up and the cashier scans our trays with a practiced eye, pushing buttons on the big keypad in front of her. She hands me the ticket.

We head for a booth that is being cleared, and settle in after the bus-boy wipes down the table, removing the various plates and bowls from our trays and divvying them up in front of each of us. The last time I was here was the spring before Grandaddy died, a year ago, when we sat for hours while Mama fed him and he struggled to swallow and chew and swallow without choking. I feel his absence deeply, but am cheered by the fact that Nannie seems to enjoy being out of the house, looking pretty in her lipstick and red sweater-set, excited about the ham, the cabbage, the baked apples and cornbread.

Southern food is salty, and I like salty food, but I also know that food that is salted correctly doesn’t taste salty, but seasoned. The right amount of salt makes the lemon taste brighter, the onion a little more sweet. Finding the right amount of salt is like finding the perfect adjective, an ultimately satisfying experience. I’m reminded of eating clam chowder at the bay in Wellfleet the summer Josh hurt his knee and needed surgery and we cancelled our honeymoon to Spain and went to Cape Cod instead; and him asking me, “How is it?” And me saying, “It needs salt.” And him saying, “I feel like it’s been a long time since you enjoyed something you ate,” and that stinging me. Because it was false; I enjoyed a lot of things, it’s just that I was of the opinion that most of them needed salt. And I said, “That’s not true. The clam chowder you made last night was perfect.” Because it was. Because we had learned to eat together and because he knew how I liked things and agreed with me basically about how food should taste in terms of a dish being seasoned properly.

It was a defense on his part, as a professional cook, to balk whenever anyone complained, or in the case of the chowder, made an honest remark, about a dish in a restaurant. You’d think it would be the other way around. You’d think because he worked in a kitchen and cooked at high volume, and prided himself on doing it right, that he’d have less patience for cooks who fell short of the standards he set for himself. But, no. We’d be out to dinner with friends and someone would make a comment about the temperature of their steak and he’d shoot me this look, like: If they think they can do it so much better why don’t they get in there and cook it themselves? Or better yet, stay home?

But the chowder needed more salt, and I wasn’t afraid to say so, as I was never afraid to tell him anything I thought. Which was probably part of what ruined us in the end: my infinite opinions.

Here is the point: the vegetables at the K&W that evening, to my pleasant surprise, needed nothing. Absolutely nothing. No salt, no pepper. I had no wistful wish that the greens had been seasoned with a little ham hock or a bone thrown in with the beans, because the K&W had gotten it right. Only a few weeks before, Josh had confessed that he had a crush on a girl at work; that he didn’t want to be married anymore; that he didn’t want to move home to the Outer Banks and open a restaurant together; that he desired a different life altogether, without me in it. I’d fled New York in a panic, first to my best friend Emily’s in Maine, and then home to North Carolina. My whole world had exploded. And yet the vegetables wanted for nothing.

And at 5:42 this evening, not much had changed. The place was packed. The fried okra was crisp, the creamed corn was the perfect combination of salty and sweet and creamy with butter, there was tarragon vinegar on the table for the turnip greens, about which Nannie was very excited. It was exactly the same, and everything else, completely different. Because today, Lauren and I have just come from the bank, where we took out a loan to open our own little beer and wine bar, which will have well-salted food and a view of the water. I am finally beginning once more to feel like myself. This time last year, I would not have believed it possible.

Some Things that Only Seem Small When You're Not Thinking of Them in Proper Proportion

One of my oldest obsessions has also become my latest—walking the beach in search of shells. Not long after I’d learned to tie my shoe and crack an egg, Mama taught me that the best time for beach-combing on the Outer Banks is in wintertime, after a storm. This was a lesson passed down from Nelly-Myrtle Pridgen, our neighbor on Soundside Road and an Old Nags Head fixture, who walked the beach every day of her life and whose drafty old cedar-shake cottage was a mausoleum dedicated to the Atlantic. Nelly-Myrtle had possession of the kind of treasures about which a small girl can only dream, and growing up, the abundance of shells was the only thing I really liked about winter, a season I defined very clearly by what it was not. It was not summer. Summer was my favorite. And then autumn came and the summer people closed up their cottages on the Beach Road and by winter, the long light and the heat and noise were gone and summer seemed as much a ghost as the others who haunted Nags Head. But there were shells.

And this winter, that is still true. Walking the beach in the sinking light, I have found abalone and baby’s ears; moon snail shells and jack-knife clams; cockles; scallops; mussels and oysters. Starfish. Conchs. More than my pockets hold. Reder, who walks the beach with me, likes the huge conchs with their coral-orange lining, and the blue-black scallops that give Coquina Beach its blue-black sand. She likes the symmetry of the little white bivalve clams, each half a mirror of the other. I trail behind her, seeking out baby’s ears as I always have, getting lost in the track of the last high tide until a wave crashes over itself into the afternoon.

It's those moments, like my sister arriving home this morning with a loaf of freshly baked buttermilk bread, still warm from the oven, that remind me to be thankful for where, and who, I am. And these days, that is no small feat.

Lauren's Buttermilk Bread (makes 2 loaves)

adapted from cookingbread.com

5 - 6 cups bread flour

3 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 package dry yeast (rapid rise if possible)

1 cup water

1 1/3 cup buttermilk

Add buttermilk and water to a saucepan. Warm liquid to a lukewarm state over medium heat. Do not make it to hot or you will kill the yeast. The buttermilk may look a little curdled. In a large bowl add 2 cups of flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and yeast. Add the lukewarm buttermilk from the saucepan to the dry ingredients. Using a wooden spoon or your hands and mix for 2 minutes. After mixing for 2 minutes add another cup of flour. Pour dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 8 - 10 minutes. Adding the rest of the flour a 1/2 a cup at a time till the dough is smooth and silky. You do not have to add all the flour. Place dough into a large clean bowl with a little oil. Rol the dough in the oil to coat all sides. Cover with plastic wrap. Place in a warm area till double in size. After the dough has doubled in volume, punch it down gently. Divide the dough into 2 equal sections and place into a greased bread pans. Cover and let rise till doubled again about 45 minutes. Preheat oven to 375 F. Brush dough with a mixture of egg and water. Place in oven and bake for 45 minutes. Remove and place on a wire rack to cool.