a contented weekend

Cooking, reading, gardening, walking, listening, for two days in June.

Petey on the move.

Get outside

If you’re able to be outside — meaning: if smoke from the Quebec fires doesn’t keep you from outdoor activities — go for a walk or a hike or, if it’s your jam, a run. I’ve recently disconnected myself from my Apple watch during weekend walks unless I’m at the gym and trying to monitor my heart rate. My phone knows where I am, and I do carry it with me all the time in the event of emergencies (mine or someone else’s) but also because I use a great phone app called All Trails that I’ve depended on for years not only to monitor my hiking (it pings a designated person when I get on and off the trail to let them know I’m safe) but to introduce me to new places to walk. This weekend, if the skies are clear, Susan and I will take Petey for a long walk, maybe up in Washington Depot, Connecticut, at the Steep Rock Preserve. If you have a dog, and I hope you do, go to Bring Fido to find local walks and hikes that are perfect for you.

We’ll also be gardening this weekend: I’ll be working on our climbing roses, pruning back the hydrangeas to finally allow them to grow, pruning the last of the lilacs, and probably planting more native perennials, because I love native perennials.

My happy place.

In our kitchen

I’m making a shift to more plant-forward Mediterranean cooking — it’s delicious but it’s also a health thing, and also there is so much that’s filling our farmer’s markets right now (go to my friend Susie’s amazing substack,

Sixburnersue

for great writing about farming or small-holding, cooking, life on an island, recovery, hope, contentment, and all the good things) — so we’ll probably spend some time cleaning piles of fresh chard, watching Heidi Swanson’s amazing kitchen videos, going through back issues of Emily Nunn’s The Department of Salad, and re-considering what it means to cook well and sustain ourselves and those we love, including our aching, beleaguered planet.

In the reading spot

I’ve recently made the discovery that I can only read fiction at night in bed, otherwise my brain switches into a heavy spin cycle of Monkey Mind, and it gets impossible for me to quiet it down for sleep. Caveats: poetry (WS Merwin at the moment), and some non-fiction from my friend

Katherine May

, and Wendell Berry, Gail Caldwell, Katrina Kenison, bell hooks, Pico Iyer, Terry Tempest Williams, Ross Gay. Right now, I’m doing a second read of

Alice Elliott Dark

‘s gorgeous Fellowship Point, which is recently out in paperback, and my annual read of Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. And because it is Pride Month, this: I do not recall a Pride Month as stunningly important as this one since I came out in the 1990s amidst my friends dying left and right of AIDS, Matthew Shepard being murdered in Wyoming, and a violent anti-LGBTQ hysteria. Still, one can argue, and I do, that every Pride Month is important, and every day is Pride Day when you are a member of this population as I am, and your every basic right is at risk. I will be reading Ani Kayode Somtochukwu And Then He Sang A Lullaby, the debut title from Roxane Gay’s new imprint, Roxane Gay Books, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, and dipping back into Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast. And as always, I will read, as I do every Pride Month, Marie Howe’s What the Living Do.

From my speakers

There is so much great music coming out right now that our usual Saturday-night-listening-while-cooking is going to be overwhelming. Coming through my speakers this weekend: Jason Isbell’s Weathervanes, Rufus Wainright’s Folkocracy, The Wildwoods’ Foxfield Saint John, Kara Jackson’s Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love.

Whatever you do, wherever you are, please: be safe, keep good sentences in your ears, avoid too much noise (said Jane Kenyon), and remember to breathe.