Issue 19: On Springtime & Goodbyes

Not to be dramatic, but it's sort of like dying

Good afternoon!

I’m one week away from moving to Oklahoma, and my little Texas heart is being glued together by queso. We are making it. Last weekend, we packed up my kitchen. It took eight people. And this fact is remarkable, because it shouldn't be possible to have that much stuff in that small of a kitchen. But I never claimed to be a minimalist.

So all my sweet little dishes are sleeping in their cardboard boxes, and we are eating frozen food and using one single paring knife. I cannot wait to get out my pans and scramble some beautiful, precious eggs. Not much longer til we are reunited, me and my pans. See you on the other side.

Naturally, I’ve decided to wax poetic about trees and springtime and dying and new life. I have a tendency for the dramatic, so I’m just embracing it at this point. But I do, in fact, mean every word. I need to process the changes and goodbyes in my life, and that’s just something I’ve learned over the years. So, here we are, reading this email.

Seeing as I have not cooked anything in a week, I don’t have much to share about food other than I have been eating at so many fabulous Austin restaurants with all my friends. French cafes, cheese classes, dim sum, wood-fired Mexican food. Just roll me out of here and put it on my tab.

As for books I’m reading, they are also all residing in boxes, so I have my old Kindle out and am trying out a Dorothy Sayers mystery for the first time. Will report back.

And one last bit of housekeeping, if, and by all means I mean if, you are interested in supporting Editor & Chef in the future, I’ve turned on the option to receive pledges. The newsletter remains completely free, but I am brainstorming some future options of more recipes, meal plans, book lists, etc. I have big hopes, but I do need to unpack my new house before I get any crazy ideas.

With that being said, I hope you enjoy this issue, which is mostly an essay and a few recommendations at the end.

Happy spring to you and yours,

Allison

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The Journal: On Springtime & Goodbyes

If you have ever had the immense privilege of visiting Midland, Texas, you will most certainly notice the vast array of brown flat ground peppered with drilling rigs and pump jacks, the air scented with crude oil. The tallest native trees are mesquite bushes. There is no such thing as springtime, in the storybook sense of the word. Cool air, flowers blooming, trees bursting back to life in a gentle, sweet manner—forget about it. Spring meant wind—gusts of dust kicked up while watching my brother's Little League baseball games. If it rained, which it didn't, but if it did, the rain smelled like dirt. There wasn't much fresh about it. For most of my life, this was my impression of the season.

That is, until about eight years ago when I first set foot in England.

March and April rolled around, and the damp dark of winter slowly began to fade. The air was cool, the Earth waking up from its long nap. There were meadows full of flowers that popped up, naturally, every year. This is still absolutely shocking to me, that flowers can just grow places. The snowdrop flowers danced in the cold mornings. The daffodils burst through the frosty ground, bushels of sunshine gathered to draw us out of our cold gloom. The trees creaked back to life as little buds unfurled, bright and delicate. The sun was soft and its warmth was welcome. Everything felt fresh. Some days, walking through a park, it was as if my soul could explode. I can still see snapshots in my mind, and if I think hard enough, I can feel the breeze as light shone through the new leaves.

That first time I experienced real spring eight years ago, I remember sitting in a lecture about poetry and springtime. The professor shared a poem, The Trees by Philip Larkin, that captured something about the essence of spring I haven't been able to shake for almost ten years now. He challenged us to memorize it and recite it for class if we were brave enough, because, he said, it's important to memorize poetry to have bits with you always for when the moment is right. If you didn't know, he's absolutely right. Some times, your heart just needs a bit of poetry.

I decided to take up the challenge, because something about the poem struck a chord in me. It's funny how memories fade just enough, but with some effort, we can patch together a feeling. If I think hard enough back to nineteen-year-old me, I can get back to that drafty Quaker Meeting House where our lectures were held, tucked away in a back garden. And I can hear the first words of Larkin's poem come to the surface.

"The trees are coming into leaf..."

Now I can't claim to remember every line perfectly, (I always get stuck in the second stanza), but I haven't forgotten his charge to us as a class. I remember most of the words too. Each year, when spring rolls around and April is on the horizon, the etching's of Larkin's words pop up in my thoughts.

The Trees by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

I don't know why this poem has stayed with me for so long. The poem itself is a memory I hold dear. It is a reminder of a past time in my life that, in more ways than one, was a true springtime. It is when I felt myself come into bloom, waking up to the person I wanted to become. Stuffed silly with dreams and big ideas, I think I first connected with the lines speaking of fullgrown thickness, what I imagined to be castle hillsides blanketed with flowers, sunshine, and warmth. Can't you just see a young me frolicking around the British countryside.

But now, I am struck by the greenness of grief that comes after winter.

I come to this poem this year in the Lenten season, and what happens to be a season of moving my life from one place to another. Of packing up the house and long goodbyes. And it feels fitting all over again.

I drive down the road past long stretches of Central Texas greenbelt, and the bluebonnets dance like daffodils, swaying in the uncharacteristically cold March air. I come up the familiar hill, and the tree outside my front door unfolds its new leaves, the green grief of goodbye looms over me when I look up. The tree is growing again.

Much of the growth we experience as people happens in the long night, the struggle under the surface for the roots to break ground and hold on to good soil. At times in the last few years, I have felt like that. Like we held on through the winter with a tight-fisted, refuse-to-let-go-til-you-bless-me kind of faith. Like the live oak trees weighed down with unforeseen ice, creaking, cracking, praying for sunlight to melt the weight off. If you cut a cross section, you might see the rings in our hearts, marking the seasons we weather.

Yet for as difficult as some days were, we have also had a bountiful harvest, new life bursting, light seeping through leaves in verdant goodness—gratuitous blessings of precious children and deep friendship. This is the house where we grew, where the babies came home, where the next-door neighbors became family. It's where we cried the tears of early parenthood, of leading a church through a struggling season, of finding our footing as husband and wife. And yes, I think we crammed more people around a four-person dining table than anyone in history.

I come in the sparse house, and the kitchen is packed. There are paper plates and frozen pizzas left. We still need to patch the nail holes in the walls and scrub down the showers, and the calendar is filling up with crossed-off days of what feel like last suppers. We are running around shoveling Tex-Mex into our mouths like tortillas won't float across the Red River. And these words just keep echoing in my mind. The trees are coming into leaf, the bluebonnets are singing, and it's all tangled up in my heart.

It's springtime. It feels partly like dying, partly like new life, partly like growing another ring of grain thicker, partly like relaxing into what I pray is another season of full-grown, overflowing castle hillsides, blanketed with flowers, sunshine, and warmth.

I can still here my professor's voice carrying that final line rather breezily: "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

It almost sounded like the West Texas wind.

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Editor & Chef Recommends

• Did Starbucks Really Put Olive Oil in Their Coffee via The New Yorker. This piece had me laughing out loud by the end.

• Where the Lion and the Witch Met the Hobbit: a lovely little article about my favorite city, complete with some achingly beautiful photographs of Oxford.

• Other newsletters I’m loving:

  • Haley Stewart's Newsletter
    , where she often writes about wonderfully bookish things, especially Jane Austen!

  • Joy Clarkson
    always has a delightful dispatch I enjoy each week — all things theology, beauty, and books!

  • the smitten kitchen digest
    is my weekly inspiration for what to eat.

  • The Goodness / from JL Gerhardt
    is my dose of writing that always makes me reflect on my faith.

• Austin Restaurants I loved lately:

  • Epicerie French Cafe

  • Bulevar Mexican Kitchen

  • Lin Asian Bar

  • Antonelli’s Cheese Shop

  • Roaring Fork

  • Loro

  • Matt’s El Rancho

Any other favorites?

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Wish us luck the next week as we load up the straggling pieces of junk still clinging to us. Stay tuned for the new kitchen in a few weeks.

Allison

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