once you were not a people, but now you are God's people

Prologue

Welcome to my 100th blog post! Wow! This is exciting for a number of reasons: 1) it means that writing is happening; all is not lost, 2) it's a commemoration of some really awesome people, several of whom were ones who helped and inspired me to start, develop, and (finally) share this blog. I used to be afraid of writing, but I knew it was something I loved and had to do; I never imagined being blessed with boldness enough to share it with all of you.

1 Peter 2.9-10

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Tonight, I am so thankful for family. Family at Community—sharing what God has led us to in our lives and that we are all here, in Seattle, as a part of God’s plan, even through all of the storms in our lives. Family at our apartment—Pickle and me running into all of our friends in our building and talking out our weeks. Family from a distance—the people who have influenced me and guided me and loved me, blood-related or not.

Particularly though, Waynesburg is on my heart tonight. Not the Waynesburg where I went to school, but the Waynesburg where I learned to live afresh—the Waynesburg after graduation. These are the things I am thankful for and that I miss.

Was it really just last summer that I was there? That we were all there.

I remember “move-in” day, walking through the gate with my carry-on suitcase and unpacking in Merry’s room, sweet Merry who slept in her sister’s room so that I could have a bed upstairs with the family, as one of the family. We’d get up in the morning, and Kim and I would go around shutting the windows and turning off the fans to keep in the morning’s cool.

Walking down the creaky stairs (the best feature in any house, if you ask me), we’d meet in the kitchen for morning tea. I think you really know someone when you know how they like their tea. (Even more so when you know their favorite mug in your cupboard!) I loved that all throughout the day, we would put on the kettle and make tea for each other—morning to start the day, afternoon (if not wine), evening after the girls were in bed, as we unwound with laundry and Frasier.

It’s these simple routines that I hold dear, even though they weren’t even my own. And as my lovely friend Kim would call them, these rituals compose our lives. She wrote, “Ritual is different than routine. Routines are ways of doing things you fall into without thinking too much about them; they become rote, and often even tyrannical things that eventually disgust you. But to nurture Ritual requires careful forethought, an attention to space and time, and a tender attitude of love," and that has stuck with me. I love it. I go back to those words when I start falling into routine. (So pretend I said ritual to begin with, like Christopher McCandless quoting an author with which I am unfamiliar, “To call each thing by its right name.”)

So that summer, I adopted their rituals as they adopted me—they being all of Waynesburg that is sweet and kind and lives with that tender attitude of love.

I would walk to my wretched Chemistry class, late almost every day (as I was for my 8am class the previous fall: so worth it to have tea around the table to start the day), but with tea in-hand: armed. (Martin & Kim drink tea fresh off the kettle like it’s already cooled—something I still haven’t mastered; they’d be pouring seconds as I was still sipping the rim of a full cup—a sign that I have a lot of tea to drink to catch up!) So I’d take my cup to-go.

After class, I’d sometimes walk up to the library and visit with whoever was there, most often Noah or Jill or Pam—people whom (with the exception of Jill) I didn’t really know well until that summer. We’d talk about Noah’s book or Jill’s daughters or Pam’s peacocks—conversations that weaved warm summer days into a flipbook of tiny celebrations after (yet during) a period of trial and transition.

My first day after class (and many after), I came home to Martin & Kim in the garden. We did so much therapeutic weeding that I think I’m still gleaning peace out of the process of just ripping out weeds and laying down newspapers, building up sections of stone and brick. (You can piece together the symbolism for yourself.)

I miss meeting with Joonna for lunch, catching up on the what’s nexts and the uncertainty of the coming months and leaning on the support over the previous weeks.

Ahh and baking and cooking with Kim! We made a vegan chocolate cake for tea time with Joonna; we made pasta with fresh basil and oven-toasted bread for some dinners—herbs picked from right down the back patio.

My mother would tell you that I do not cook; I do not wash dishes, but I learned to love these things that summer, and I’ve realized that it’s something I missed out on growing up—I always saw it as a chore, something to be done, rather than an experience of friendship (wasn’t it just something my sister and I were supposed to fight over?).

One day, I got to drive with Sally & Kim to Mother Earth Farm at the top of the hill for the first time. We walked through the greenhouse, pointing out our favorites, selecting some for planting, some for porch décor. This place quickly went from unknown to sweet—I’d drop by on my way in or out of town to visit Rose.

Then there were evenings sitting in the yard with Ian and Julia, watching the fireflies over the hill sparkling in the dark like sun flickering on deep water. We’d talk about poetry and future schools and summer.

I’m not clearly articulating any of this, and as each instance pours in, it brings friends because that’s what this Waynesburg was—a nest of friendship.

Ice cream on the porch—Noah & Michelle’s, Sally & Kevin’s, Martin & Kim’s. Wine at the dinner table. Tea in the playroom/writing room/sun room. Tequila & egg-in-a-hole at the kitchen table. Cake & stories on the back patio. Walks everywhere with everyone. Family visits. The Trees of the Field will Clap their Hands. Prayers & piano-playing. Lunch at the arboretum. Visiting Jay & his family. The Mennonite church. Walks with Elesha’s dog. Dancing with the girls in the living room or catching lightning bugs (and Elspeth wanted to keep one and asked Papa what they eat so that she could take care of it) or pushing Bea on the swing or reading Strega Nona while we waited for noodle water to boil or going to the park to “play school” (we found a snake on the sidewalk) or walking to the honeysuckle bush to suck the nectar out of every bloom.

Was I really only there for two or three months?

So all of these things are flowing in and out of my mind as I rest 3,000 miles away, content on my mattress on the floor with my puppy sleeping beside me, a cool breeze through the window relieving this summer’s heat and StoryHill playing on-repeat, which is actually what brought all of this to mind in the first place.

I was listening to them and thought of that last Open Mic where Noah & Martin sang and played together and covered a StoryHill song, and the band stuck (though I can’t remember that particular song). I think that was the beginning of the Waynesburg I’ll remember, the Waynesburg I’ve shared just a slice of here.

It led me to think of the idea of breaking bread, the way that it ties us all together, sometimes with literal bread. Like sharing Chemistry-class raisin bread with Noah in the Writing Center, which led to a conversation that ended with a friend, my sister, and me staying at his brother’s house in New Jersey for a weekend. Like sharing loaves of banana bread for dessert, for breakfast, for afternoon snack in a red house with a family of five plus one. Like learning to eat and sleep and breathe again after the trying months of the initial storm and the aftershocks and the continued challenges and fears.

God brings us to these places, and we don’t know why or for what, but when we fully enjoy the people there, we learn to stop asking the questions we can’t answer (loving them [this may always be my favorite] like locked rooms, as Rilke writes), and we learn to live in the simplicity of rituals, of intentionality, of love.

Our church in downtown Seattle constantly reminds us that the church is a people and not a place. I am so grateful for the people of Waynesburg who lived this without saying it, so while I keep saying “Waynesburg” like it is a place, I really mean “the people whom I love who just happened to live/work/be in community there”. 

A lot of words about food and only food

In my long days of unemployment, I have found that most of my days revolve around when I am going to eat. It seems to be the most important thing at current, and with my new on-take of veganism, I have much to explore.

There are several things that I have learned through this adventure thus far:

1. Recipes are just suggestions.
2. 10% of ingredients are optional. 
3. When it doesn't work out, eat it anyway.
4. Three home-cooked meals a day is way too much food.
5. YOU CAN COOK FOR ONE PERSON.

1. Recipes are just suggestions. 

Many of you may be familiar with the terribly addicting site, Pinterest. For a while, I sat idly by while the people I follow pinned recipes and photos of entire meals and unique ways to cook a vegetable. I'd scroll down and down and wonder why on earth people would post these tempting recipes and not make them. It was probably then that I decided to use Pinterest for its real purpose (aside from finding hilarious photos of dogs with funny captions) and start pinning recipes. Then! dundundunnnnn I was going to make the recipes. gasp!

Once my "food" and "vegan" board were plump with recipes, I began. I started with smoothies. I mean, how hard could it be? Not very, I learned. This is also where I discovered that recipes are suggestions. It doesn't matter if you include one cup of mango or one and a quarter cup or one and some unmeasurable amount of mango that resulted from turning the bag upside down over the blender. Further, who knows how much avocado makes a half cup mashed? The blender is present for the mashing part, so just through in some avocado. This, of course, is referring to one of my favorite smoothies: the mango avocado smoothie. Yum! 

How does one make a mango avocado smoothie? Throw in some mango, some avocado, a big glob of vanilla yogurt, a few squeezes of lime juice, a tilt of sugar, and ice. Blend it all. Too thick? Pour in some water or orange juice or apple juice or anything liquid. I like to match the vanilla yogurt flavor with a packet of vanilla protein powder. I just realized how un-appealing I made this smoothie sound. I'm not trying to sell it, but you just have to trust me that it's delicious. (P.S. I don't actually use yogurt; I use cultured almond milk, so in other words, almond yogurt. Kind of.)

So that's how I got into this. And today, I definitely took a recipe and made it my own. It was for creamy potato soup. I've had these potatoes sitting in the cupboard for weeks, and before I went to Arizona, I blanched a bunch of vegetables--peppers, carrots, eggplant-- so I decided it's time to use them. Oh, and I had an open carton of vegetable broth that expired last week, so I figured I should use that up too. 

The eggplant was gone (to be explained later), so I thought I'd shoot for a potato soup. I did a Google search for "vegan potato soup recipe" and found one that claimed to be quick (I don't have a crockpot) and simple: that's my kind of meal. 

In my efforts to lead a microwave-less life, I boiled the potatoes and got started on the rest. Well, the recipe didn't even call for peppers or carrots or garlic, just onions. Oh well, they were all going in! I heated them all on the stove and sat them aside for later. I warmed up the broth and soaked the potatoes in it for a while. Meanwhile, the recipe called for cashew butter, soy milk, and nutritional yeast in the blender. What I put in? Whole raw almonds and vanilla almond milk. Close enough. As I poured in the vanilla almond milk, I thought, "I knew there was a reason  I wanted to buy plain almond milk..." Mmm vanilla almond potato soup...

I blended some of the potatoes and the broth in with the almonds and milk to make a thick, creamy broth. In the meantime, I heated up some black beans and boiled up some Ramen noodles to add; I like thick, chunky soup. When it was all said and done, I had included very few of the ingredients from the recipe, but it still worked out. That's right, even though it had a very strong, sweet vanilla tainting, it turned out to be a perfect balance, making a well-rounded soup. I do have to admit though, the Ramen noodles were a bit much; too non-traditional for a potato soup.

2. 10% of the ingredients are optional.

Now to the eggplant. First off, when blanching eggplant, I learned, just go for it; it doesn't look right (it probably wasn't), but just go for it. While Laura was visiting, I was excited to test out some of the meals that make enough for several people or don't store as easily. Thanks to my college's cafeteria, which made either rice, tofu, rice with tofu, or eggplant parm in the vegetarian section, I immediately knew what to do with my eggplant. The problem, however, was the parm. I once again did a Google search for "vegan eggplant parm" and the results were perfect. I decided to combine a few recipes, but I took the "cheese" sauce idea from one of them and began my search for the ingredients. 

Tahini? What on earth is tahini? Awesome; that's what. It's like sesame hummus, and it makes great cheese sauce or a great cracker topping. So I got tahini. Nutritional yeast? Uhh, what's the difference from baking yeast? "Well, there are different vitamins in nutritional yeast that set it apart; also, it is used for different purposes, mainly to..." I zoned out. The girl behind the counter was awfully nice to try to describe it to me, but the point was that she began by saying that they didn't have any. Therefore, it wasn't an important ingredient.

By the end, I blended the tahini sauce, as I came to call it, ingredients into a runny, milky mesh, where, again, the vanilla in the almond milk smelt overpowering. A little wary, I poured the sauce over my breaded and tomato sauced eggplant, stuck it in the oven and waited. The result? The sauce became thick and golden in the oven. I think Laura and I were both shocked by how well it turned out. Who needs nutritional yeast? Not us.

Further, the tahini sauce proved to be a great addition to other meals. For example, I poured it over a portabella mushroom filled with tomato sauce to make a "portabella pizza". And finally, my favorite, I made a sort of alfredo-style sauce with it for over noodles. Thinking back to my days of making a lot of pie, I remembered using corn starch to thicken the filling. So I added some to the sauce and stirred constantly over low heat until it turned into a thick paste for my noodles. I was pretty shocked that it actually worked.

3. When it doesn't work out, eat it anyway.

Not every experimental attempt at a recipe works out. That's the worst because you're still stuck with it. I really really really hate wasting food, so I try to use everything that I can (hence the crazy conglomerate in my potato soup). As a result, when it doesn't taste quite like it should, three options remain: add something to it to make it better, pair it with something complementary on the side, or just suck it up and eat it. 

I made that mistake with one of my smoothies. It was one of my favorite smoothies: green! Throw in some kale, some spinach, a pear, a frozen banana, and some orange juice. Well, with some of the other smoothies that I make, I add flax oil just for the sake of its health benefits. It really is an odd addition because, well, it's an oil. After blending up my green smoothie, I thought, "Why not add some flax oil?", as if the smoothie didn't already offer a wealth of vitamins and nutrients. What a mistake!

As soon as the oil touched my smoothie, it started bubbling! It was like some odd, witch's concoction. I tried to stir the oil in and it sizzled and sent more bubbles to the top. Oh boy. I knew that I still had to drink it, so I decided to pair it with low-salt cashews. The slight salt took away from the bite of the fizz, and though I could imagine it tearing away at my stomach lining, it still tasted good, and at least it had a sort of chaser with the nuts.

Another instance was with carrots. Who can mess up carrots? I mean, really. It was here that I learned that some recipes do require measuring--or at least paying attention to an idea of how much of something to include. I was roasting my chopped carrots in the oven and added some balsamic and some honey--a combination that I was already wary of--as well as some other spices and such. Well, I never did go back to check how much of each I was supposed to put in, but it was clear that something wasn't right. They had this odd combination of being super sweet and then extremely bitter. It was like eating a Sour Patch Kids gummy in vegetable version. While it was an odd taste, luckily, Sour Patch Kids are one of my favorites! It was just a bit embarrassing because I had a friend over for dinner, and I had these ridiculous carrots!

4. Three home-cooked meals a day is way too much food.

Like I said, I've been home a lot. As a result, I was putting a lot of time and effort into each meal. Oatmeal with fresh cut fruit for breakfast; a big salad with tons of toppings for lunch; a smoothie and trail mix for dinner. It's just too much! One of my friends laughs constantly my choice to go vegan.

"You must always be hungry!"

"No! I have just the opposite problem! I eat so much that I'm constantly full! The past few days, I've forgotten what hunger even feels like! It's terrible!" It was then that I realized that I just could not eat three meals a day.

This idea bothered me a lot, and it still does because it's what we're all so used to--breakfast, lunch, dinner. I'm learning, though, that it's okay to snack instead of eating a lot in one sitting. At first, it seemed so easy to justify eating this great meals because they're so healthy, and I need to make sure to hit all of the food groups. Being overly conscious of how much you eat and what you eat and if you're eating the right things, though, is a lot of work and enough to drive you mad and just say, "I want a cookie!" and reach for a bowl of cereal to satisfy the sweet tooth. And that's one that I still haven't figure out because smoothies are really sweet; oatmeal is really sweet; why do I still want cookies and ice cream? I've been spoiled by watching years of the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street instead of the "Cookies are a sometimes snack" Monster.

5. YOU CAN COOK FOR ONE PERSON

I was really nervous when I started living on my own that I was going to succumb to Ramen every night and cereal every morning and peanut butter and jelly for lunch. It's an especially easy habit to get into when you don't have many ingredients around. It's taken me a while to get a few essential spices and to have some ingredients that are in many recipes. But now that I do, I've learned that there is so much to be made!

My second query was how to make good meals but not eat it for a week before I made something else because I had too much of that one thing because I am only one person. This is a lot of where the "recipes are suggestions" comes in because I discovered that I could visually half a recipe by just adding less of everything.

One day, I made these lettuce wraps with quinoa and black beans and avocado and peppers and the like. They were delicious, healthy, and I didn't have to worry about eating it for a week because I made enough for a meal and some leftovers for another meal at a later date. This was exciting: to be able to make good meals that would feed me more than once without going bad or getting tired of it.

And that one was especially a favorite because it was delicious, healthy, and pretty! I love the colors! Then again, avocado has a way of doing that to food. 

These are all things that I thought about today while I stirred my potato soup. I thought about some of the myths of cooking and some of the ways that I--someone with little cooking experience--decided to tackle the myths and make good food...and sometimes not so good food. I know that if I were a good, interesting creative nonfiction kid, I would have interwoven some personal experience or dilemma with the process of cooking or the variety of meals. Unfortunately, the cooking and recipe-mending are all that I have to share today, and I hope that it is enough and is as filling in words as it's filled my belly the past few weeks. 

Never Apologize

So this seems as good a time as any to start actually blogging--or at least attempting to. In Creative Nonfiction class, we read excerpts from Julie Powell's Julie/Julia and watched a snippet of an episode of The French Chef. The excerpts gave me comfort in the fact that a young woman could use some side project to hold her life together, even if that means making it fall apart more first. Further, Julia Child's hilarious, yet seemingly stoic, personality inspired me to step into the kitchen. (No, no, this isn't another food blog! Maybe...)

Every time I think I have things under control, I realize how much I don't. I crack under pressure, but I can't let myself fall apart. I am the yolk dropping into a bowl with a plop! with just enough buoyancy to keep from breaking. According to Julia, though, I needn't worry about my breaking yolks--"never apologize." They're omelettes anyways; I mean, that's the solution, right? Break and blend and whisk the yolks until they are no more discernible from each other or their whites. God, I am so alone.

I am twenty years old. Twenty. Two decades old. I can't even drink legally yet, but I keep getting these moments of panic where I start to think my life is over. I've lived it all, though I've barely lived at all, and I can do nothing but push forward through some set of routine to keep my body going.

I woke up one morning and wondered what I should eat for breakfast. I need to use up my eggs before they expire. Oh God, I am twenty years old, and my eggs are on the verge of expiring! I thought that I wanted to do my own thing for a while, but too often I felt this urging to fall in love and finish my life. (Why does love seem like such an ending?) During the past year, I spent a lot of time pretending that we were immortal. My cousin Derek was hospitalized most of 2011 due to complications that began with pneumonia, complicated by his DMD. He had always been the other half of my every "we." I could feel this ticking--like the elephant in the room, only this elephant was snoring while wearing a neon yellow tutu. I'm really good at pushing out whatever I don't want in my life. I turned the snoring elephant into a meditating Buddha in my mind, and I felt like I could hold onto that peace all the way to nirvana. 

Then Derek died. He died, and the prospect of death became real--I could, and would, die too. It was that moment when the ticking became my own. And here I am--trying to pick up the eggshells from the floor (never apologize), while I pretend like my yolks aren't longing to be mixed and blended and, oh God, worse than expiring, cooked. Cooked: entirely brewed into one being with ______. No one. With no one. 

"What are your first thoughts after watching Julia Child?"

"There is no way that those eggs are cooked!" I sassed at my prof's question. I have a tendency of saying ridiculous things to avoid some of the serious class discussions. 

Well, for what it's worth (if anything), I was right. Well, maybe. I've determined that there is a list of factors that I could have messed up:

• The pan wasn't hot enough. On my first try, the eggs weren't sizzly bubbling as Julia showed. Maybe my skillet was too cheap? Though, Julia sure stressed that there was no need to have anything more than a cheap skillet!
• Julia did pour a trickle of water into her eggs, but I didn't; she said it was an option!
• I can't have been shaking the skillet correctly. It splashed and jiggled, and each crest left me flinching back, as if I had a sparkler shooting sporadically in my hand. Nevertheless, the top of the egg remained gooey. 
• Julia said two-three eggs. I used two. Were they too many for the size of my pan?
• Maybe it's just the fact that I can't get the terminology right: pan? skillet? I don't know. Something. Surely Julie Powell didn't pronounce Julia's recipes correctly on day one. 

Maybe I don't need to worry so much about my eggs cooking up. I mean, we get multiple tries, right? We're all broken and risk everything to mix with a potential pair, but sometimes, we flop. Sometimes at the end of the date or the years of dating, all that we can do is lay flat on the plate and give up. If relationships worked out every time, life would be boring because we'd all be paired up with whichever little eggy we happened to be seated next to in our squeaky styrofoam beds. (No, how about cardboard? Let's be eco-friendly here; I try.) Hmm... "Life, friends, is boring!" ...so Berryman seems to think.

I'm glad for second-chances. I'm glad for falling apart and feeling like I'm nearly expired and hoping that someday I'll be cooked up tight in that French burrito of an omelette. Sorry, Julia, but it's no 30-second venture, and it takes more than two trys. Even if I'm not that hungry and I end up only cooking one egg, all swirled up within myself, as long as I've made it, knowing when to break and when to bounce lightly in the bubbling heat of butter, I can admit that Julia wasn't too far off, even if breakfast isn't quite what I thought it would be. 

Never apologize.