Recipes for Moving On
A reflection on moving out, kitchen magic & dinner parties.
Growing up, even when I was as young as elementary school, I've always wanted to move.
And I meant this both literally and figuratively.
I wanted to be the main character in my life. I wanted to see new places, sure. But I desperately wanted to be the main character in one of the great young adult stories I read one after another.
You know the ones? The ones with the character who moved to different schools every year and at one point, at last, made new friends that changed everything. This person, this character, was the mysterious one that people were intrigued by. Truly, this is who I wanted to be as someone constantly searching for a friend within the same group of small town faces that I never got away from, from the time I entered kindergarten to the time I graduated high school and on.
I wanted a fresh start. I wanted a new beginning.
But, growing up, I never moved. I was never sent away to boarding school (though I brought the idea up to my parents more than once) and I never went on fancy European vacations by myself as I had always planned to after high school when I was young I figured that would be the only time to do it even with my minimal bank account savings.
Instead, oddly enough, I stayed close to home.
While I was in college, I studied abroad for a summer. After I graduated with a fancy BA (that currently I feel like I’ll never use) I lived in New York City for about the same amount of time wondering if it would eventually be my forever for now home. I liked the city after all. I liked the opportunities. I liked the feeling that when I went out during the day I never knew where it was going to take me or who I was going to run into.
However, I didn’t end up there for now or for any great length of time. I ended up coming back to the smaller, rural town I grew up in astonished by how green it was.
How did I not remember there was so much green?
For a while, I felt trapped by the return. I felt like I was stuck and not moving forward or even fully living. I mean, it’s hard not to looking at the same walls that you knew well from childhood, thinking that you would’ve outgrown them, but you still fit.
I see now that I was gifted the extra time exactly where I was planted. Though I hated so many moments of it because I thought that I should move, it was a sort of challenge gift. I thought I was falling behind and I should yank up my roots and leave—be adventurous.
Start telling my own great story.
I suppose now, I realize that wasn’t all I was meant to do. Because moving isn’t all we as people are meant to do.
We are meant to revel in the moment. We are meant to create. We are meant to develop deep connections that we glaze over when focused on ourselves and where we are going, forgetting to take a moment to appreciate were we are so that when opportunity or people meant to be in our lives knock, we are ready to leap without looking.
So, now one year ago almost, I had the moment that childhood me waited for all this time. I moved.
In a sense, I'm finally got to start over. I finally was able to get that new beginning in the vast sea of them I imagine I’ve given in my life for big and little moments. Only, I expected this time in my life, moving—leaving, to be a very fun and exciting. Though, there was so much more that came with it.
I'm realize just how much I was leaving behind as well as gaining. I was remembering all the wonderful things that I took for granted while I was in this moment. Before I left, I also had a few things that I wanted to do.
Oddly enough, in the kitchen.
It was like I knew even back then that I was starting a bond with the space where previously the oven made me a little nervous whenever I was left alone with it. I’d stick my hand inside the belly of it to hesitantly touch the metal racks, as if a teenager with their first curling iron, making sure that I turned it off before I went to sleep.
These sorts of things on my metaphorical to-do list go beyond stress-packing or getting myself prepared for the long haul to where I'm going next.
Maybe it’s the writer in me that says this. There’s a rush that comes with a deadline. It can either break you or make you and your story stronger.
And like I said, I’ve always wanted to be the main character of an amazing story.
I just never realized that it was almost like a recipe, which leads us to one of my number-one to-dos.
I wanted to learn to cook. Hopefully, cook well.
It sounds a bit random when there are so many other things that were going on, but I wanted to learn how to enjoy cooking. Moving out and starting my own home made me feel like I wanted to develop my homemaking abilities and build back up the coziness I was leaving behind somewhere new. I also don't mean that I wanted to learn how to cook just anything.
I can handle things like basic bread (the pandemic made us all learn how to bake bread, didn’t it?), baked goods like a variety of cookies including the raspberry shortbreads I attempted to recreate from my last book release Call You Mine, and midweek meals. I wanted to learn to cook things that I always raved over whenever I had them at a party or when they were handed over as a little gift in empty Tupperware containers.
I wanted to take action and take on the recipes where I’ve previously said, “Oh, I need this recipe” or “I need to learn how to make this.”
Because let’s face it, often when you do that, you never actually get the recipe. You never learn how to properly make it. Life moves too fast. So, all the amazing pasta salads or chocolate chip cookies with sea salt sprinkled on top fall to the wayside and into nostalgic memories of a time and place past.
This time though, I might be moving on, but I wasn’t going to let this opportunity I couldn’t find in the city or anywhere else but at home pass me by.
So, one hazy summer morning, wearing my pajamas, I picked basil from my garden as my contribution to a Sunday dinner party hosted by my neighbor after she found out that soon enough, we wouldn’t be neighbors any longer.
Her favorite place is her kitchen. There is a big island and window above the sink that overlooks the development of houses including my own. The view on the hill is great to see the sky in the evening and to hear the kids next door jumping on their trampoline at all hours of the day. Ever since last year when my family was invited over for a similar dinner in the depths of July, I raved about the bread and pasta and sauce she taught us how she made. Most of all, surprising to everyone as a well-known picky meat-eater who could easily go vegetarian one day, I raved about her ricotta meatballs.
“I really want to learn how to make your ricotta meatballs before I leave.” I told her one night sitting outside.
She smiled and said something along the lines of, “Great. Let’s do it. Sunday work?”
So, we did. The top 100 pop songs played in the background on her television. She gave me recipe cards for the renown meatballs as well as banana bread and butter cookies that were her mother’s recipe that I could take with me wherever I go. Then, she taught me step-by-step how to make the recipe I admired, though she insisted I make them in her kitchen all by myself.
“This is all you,” she said and proudly proclaimed my accomplishment when everyone gathered off the kitchen for dinner later (hopefully not because on my first try, I still think she makes them better).
You never realize, however small, community can still be found all around us if we are open to it and that we don’t often realize it until it’s gone or at an end. As humans, we crave that connection. Sadly, I feel that so many forget that or lack the motivation to cultivate it when those pieces of each other that come with surrounding a dinner table together or sharing recipes feel special.
Like a little piece of magic.
We all hold it just to share.
No matter where we go or move, I’m reminding myself just how important to find your people and these moments even though it can be difficult to do so. They make life worth living. They make places worth remembering. And maybe returning one day soon for a glass of wine on the patio while watching the sun go down in the sky and turn into a smooth cotton candy pink.
Or to have another dinner with friends.
