Today, I find myself craving lemon cake. A friend suggested that maybe it’s not sweets I’m craving but an experience — eating a moist, rich slice of lemon cake in a beautiful café, with a friend, or maybe a sister, or one of my children. Or savoring it all on my own at the edge of the river that cuts through Paris, where everything tastes better.
There’s a book called The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Katie read me pieces of it when it first came out, and we marveled at its strange mystery: a young girl discovers that she can taste the emotional life of the person who made her food. Her mother’s lemon cake tastes of loneliness and longing. Other recipes contain other secrets—love and loss, tinged with the spice of memory.
I’ve spent the last month exploring a similar line of inquiry from the opposite direction: not, what emotions did the cook put into this food, but what is this particular food saying to my body?
Food has become a language. One I am learning from my body. I’ve been noticing that one meal leaves me clear and light, another leaves me a little swoony, another and I feel heavy, dense, stupid. Another leaves me itchy and irritated.
Today, when I peeled back the craving for lemon cake, I didn’t find a craving for carbs, or sugar, or fat. I found that I was craving Katie — and a particular kind of conversation, over a good meal. At Art Café. Or maybe, someday, in Paris.
I made a pledge: I am taking my daughter to Paris. And another craving rose. To float on a boat, like in the surprising and strange novel The Little Paris Bookshop, where a man with a broken heart opens a bookshop on a houseboat, and when you visit there, he prescribes you just the right book. He just knows.
That’s the silly-strange premise but then — if you stick with him — the whole book changes. He unmoors the houseboat and starts flowing down the Seine, into the waterways, floating south, touching in at the small towns that cluster along the banks of the river. Making his way down the country, until he lands in a remarkable village. I won’t tell you anything more than this: it’s when the story turns from predictable to magical. When he unmoors the boat and lets it carry him. Lets the river guide the boat.
I am craving a float on a boat that follows a river that knows where I want to go.
I am craving a long drive up the California coast.
I am missing my mother, who is about to enter the memoir I’ve been sharing in a big way. She is about to take over, and I am inside her scenes, and craving lemon cake.
And then, during this moment of hesitation at the threshold of loss, I heard—as a postscript to an email about something else—that a dear friend had lost her son. A loss so deep that my own heart cracked open while I was writing about my mother’s heart surgery. And I wept. For my friend. For her son and his three little children. For this life that floats us and then slams us into walls like this. Walls of forever and never again.
I am thinking about a client who cracked three ribs driving a motorcycle into a tree, arms spread wide. I am thinking about his heart. Her heart. My heart and yours.
I am thinking of my own son, arriving on Friday, and how I need to get the house ready. And all while I am saturated in this grief.
And this craving for lemon cake. Not just any version—the dense almond cake version. The dense sponge cake version, rich with egg yolks and butter. The one with buttercream icing, tart and sharp with zest.
Bright. Alive. Sweet and sour. Like joy and grief in the same bite. And the next bite. Beauty and sorrow.
Earlier this week, I noticed a volunteer tomato growing out of my new garden. It must have planted itself quietly beside the red yarrow that I planted the week after Mother’s Day. I noticed it there on Saturday and thought, I better get that over to the vegetable patch where I can protect it from the deer. The next morning, I came out and the deer had found it — eaten it down to the roots.
They left me the roots. And I replanted them.
This is the landscape today. Under a strange haze of smoke from the forest fires in the north. My husband’s assistant said the smoke is drifting down from Canada. My sister said she head it’s from the midwest. All I know is the sky is a haze and everything that was white is apricot today. An effect of the light.
I read on Wizard’s Watchtower this week that something is taking shape in the sky that a French astrologer named André Barbault predicted half a century before it arrived, and then died waiting to see: the moment when four outer planets simultaneously reach 4° of their signs, forming the shape of a basket on the zodiac wheel. He called it pour le plus grand bonheur de l’humanité. For the greatest happiness of humanity.
He believed it would take time for the promise of this moment to take root. But that it would.
And so I am optimistic. For humanity. For the roots of a volunteer tomato plant. For all of us, going through what we are going through.
And I am going to make lemon cake for my daughter in law, who is not eating gluten or dairy right now. I will change the linens in the cottage and put the towels through the laundry. I will set a welcome basket in the bathroom and the kitchen. Little things to make their stay feel special.
Salmon with dill for my son.
Lemon cake, gluten-free and dairy-free, for my daughter-in-law.
Something to look forward to.
For those following along with The End of Men, there’s a new scene up in my new Library space. It’s called Salt Water, and it backtracks along the timeline to before Dad was in the nursing home. You’ll find it here.
I’m having these writings for breakfast, early before anyone but the cats arise. Private pleasure.