in the span of friendships

It was a beautiful day, last week's summer solstice, and filled to overflowing with almost everything good. Oysters and chocolate cake and laughter and fresh local strawberries and crisp vino verde and boundless affection for dear relatives and new and old friends alike.

One of these new friends, a kind and generous woman, gave me a card that quoted Albert Camus. It struck me as beautiful as soon as I read it, but it wasn't until days later that I realized it's been swirling around up here in my head ever since: In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.

My mind's been casting back to the long nights and gray days of this past winter; of the winding down of a relationship that was the catalyst for a cross-continental move; of a sometimes insurmountable homesickness for the life I so carefully constructed over the course of two decades in New York City; of the strangeness, both disconcerting and lovely, of living again in my mother's house. It may have been an unseasonably warm winter (at least here in the fair northwest) and even an unseasonably sunny winter (or so I've been told by the locals), but until now, with a layer of distance and beautiful June days, I hadn't quite realized how dark it felt.

To have this new person (this wonderful woman, this friend) be aware of some of this was a shining moment I don't think I could have imagined back in December, February, March.

And then the other night I was chatting with an old, old friend -- a man I've known since we were ridiculous young teenagers spending hours on the phone or sneaking out for clandestine after-hours talks down at the lake. I was whining to him, I'm afraid, about lingering insecurities -- of growing old and fat, unattractive and unloved. He scoffed at this, of course, as any friend would, and said, "You are as you've always been." And then, "I remember you. We are from the same cloth."

Somehow these simple words -- this moment of being truly seen, of being known to an other through all our years of overlapping histories -- brought such a warmth that the rest of the evening found me glowing (though perhaps aided by the beer with dinner, the bit of port afterwards to accompany delicious birthday chocolates from another new friend).

So here I am, thousands of miles away from the place I secretly thought would always be home, unexpectedly single again, perched precariously on the edge of a new life. In no small part thanks to the amazing good fortune of having these new and old friends, and much to my surprise, I find myself actually, excitedly, loving it.

the modern age

I am writing this from the modern age: unplugged and sitting in the back garden, feet propped comfortably on an ottoman, glass of perfectly chilled white wine and plate of sliced and salted kohlrabi from the garden close to hand.

A girl could get used to this, I have to say.

Two weeks ago I was chained to a semi-functional laptop with a battery life of approximately zero and an ancient flip-phone that could barely handle text messaging. Now here I am, the pleased and slightly discomfited owner of not only an iPad but also the newest iPhone. (Yay for early birthday presents, generous relatives, and a brother who continues to live up to his reputation of sniffing out the best possible deals on, well, everything.)

Which is how it came to be that one mid-June afternoon found me and my mother hunched over a table, peering intently down at our phones, she offering instruction on the ins and outs of iPhone ownership and me, mouth agape, trying to absorb it all. The humor in this inter-generational role reversal did not escape me.

And so here I sit typing contentedly away in the garden, untethered and unchained, convinced anew (or perhaps for the first time) that the future is, in fact, now.

on knitting

I've been a bicoastal creature most of my life -- born in Oakland, CA to hippie parents who relocated to the Bronx when my father got a faculty position at Barnard College, then moved again to a quiet, leafy suburb of New York City; summers spent on Idaho's gorgeous Lake Coeur d'alene and driving up and down the Oregon and Washington coasts. But mostly I've been a New York City woman, having moved there at the age of eighteen for college, taking on a library job at Columbia University, and never looking back.

My grandmother was an avid, if quirky, knitter who for decades tried to pass along her love of the craft to me, her endlessly stubborn granddaughter. Finally, as I approached thirty and she wasn't getting any younger, my mother and I went on a little road trip to spend a ladies weekend with her, our dear matriarch. We armed ourselves with a couple pairs of size 11 knitting needles and some pretty wools and decided to finally let her have her way with us. And lo, by the end of the weekend we were well on our way to knitting our very first scarves.

After I first started knitting on that trip ten years ago, I couldn't believe the pleasure to be had in making these things -- these simple blankets and striped scarves in beautiful natural fibers -- and I had this insatiable desire to just bundle them around all the people that I loved, to keep them warm and cozy and safe. Somehow this seemed even more necessary in the face of bitterly cold New York winters, saturated as they are with an icy frozen-ness of concrete and glass. 

Eventually practically everyone I loved had an Emma-scarf, so I began selling my work and branching out into more complex forms of knitting. Teaching myself how to knit lace was a whole new experience, and I became entranced with the idea of these delicate silks softening the harsh edges of the concrete Manhattan world that surrounded me. I began focusing on bridal wear and chuppahs (traditional Jewish wedding canopies), eventually started Emma's Bridal & Lace, and grew to love this type of work most of all.

And not long after that, the siren call of my west coast relatives -- mother in Anacortes, brother in Portland -- became too difficult to ignore. So here I am, having traded in my beloved Manhattan and a career at Columbia University for an entirely new way of living, here on beautiful Fidalgo Island. These days, I wake up peacefully in the mornings to birdsong and the salty wind coming in off the ocean, the scent of lavender and peonies having permeated my sleep . 

This new piece, my seaweed girl, is an attempt to embody some of this newness -- this clear air I've come to love so much, the greens of the forests and the tangling weeds washed up along the shore, the beautiful snarled essence of living here, tentatively, on the edge of the briny deep.