Of Cookies and Roses

Slowing down to savor the sweet.

In one of those year-end iterations of sixty-degree winter days, I ate lunch outside beneath a rare blanket of warmth. Surveying our courtyard, I noticed one last rose of summer (or would it be winter?). I have an ever-present need to edit, so I pruned the knockout rose bushes earlier than usual. When complete, one lone stem with that last rose lay at my feet. Ah, the sweetness of life. Until spring, I said, and carried the branch inside.

As we rush into the busyness of the year, I’m thankful for the uncommon rays pressing on my cheeks, halting me in my steps, for noticing the last rose on the vine, and the final cookie crumb on the plate.

Slow is the goal in the new year.

Coming out of Covid, our collective manic energies produced Yellowstone and spinoffs, a better Bengals team, and renewed chances for book talks and production from me. Motivated in ways never felt before, my fingers couldn’t fly fast enough across the keyboard to fire up my thoughts, desires, and mostly experiences.

In 2022, I achieved gold status in car miles and in the air. To celebrate Mark’s 60th, we hiked Utah. We reunited with longtime friends in Austin, Texas. Our son married. We traveled to my mother’s hometown in Italy. I filed for Italian citizenship. We entered the ranks of grandparents. Two drafts were completed, a food memoir and a novel, the latter shipped off to the editor by year end

I needed to stop.

Thich Nhat Hanh says, “When you walk, only walk.” This mantra served me well over the many years of being a walker. Even when I couldn’t walk, I repeated it as a way to stay grounded, plant my feet firmly, and not tap endlessly up and down stairways to goals I couldn’t reach.

It was time to attach that maxim of pacing my writing. By this, I didn’t mean slow typing.

As friends and I stood around a campfire on January 1, I tried to explain my consideration of this ideal.

Perhaps life simply speeds up on this side of 55. Writers often live in a vacuum of time and yet still feel its profound movement. Now I’d like a say in how quickly it passes by. Of how fast my internal hands wind their way around my insides.

Recently, in a Yahoo News Insider report, Superager, Carol Sielger, 85, talks about her secret."You get into a groove and if you stay too long it's a rut, then it's a trench, then it's a tunnel," Siegler said. "Just keep turning your head and looking around." This then is my goal, to find that sweet spot where I’m grounded enough for my internal hands to keep on ticking while a part of me sits still.

For New Year’s, my son Davis texted a photo of the Oregon coast, the sheen of blue sky an anomaly in the northwest in January. I responded. “Oh how sweet to be human for another year.” Sweetness has seeped into me for the year. No goals, no resolutions. Just more cookies.

What?

At the close of the holiday season, I asked friends over to help me finish the Italian wedding soup.

As happens when two Italians get together, my friend Daniel brought goodies leftover from his Italian mother, reminding me of when I drove back to college with a Styrofoam container with a load of Mom’s Christmas cookies and also how, when while waiting for Davis and Kyra to pack their bags before a 6:30 a.m. flight, I set aside pizzelles for their breakfast, plus a few ugly sweater sugar cookie cutouts wrapped in bubble wrap for them to stuff in their pockets for later.

Our meal with friends ended, as usual, when Mark poured the port. For dessert, the cookie tray was loaded with my Italian rolled balls, a few sugar cookie cutouts, celli ripieni, some of the best fruitcake this side of hellish 1970s holiday platters, and thumbprint cookies (without the cornflakes, horror).

By evening’s end, the cookies had vanished. But I wouldn’t be my mother’s daughter without saving some for myself. One last bite of sweetness from the old year to ring in the new. Perhaps that’s what my mother signaled, other than “I don’t want these around because I’ll eat them all.” She wanted us to transport that goodness back to our roommates, dormmates, into our studies, and probably our report cards too. And into the new year.

What does that have to do with slow writing? Everything.

The act of cookie eating is about savoring the flavors. What was in the grape marmalade filling of the ripieni, Daniel asked. I ticked off the ingredients surprising myself at how each mention elicited its own magic. Dark chocolate shavings plus chocolate chucks. Nocino liqueur. Buccia d'arancia. Miele. The grapes, purchased last summer from Madison’s at Findlay Market for the first of many batches of marmellata.

Every ingredient in that recipe possessed an origin story. Each flavor filled a particular need on our tongues and in our tummies. Every layer served as an jumping off point into the next. That’s what sweetness has to do with writing. Not only savoring each bite of your work, and digging deep into each sensation, but recognizing the interconnectivity of them all.

Flavor is a function of time, writes Patrick Rosal in Atang: An Altar for Listening to the Beginning of the World. Certain flavors hit us at the tip of the tongue, others at the roof, and still some not until we have digested them completely, do we savor them at all. Perhaps it is in the longing for flavor, we relish in time.

I offer you this sweetness in the new year. To find the sweet spot in your writing. To find the sweet spot in your walking stride (you could try the Monty Python tea bag walk).

To find the sweet spot inside of you. Pick up a rose or a cookie, whether it pricks you or sticks in your stomach. There’s a sweetness waiting for us in this new year.

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Thanks for reading, as always. Leave a comment about the sweet you are savoring this new year.

Want to sweeten up your writing? Check out these upcoming opportunities to do so:

• Rewrite, Revise, Repeat - a three-part workshop to get that writing in shape. In partnership with Women Writing for (a ) Change and Roebling Books Newport. First session - January 28. Learn more or register here.

• Pauletta Hansel and I are again offering FREE, virtual caregiver writing experiences through Giving Voice Foundation. First up, February 16th from 1-3 p.m. Learn more or register here.

• In conjunction with the Contemporary Arts Center, I’ll be leading a writing workshop as part of their Creative Writing Project and their upcoming exhibit - Ecologies of Elsewhere. Details forthcoming on social media, this blog or or visit comtemporaryartscenter.org to learn more.

• Together with Promedica Senior Care, I’ll be returning to the Land, otherwise known as Cleveland for a series of presentations. Stay tuned for details. I’d love to speak to your group or see you there.