little moments

Spend the afternoon enrobed in sunlight, the air unmoving, a little sweaty, suggestive perhaps.

Go up to the big hillside and watch the Soapbox Derby. Swoon over Elvis in his white jumpsuit with rhinestones and not care how it makes you come cross.

Discuss baking as a series of difficult decisions. When or how much or how long. Discuss the cryptic text message I know why CF lets the batter rest overnight, the joy it brought, the way to break down the process into the most tiny details. Molecules of air and water. Membranes. Creating things and breaking things down. Remember your boss by the stove the night before, the lengthy discussion of candying, how the line cook with baker envy sidled up to you later to ask what that was all about. How you watched the rinds waiting for the moment of translucency.

Sleep. Sleep in. Discuss the joys of baking again on the way up the hill, get off the phone to meet someone, watch the dance your eyes and arms and legs do. How you move around one another, how you move up the hill and down and find your way into a bar by three or so. How it's so endearing, a girl who drinks beer in the afternoons. How it shocks you for a moment when she does not know who Anthony Bourdain is. Recall the journalist who was going to look up your blog and wonder if she ever did, and if you will see her some time in the Mission.

In the backyard garden, tell all the old stories. Laugh at the most painful and familiar moments. Open yourself up to the joy of the garden, the light, this new person who you already know you will call soon. What a touch means, accidental or not. What the contradictions of language reveal. Whether in the end you have said anything at all.

Take great joy in the day. A day off. A day you wanted to spend baking and writing and cleaning the house. It is okay to be out in the afternoon. It is okay to be shirking all of your responsibilities and passions for the sunlight and good conversation and finding space for new people so that you are a little more at home here.

(The word friend is such a funny word. At what point does it become okay to use it? And how is the offer given or revoked?)

Return home buzzed and happy, get out the battery of cookbooks. Piles of apples. Graventeins, Sierra Beauty, Pink Lady maybe? There is enough butter for pie dough.

Realize that you forget to tell your friend the thing you realized about work last night as you were baking home and so you will need to talk again, and by the time you talk there will be apple pie and apple butter.

Start to clean. Start to cook. Read over the comments from your writers group on your last piece and think about moments in angles, shards, what your characters want, how their dreams or goals may resemble yours or not, how you feel inspired these days much of the time, how it makes you by turn giddy or quiet, how you realize the same thing these days over and over

and you know it

but you don't know how to do it.