An Alchemy of Living
Or: “Kitchen Witchery at 5 AM”
I rolled over and looked at my watch. 4:50 AM.
This time of day and I are not regular companions.
I went to the bathroom, drank some water. Noticed one of the faucets wasn’t running. We’d had several days of air temps below 0 Fahrenheit and, in spite of our best efforts, we have one belligerent bathroom faucet. Cautiously optimistic about it not bursting, I went back to bed.
Then I realized…I was awake. Just plain awake.
And I kinda felt like baking. Thought maybe it would warm things up. The oven is more or less below that stubborn sink.
And this is how, at 5 AM, I came to stand alone in the kitchen, cookbook open in front of me. I wore my belovèd’s black zip-up sweater with the reinforced shoulders and elbows over my mismatched pajamas and my new pink apron with the big pockets.
Inspiration hit – Yes! Today would be the day. Today I would cross a long-awaited item off my “I want to try to make that” kitchen bucket list.
Biscotti.
Depending on your level of kitchen adventuring or your enjoyment of cooking, this may seem quaint or ambitious.
To me, it felt a little of both. What’s cozier than fresh baked goods? And fresh baked goods you can dip in a nice cup of coffee when the windchill is -16 F? That’s winning, no matter what time of day, in my (cook)book.
A couple months ago, we got home from spending seven weeks in Ohio. During the time we were there, we never had a fully functioning kitchen.
We’d order delivery or pick up, sometimes daily, mostly in the evening when one of us would say those dreaded words: “we have to figure out dinner.” We ate at an octagonal end table in the middle of the living room, I’d often sit on my grandma’s broken yellow velvet vanity bench, my belovéd, in the rocking chair my mother held me in when I was a baby.
We got to eat lots of fun food that we can’t get where we live, but even the most exciting meals (some really amazing Indian and Korean food comes immediately to mind) always had a sort of cloud around them. They were the silver lining of an impossible situation.
We drove home on a Friday, 15ish hours straight through. By the end of that weekend, I’d checked another item off my kitchen bucket list: veggie pot pie from scratch.
More of a utilitarian cook in my twenties and thirties, that is, someone who cooked mainly because I needed to eat, I’ve changed. Cooking now feels like magic – and like home.
And the real magic of cooking, the real witchery of kitchenry, is how it transforms me. How I lose myself in the process and then emerge in a world of gentle smells, finding myself in a laboratory of measuring devices and books, and eventually with something that wasn’t there before, something I can taste, smell, touch.
The following Wednesday after I made the pot pie, I met with a coach to help me unpack the previous two months. She said to me: “what I hear you saying is that being creative, creating something, is really important for you.”
That’s a thread I can trace across my whole life, but I never bothered to look. And one I never expected to land me in the kitchen.
I’m the first grader who put her Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn tapes in the cassette player and choreographed entire staged scenes, dancing, miming, singing – all for an imaginary audience.
I’m the 11-year old writing pages of poetry but never sharing a word of it. Who wrote in her journal, “I want to be a writer.”
The highschooler who, instead of writing a research paper on Pride and Prejudice, wrote an alternate ending after skimming the last fifty pages (and somehow still got an A, thanks, Mrs. Klefas!).
The college senior who, grieving so hard she could barely breathe, much less sing, bought herself a set of pastels and a sketchbook, drove down to Monroe Lake in Bloomington, drew the boats while sitting on a nearby rock, shaking with sobs, remembering how I tagged along with Dad on a work trip to the area.
This is the first time I’ve told anyone about that day. How I wanted to drive the Dadmobile – Dad’s light blue 1992 Dodge Spirit with the soft, square seats, my car by then – away from everything and everyone and instead drove right back into a memory I couldn’t draw myself out of.
I kept those drawings for years.
But I only later realized the great lesson: that when I couldn’t sing, when I didn’t want to, when nothing was “right,” I could still create. I could still make something new, reflect some part of life back to myself, take something apart or take a bunch of different parts and combine them with some part of myself, make something that wasn’t there before.
And as the world gets darker, scarier, harder, this need to create, to make something new, something cozy, some little bit of comfort or some new way of seeing something, something better, something for everyone, it is crying out, too. It is crying for its life.
And so there I was, at 5 AM in my kitchen, wiping my hands on my pink, canvas apron and measuring sugar, allspice, cinnamon.
Press the dough into a log. Set it in the oven for a first bake. Time to let heat, let science work its own kind of magic, catalyze positive change.
I sat quietly in the dark, meditated, noticed how the air became different, how the sweetness started to come through, how the oven made everything warmer.
Eyes open, I watched the light shift, went behind the stairs to look out the back windows, facing east. The sky, black when I started, now a purply-pink, brighter against the crest of the hill through the trees, those birch trees I write about all the time, tall and slender against the snow.
When my belovèd made his way downstairs in the shortening shadows of early sunrise, I saw his face transform as he took it in: me, quiet in the dark, the sweet-smelling warmth. “Are you ok?” “Yes. I’m making biscotti.” His eyes widened. I am rarely up before him – and never with a sweet treat in the oven.
Around 7:30, the biscotti setting under a blanket of vanilla glaze, the sun hit the outside wall encasing the upstairs faucet and within seconds, we heard a pop and the sound of water flowing.
Not long after, I dipped biscotti into coffee, the sky, bright pink-white. A new day.
I’m in a new era – an era where I love to cook, where I sink into the quiet joy of a Sunday morning sunrise against a frozen landscape, bite into something newly made, feel its sweetness sink into me.
I think of Thoreau, writing in a letter in 1856: “for sweetness is in me, and to sugar it shall come, it shall not all go to leaves and wood.” (lines 278-279) It’s the new-old alchemy, an alchemy of living: flour and sugar, light and dark, warmth and chill. Old memories and new words. The tellings and retellings of our lives.
The sweet and the bitter and the bittersweet. The beautiful and the terrible. The worlds made, the worlds we make. And the world we want.
Up here, the light returns, but at its own pace. It’s still plenty cold; it’s not even sugaring time quite yet in these woods, but it is in my kitchen.
It may be the only true sweetness we find in the world right now – the sweetness we make and share, the sweetness of a neighbor coming by, of kind words between loved ones and among strangers.
Lately this feels like a defiant sweetness. It feels defiant to wake up early, to make something new, to connect with ingredients, ideas, and people, when so much conspires to keep us bland, compliant, and separate.
May all beings find a bit of sweetness. Make we make sweetness anew, may we make it our own. May we find a way to share it out.
The world needs all the sweetness it can get.
Dear Readers:
This is the second in my series loosely (very loosely, some might argue) following the Major Arcana in Tarot. This post is my wintery, biscotti-inspired interpretation of The Magician, card 1. While there is a narrative to the Major Arcana, I am not following it in this series. Rather, I’m using the story portrayed by card images to inspire a bit of this somewhat chaotic, memoir-ish blog.
My previous disclaimer applies: I know Tarot isn’t for everyone, but whether or not you are a reader of the cards yourself, tarot-curious, or just a lover of the arts and storytelling, there is much to enjoy in a well-made deck. I love Tarot for its freshness of perspective, for the art and for story, and for how, whenever I come back to the cards, I get a chance to consider a new idea, a new symbol, a new story. To me, when I learn something new, that means possibility, opportunity. I can take what I learn and use it to deepen my understanding of myself and choose or create a path of positive change.
Like The Magician, I am interested in taking things that are here and recombining them, experimenting with them, trying to make something new. For me, The Magician also symbolizes the great union of science, art, and progress – alchemized through creativity, experimentation, and perseverance.
We need all those things right now, maybe more than ever.
If Tarot isn’t your thing, that’s ok. I hope you’ll stick around anyway. There’s a lot I’d like to write about this year. It’s not going to be an easy year. But we can hold on to each other while we alchemize our own versions of defiant sweetness. And we can do it together.
Love,
Erin