📍provisions from nowhere: #17

an overextended butterfly metaphor; the perfect bug-themed hat

It’s pretty hot out, so … let’s just get into it.

Joy blaaast

Joy has been flitting in and out of my peripheral vision lately, hovering nearby like a shifty blue morpho. If I’m only glancing, I’ll see just the mothy brown of its outer wings—but sometimes, when the light is just right, its blue scales will jolt me awake as if to say: hello yes I see you living your life and doing your Very Important Business and eating your overnight oats but—I’m here!!! Don’t forget me! Here’s what caught my attention this week. How is joy getting your attention these days?

Joy blast winner! The enchanting chaos of a big, multi-generational gathering. After braving mid-week Denver traffic one evening this week, Mike & I emerged into the snug suburban paradise that is a neighborhood pool, where we ate tacos from a crock pot, watched our kids splash their cousins, and watched their great-grandma watch them. Recipe instructions: get many beloveds into the same vicinity; sit back and lick salt from rim of marg; watch rapture unfold.

Runner-up: The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century from the NYT, which I loved not just for its reminder of how much there is still left to read, but also its satisfying photographs of well-loved copies of each pick. Made me want to go hold all my books, immediately.

Runner-runner-up: This hat from The Dime Shop by maker Molly Anne Bishop—bugs rule!

Bo is in his Danny DeVito era, hair-wise

Cooks, listens, reads

• 🥄 Meal plannin’ → Skillet chicken thighs with schmaltzy tomatoes. This is your PSA / reminder that rendering chicken thighs in their own fat via a cast-iron skillet and then popping them into the oven to finish cooking is of the BEST methods for cooking chicken, full-stop. This recipe from Melissa Clark adds cherry tomats, red onions, and basil for a very “it’s summer nights, babe” (but make it Italy) feel, though there are endless flavor riffs to apply to this banger technique and I am here to insist that you try it.

• 🎧 To play on your way somewhere → Big Jeans Feelings from the Culture Study Podcast. AHP interviews one of my absolute favorite thinkers on diet culture and anti-fat bias,

  Virginia Sole-Smith
  , about why finding great jeans feels weirdly high-stakes but also impossibly difficult?! Need to know how you’re feeling towards the Big Jeans Industrial Complex these days

• 📖 A deep read → Boymom: Reimagining boyhood in the age of impossible masculinity. A friend gifted me this book and reading it feels like an immediate relief. In it,

  Ruth Whippman
  tackles big, complex questions about how we raise boys to acknowledge their privilege and avoid toxic masculinity—without making them feel unworthy or somehow … bad. So, you know, just an easy beach read

• 🗽 A necessary diversion → this is some real game of thrones shit: this season of USA is insane from my king

  Alex Dobrenko`
  . It’s the only Biden-Trump debate recap I wanted and the chilling reminder I needed (spoiler: we’re still in charge).

A poem share

Though not a poem, something in my brain un-snagged when reading this sentiment from Lena Dunham in Lena Dunham’s Change of Pace, by Rachel Syme for The New Yorker:

“I used to think that winning meant you just keep doing it and you don’t care what anybody thinks. I forgot that winning is actually just protecting yourself and doing what you need to do to keep making work.”

Keep protecting the work, cook the chicken, and, if you must, don a sassy hat. Send me tales of your most chaotic gatherings or your quietest evenings, and definitely tell me which book is to be your porch companion on these long summer days.

hi from my porch companion, Bo’s elbow

Wishing you sun on your face this Sunday!

Becca 🌞