📍provisions from nowhere: #18

a bubbly drink, a pink drink, relying on each other

August is my favorite month. It is the balmy Saturday evening of summer: the part of the weekend where it’s not quite over yet, and time still feels expansive, abundant. I crave this feeling all year—and I’m already moody about its passing. This is ridiculous, I tell myself, it’s here! Right now! GTFO there and savor it u dum-dum! But this only serves to make me more anxious. How can you miss the deep green of the trees when it’s right in front of you? How can you mourn the dampness in the air as you feel it on your tongue? This is the strange condition of being human, I can only conclude.

Has your August felt fast or slow, and is that as you wish? Whether you love it or you hate it¹, here’s our reminder to notice it, ok guys?! Please report back with your noticings.

gang’s all here 🌶 🍆 🍈 s/o to the color of these marigold tomatoes—slay queen

Joy blaaast

Joy-blast winner! My joy blast this week came from observing a routine, neighborly interaction that’s had me thinking a lot about interdependence². It was thus: like anyone with the good fortune to have ample time on their hands and a little backyard space to call their own, my mom is, shall we say, invested in her garden. So in preparation for an upcoming trip to New Mexico, she enlisted her neighbor, a high school sophomore named Riley³, to water her plants. I listened in as they strode through the backyard, mom pointing out which flowers needed more love; the flourishing mint that could be skipped. As they walked, she asked Riley about her upcoming drivers’s ed class, and Riley spoke with measured excitement about the final lessons standing between her and freedom. I was so charmed by this innocuous reciprocity: the offer to care for something someone else cares about; the known details of the lives being lived in the houses next to yours.

Runner-up: Mike and Nova flew to Australia last Friday to spend ten days with his brother’s family in Sydney. After dropping them off at the airport, in order to fill the giant hole in my heart, Bo and I stopped for a picnic in the trunk of my car. Strawberry limeade 4ever!!! (This episode of Joy Blast is brought to you by Sonic.)

grilled cheese also 4ever

Reads, cooks, drinks

• The most impactful thing I read this month was Everything Got Better Once I Stopped Cooking for My Family by

  Kathleen Donahoe
  for Romper. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that this meaningfully challenged my perspective on the way I approach meal-planning. I’d love to hear how you’ve approached the question of how to feed yourself in various eras of your life (Soylent, anyone?).

• In a complete about-face from the above prescription (whoops), I’m sharing this simple and scrumptious tomato-and-orange salad from

  emily nunn
  at
  The Department of Salad
  in hopes that you, too, might make it this week. Whether this “counts” as “cooking” I’ll leave up to you.

• What definitely does not count as cooking is making yourself a spaghett, which requires nothing of you except a chug of your Miller High Life followed by a splash of Campari right in the bottle. Chef’s muah.

A poem share

From A.R. Ammons. From me to you.

I hope your Nowhere puts you in proximity to an enormous body of water this Sunday, and if not that, something good to savor.

spent a laaaarge portion of Saturday like this

Holding onto August, Becca

1. My love for summer runs so deep that I often forget that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, which

Haley Nahman

reminded me of last week → “Don’t forget that if you feel off and unlike yourself right now that it’s normal to feel like that in August.” Baffling, to me.

2. This AHP interview, “I Went Into Motherhood Determined Not To Lose Myself In It,” also had me thinking about the ways we do and don’t rely on each other. I immediately got

Elissa Strauss

’ book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring For Others, from the library.

3. This is entirely irrelevant to the narrative but I include it because it feels like the perfect name for a high school sophomore and feels a bit frozen in time in a very fun way. Let me know if you’ve met any baby Rileys lately!