📍provisions from nowhere: #20

piracy, betrayal, and a reminder about time

When we moved into our house last October, we inherited not just its thoughtfully, spectacularly-plotted garden. We also inherited a pirate ship. Once a year, for one night only, our front yard transforms into a beacon of neighborhood hijinks, high-seas style: toothless skulls on stakes, a warning for fellow sea-travelers; sweet treats lowered by bucket from the second-story balcony (candy for the littlings, rum for the adults). At least, that’s what the previous owners did, every year on Halloween. So we have big boots to fill to keep the tradition alive for October passersby—and the transformation is underway 🏴‍☠️

porch hangs. note my guy’s luscious grey locks—impressive, even in death

Joy blaaast

For my birthday, my parents gifted us a night alone for the first time since Bo was born. They whisked the kids away to build Brio trains and we, naturally, went straightaway to try on pirate costumes. I’ve always aspired to Go Big™️ for Halloween, so inheriting a house with a history of swashbuckling has been exactly the inspiration I need to make it happen. Thank g for Becky, niche pirate costume expert and professional Renaissance Faire pirate herself, who we encountered at our local¹ costume purveyor yesterday. We left with a strong foundation upon which to build our pirate lewks and the levity that only comes with stepping outside of real life to live, for a few hours, in a fantasy of skeleton keys and waves that crash against the damp hull of a ship.

What is letting you step out of reality these days, whether inspired by this liminal time of year where we meet death playfully or not? Find it, immerse, and then come back to earth to tell me the deets!

Reads, cooks, and a traitorous watch

• 👀 The most perspective-expanding piece I read this month was The ‘Platonic Life Partners’ Raising a Baby in a Flatbush Duplex, by Kayla Levy for New York Mag. While I’ve always been interested in the hypothetical of how to organize a life beyond the heteronormative template our culture continues to overvalue, Amrita & Andrew’s story wraps concrete details around one way to actually do it. I wish for hundreds more stories like this one, to help us paint the version of the future that includes a much wider canon of ways to be.

• 🍴Hello and welcome to slow cooker szn, which gives us permission to cook without actually cooking! If you’re ready to pull out ye old Crockpot , make this slow cooker honey-soy braised pork w/ lime and ginger from Sarah DiGregorio for NYT Cooking. The spray of crunchy scallions across the top makes it! A handful of thinly-sliced cukes would be a welcome addition, too. The recipe makes a lot; share it with someone on your block.

• ⚰️ Hard to overstate how much I enjoyed this absurd reality TV concept, Traitors UK, which basically follows a game of mafia² that plays out across a group of random British people. There’s drama, there’s betrayal, and there’s the accents—this is basically the Great British Baking Show, but with murder (fictitious, ofc). Perfection.

A poem share

This week, as fall deepens, I’m sharing with you this perfect sentiment from my writing crush,

Kelton Wright

, in her essay on paying attention:

Every year, autumn reveals old paths. If only for a few weeks when the flora has died back and the snow has not yet arrived, you can see faint paths like pen marks left from the sheet above. It is fleeting, but if you pay attention, you can find them. That’s all autumn ever really demands, our attention. Every year we give it, and yet, we lament the passing. Our attention was never enough. 

A child is an autumn. They are ever fleeting and falling, changing into something else as you try to capture what just was.

hello from my tiny autumn / human bear cub

🍂 , Becca

1. And extremely legit—this store reminds me of Halloween Adventure in lower Manhattan, which is not only the place to find an entirely-too-real Donald Trump mask, but the perfect passthrough from Union Square to our onece-home East Village apartment when it’s pouring rain (it fills an entire city block). It’s worth ducking into next time you’re nearby.

2. Best played in someone’s basement at a sleepover in the 90s, if you ask me