Wanderlust and walnut cookies
Xmas edition
It's Christmas night and I'm back on my bullshit, which is to say I'm compiling lists of Airbnbs in remote places. The urge to travel arrived with a vengeance today. Equal parts desire to escape the pandemic, flee this country, be alone. And I guess also to write, to hear different sounds, to stand in a grocery store and try to decode the packaging on foreign food items, develop a relationship with a surly neighborhood cat. A fantasy of space and time.
I remember asking my dad when I was young, "If I started now, and did nothing but go into other people's houses and look around, could I get through all the houses in the world before I die?" "How long would you stay in each house?" he asked. "Five minutes," I said. "No," he said.
I consider the capacity to see into other people's homes one of the greatest gifts of the internet. I want to see all of the kinds of places there are—of course, not all are on the internet, but a lot are. A surprising number. You’re trying to rent that out? I think. In addition to the Airbnb lists, I collect photos of strange and inviting interiors. Screenshot them. Doing this, I can lose a couple hours without realizing it, which is a bit frightening. It’s better than Instagram, I reason.
I look at places all over the world but the ones on my lists are mostly in Russia and Sweden. I wonder why we form strong affective attachments to particular places, climates, cultures. Mine are mostly snowy. Harsh climes. I think wintry landscapes are the most fairy-tale-like, their beauty the most piercing, severe, but really what I'm after is coming in from the cold, the juxtaposition of a glacial outside environment with a cozy inside. I like places with a strong culture of retreating from bitter cold into warmth. A whole way of being develops around these comforts. Hygge in Danish. Mys in Swedish. Уютность in Russian. Slippers, soup. Baths, books, borscht, etc.
I look in Murmansk. In Omsk. In Tomsk. In Norilsk, a former Gulag outpost that experiences perpetual darkness in winter. I look in Odessa and think about the beach. Then I move to Sweden. I look in Kalix and Haparanda and Jokkmokk, where I could see the Northern Lights. I look in Kiruna, 200 kilometers above the Arctic Circle, where I have been in winter (pitch black at midday), where I slipped and fell on the ice and my tears froze to my face and had to be ripped off.
I want to be someplace very pink. I think I could write a very good book here:
Or here:
This might lend itself better to thinking:
Or this spartan lodge:
How long would I stay in these places—one month? Two? Six? How much space and time does a person need? Where is the line between embracing independence and running away? How much time does a mother need? How much could she possibly ever finagle?
While in my last relationship, I baked the same Italian cookies every Christmas with my ex's mother. It was a comforting ritual, one we sustained for nearly a decade, even in the years that he and I were fighting or weren't together, even during one when he was strung out and watching television in a bedroom down the hall at her house. (I brought him a warm one when they were done, freshly sprinkled with powdered sugar, on a small poinsettia-printed paper plate.) His mom and I baked from a handwritten recipe on a yellow index card that had come from a relative in Italy. The cookies look like pierogi and the dough is rich like rugelach (from cream cheese) and inside is a deliciously sweet bite of a paste made of ground walnuts, milk, and sugar. My ex's mother is the type who seems unfazed cooking for 20 people. The type who packs tall stacks of tins of cookies to give out at the holidays to people she doesn’t even know that well. She told me stories while we baked—about her marriage, childhood, motherhood. I was soothed by those conventional routines.
This year I decided to make the cookies myself. I couldn't find the photo I'd taken of the yellow index card so I poked around online, found a few similar recipes, and decided to wing it. I was proud and a little crestfallen when they turned out well. I don't know why exactly, but it made me sad to think that it wasn't just the magic of her kitchen. They're only cookies, after all. The pandemic has made me so focused on cooking, baking, and fermenting, and I'm pleased by my confidence in the kitchen. Making these walnut-filled pillows, I thought I should be glad that I am now the mother who can slap dough around authoritatively. But I miss being the little acolyte.
Baking these also made me think about all the things we collect in relationships that influence us, that become our tastes or talents, but that seem to have no place to go after the relationship ends. If I were still married to my husband, or still with that ex, I would be the rightful guardian of those family recipes and stories. Oh, this is my mother-in-law’s pie crust. That’s a certain kind of flex. Instead, I carry these odds and ends—a selection from these relationships, and all those that have come before or since—like a kind of lost peddler. It’s as if I am borrowing them from a person I used to be. They’re part of me, my experience, so it’s strange that they can also make me feel fragmented or fraudulent. Or maybe the feeling is just nostalgia. Regardless, they are only cookies, and quite delicious.
I’m reading a lot these days. I finished Nadia Terranova’s Farewell, Ghosts, a beautiful, sad Italian novel. I’m reading Elissa Washuta’s White Magic, which is heavy and comes out in April. And Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion. I’m listening to Megan Giddings’s Lakewood while I cook and clean.
To review in the new year, I’m reading Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation and Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy, two books that are making me think about the problem of love, which I guess is what I want to think about. (Ernaux, too. There is nothing else to think about while reading Ernaux.) Nolan’s debut is a novel about love addiction. A young woman is rejected by the older writer she’s in love with and loses her shit. Ditlevsen is a Danish poet I’ve been interested in for a while and the later section of her book (actually a trilogy of memoirs) is an early entrant into the genre of addiction literature. It was rare for a woman to write when she did about her own alcoholism and opiate dependence—not to mention codependency, abuse, and the strains of writing and mothering and poverty—and her language is lyrical and dark as hell. She killed herself in 1976 at the age of 59. I’m looking forward to writing about her work.
And on that note: Merry Christmas! Really, though, I just looked at social media and felt buoyed by people’s festive mantelpieces, corny family portraits, funny gifts. Feels like there is care in the air, like people tried. A truly sad year. But life finds a way.
A note: I plan to send this newsletter out on Friday during the day, but this week was a holiday (duh) so it comes late Friday night.
A few good things I read this week:
This NYT Magazine piece about Emerald Fennell's new show "Promising Young Woman"
This Los Angeles Review of Books piece on "Toxic Relationships in the Affective Age"
These wild poems by queer feminist Russian poets in Calvert Journal