On Grief + Ginger

 

Cara from Yummy-Books.com

I’ve written about Cara before. Her blog, Yummybooks, is literally one of my favorite in the whole wide interwebs, because it combines my two favorite things: books and snacks. I am disappointed in myself that I didn’t take advantage of the time I had class with her to become her bff. I get anxious and kind of grumpy when she doesn’t post for an extended period of time.

I totally just sat at my desk at work with eyes welling up with tears at her latest post (I like her so much I don’t even care how it looks to reblog this  literally moments after it’s posted). It’s personal; about grief and eating, vis-a-vis my favorite author, Joan Didion. It’s also about the East Coast/West Coast pull.

I am in the middle of an, as Cara puts it, “am-I-still-in-love-with-New-York” pity hole”. One that I think if I reread  Slouching Towards Bethlehem in this moment I would pack up and haul out to the West Coast.

As Joan put it,

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.

Instead of packing up, Cara made ginger scallion soup, and kept on keeping on. It’s no surprise the ginger worked, with it’s gentle heat and ancient stomach-settling properties.

Leaving me to ask myself, “Can I cook myself into staying?”