strike that

good directions

My housemates are both away for a few days and they both left behind apples. Perhaps only one of them left behind apples, but there were really quite a lot of apples, so I’m thinking it was both of them. In any case the apples were getting waxy and wrinkled as abandoned apples do, so when I got home from work this afternoon I turned up the radio and cut them into chunks and mixed them with brown sugar and cinnamon in a pot on the stove, and cooked them for a very long time until the whole kitchen smelled like spice.

And it is times like this, when I have a spoon in one hand for mixing homemade applesauce, and a knife in the other hand to cut tofu for a stirfry, and the radio is playing, quite loudly, a song that begins I was sittin’ sellin’ turnips on a flatbed truck, that I wonder how I possibly got here. My parents raised me in a big suburban house full of fragile furniture and classical music, and they hoped that I would either be a doctor or marry one. But instead here I am in Oregon, a state I couldn’t find on a map until I moved here for design school, peeling apples into a compost bin and dancing around the kitchen to a guy who has cracked the Billboard Hot Country Chart four times over.

Who understands the complex chemistry of what makes each of us happy? I remember very clearly the moment in the post-college scramble when a dear friend of many years announced to me enthusiastically One thing I know for sure is I really like marketing! And it was so jarring, so revelatory. Shit! I realized. She really does. Where do we get these affinities from? The big devotions to art or parenthood or the ocean, and the countless tiny tendencies to the tuba or Swedish or sleeping outside. Somehow we find the things that make up our lives and make us happy, even if they are not the things we were ever expected to look for.

posted by tortaluga @ 10:39 PM