Monthly Review: May 2026

Our mother lines us up in stairsteps—brother, sister, brother, brother. Each of us is a head taller than the next. We don’t like pictures, but we’re not in charge. The boys pull faces and stick up bunny ears in mischievous mutiny. Someone is usually caught blinking; someone else looks funny (whether intentionally or not). This is the best we can do, and we have been documented in all our mediocrity. Mom will print the photos and mail them to our grandparents, who will stick them on the fridge or in a frame, freezing us just as we were.

The second child and only girl, I maintained my comfortable position as second tallest until I was fifteen or so, at which point the brother three years my junior began shooting up to his weedy eventual height of six feet (give or take). The youngest of us took a few more years, but soon enough all three of my brothers towered over me. Soon enough we were grown up, out of the house, most of us married, half of us chasing toddlers. Back when we were playing Mario Party and yelling at each other to get out of the bathroom and stretching our legs into the no-man’s-land that ran down the center of our hand-me-down kitchen table, an offense for which we also yelled at each other, we didn’t think about the four of us as adults. (At least, I didn’t, and if any of the four of us had, I guarantee it would have been me.) Our parents did not tell us we had to get along so we could be friends when we were grown-ups. I think they were mostly concerned that we would all in fact live into adulthood.

And now here we are. The youngest is in the military and has been stationed in three (four? I lose track) different states and two different countries, but the other three of us all live within about an hour of each other, a small triangle of Mayes siblings. But every so often all four of us are together. Never for very long at a time. This time it’s just an afternoon, in a sunny park very like the one where we played tag growing up. We pack picnic lunches with treats to share, and I push my niece on the swing and chase my nephew through the warren of wooden towers.

Before we leave, Mom asks us for a picture. We stand on the stairs leading down to the creek that flows through the park. Two, four, three, one, and we are stairsteps once again, just as we have always been, and mostly smiling. As long as they’re beside me, I will always know where I came from and where I’m going.

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Here's what I read, cooked, and created in the month of May.

What I Read

• The Librarian of Auschwitz, Antonio Iturbe (★★★★)

• Same as It Ever Was, Claire Lombardo (★★★★)

• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (★★★)

• The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (★★)

  
  

If you want to hear the rationale behind my rating, head to my Goodreads for full reviews.

What I Cooked

• Crab Salad

  • Difficulty: ★

  • Flavor: ★★★★

  • Keeper: Yes

Something about crab salad on a croissant at a picnic feels so luxurious. I did add more lemon juice and Old Bay than called for here.

• Caprese Chickpea Salad

  • Difficulty: ★

  • Flavor: ★★★★★

  • Keeper: Yes

I served this over farro, and what a great dinner it was. Even if you halve the recipe (as I did), I would recommend making the normal amount of dressing.

• Sausage, Cabbage, and White Bean Skillet

  • Difficulty: ★

  • Flavor: ★★★

  • Keeper: Probably not

I love a one-pan dinner as much as the next gal, but this one, like so many other Modern Proper recipes I have tried, just didn't do a whole lot for me.

• Crab Rangoon Burrito Rolls

  • Difficulty: ★★

  • Flavor: ★★★★

  • Keeper: Yes

I made these for my brother and fellow crab rangoon enthusiast, and we were both pleased with how quickly they came together and how good they tasted.

• Yogurt Cookies

  • Difficulty: ★★

  • Flavor: ★★★★★

  • Keeper: Yes

I can see these being great in bar form as well, if for no other reason than to avoid the inevitable glaze squashing when storing cookies. I had to swap the raspberries for strawberries, and with Greek yogurt the glaze required some heavy cream to thin, but the recipe held up well to these changes and produced a soft, lovely cookie.

• Lemon Ricotta Cake

  • Difficulty: ★★

  • Flavor: ★★★★

  • Keeper: Yes

This was so pleasant. Ricotta cakes are naturally moist and subtle in flavor, making them a great vehicle for the fresh strawberries and whipped cream.

What I Created

• Unpublished original poem "What You'd Want for a Child"

• The first few paragraphs of my next essay for Commonplace magazine

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May your days be filled with beauty, and may your heart be filled with the willingness to see and give thanks for it.

Monthly Review: April 2026

You woke me up, not the siren, though I’m sure that with a few more seconds I would have been upright in bed right alongside you. “We need to get down to the basement.”

There is a certain hubris one develops as a (nearly) lifelong resident of the Midwest: there won’t be a tornado, but on the off chance there is, it wouldn’t dare come here. But, when that Wisconsin fool marries a Californian transplant, she at least has to play along when those tornado sirens go off, even when it happens at midnight. I put on my robe and my slippers and dutifully tromped down to the basement.

Oh, the laundry basket’s full. May as well sort it.

I pulled clothes and towels and dishcloths from the overflowing basket beneath the laundry chute, heaping them into piles at my feet. Beyond the thick walls of our basement I could still vaguely hear the shrieking that had called us out of our cozy bed. Is this a watch or a warning? I can never remember which is which.

At least one of the two dogs had followed me already; the other one came down the stairs with you. You brought our pillows and blankets too, and as I stood over my laundry piles I felt I had been rather foolish, coming down completely unprepared. But you didn’t demand I explain what I’m doing or tell me off for doing it. You spread out the blankets on the concrete floor of our basement bathroom so I could nestle onto my pillow with the dogs, as warm and cozy as one can be when lying beside a toilet during a tornado warning. While you watched the radar, I dozed off. In half an hour, you were waking me up again, letting me know it was safe to go back upstairs.

There was nothing you could have done if the tornado had come. The house would have splintered above us, the walls crumbled around us, the rains poured down over top of us. It all would have been over in an instant. Yet I suppose I had felt safe all along. You were there, there when I fell asleep and there still when I woke up. What, exactly, would I do without you?

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Here's what I read, cooked, and created in the month of April.

What I Read

• Five to Thrive: How to Determine If Your Core Needs Are Being Met, Kathy Koch (★★★★)

• Scotland: The Story of a Nation, Magnus Magnusson (★★★★)

• The Art of Clear Thinking: A Stealth Fighter Pilot's Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions, Hasard Lee (★★★★)

• Peace Like a River, Leif Enger (★★★★)

  
  

If you want to hear the rationale behind my rating, head to my Goodreads for full reviews.

What I Cooked

• Brioche Dinner Rolls

  • Difficulty: ★★

  • Flavor: ★★★★

  • Keeper: Yes

I overbaked these a tad, so they were a little dry in the middle, but an easy and reliable dinner roll recipe that I will reach for again.

• Sheet Pan Ranch Pork Chop Dinner

  • Difficulty: ★

  • Flavor: ★★★★

  • Keeper: Yes

I brought this over to my best friend, who is currently postpartum, and it was a winner by all accounts. I did use additional ranch seasoning beyond what the recipe called for.

• Roasted Spring Vegetables

  • Difficulty: ★

  • Flavor: ★★

  • Keeper: No

Turns out roasted radishes are not good.

• Creamy Carrot Cake Coffee Cake

  • Difficulty: ★★★★

  • Flavor: ★★★★★

  • Keeper: Yes

I had made the pumpkin version of this coffee cake, so I knew this was going to be a project going in, and indeed it was. But, when I brought this to a family get-together, my 4-year-old nephew, who loves both coffee cake and carrot cake, was thrilled beyond words about the dessert situation, and that made it all worth it.

What I Created

• Original blackout poem "Crucify Him"

• More grad-school essay revisions

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May your days be filled with beauty, and may your heart be filled with the willingness to see and give thanks for it.

Monthly Review: March 2026

Photo by Mitchell Allen

There’s no snow in San Francisco; instead, the city is awash in fog, a thick gray that settles in the valleys and creeps over the beaches like a second tide. My first time in the city, my then-boyfriend, now-husband bought a fog globe for his small-town sweetheart from the Midwest, and it still sits on my bookshelf all these years later. The gray glitter swirls around a miniature Golden Gate Bridge, mimicking the fog that so often veils the magnificent orange towers rising out of the bay. As we dig ourselves out of the foot of snow that arrives in Wisconsin the week before our San Francisco spring break, I would happily take anything above freezing, fog and all.

But there’s no fog when we touch down Saturday night and greet my in-laws outside the airport, and none when the morning dawns. That afternoon, downtown seems clearer and warmer than my college visits in June. At the wharf we gobble mini-donuts glittering with cinnamon sugar, and we laugh as sea lions shove and bellow on the docks. The ferris wheel at the pier is new since our last trip three years earlier, and when we ride our stomachs swoop and dive with every circuit. The cityscape spreads out like a postcard, every landmark gleaming in the afternoon sun.

Our fastidiously-drawn itinerary, sketched on printer paper at our dining table, takes us up and down the bay, from the evening lights of the Bay Bridge over the Embarcadero to the shops of Sausalito to Pacifica where the neighborhoods bump up against the beaches. One day we rent one of the little yellow Go-Cars we weren’t old enough to drive when I came out in 2016, and we zip up and down the hilly streets to catch some landmarks we’ve never seen and some we’ve always loved. We come home in a Waymo with our cheeks pink from the sun. All week San Francisco seems as golden as its state moniker.

At dinner midway through the week, we book a table for 7 PM. Even though I forgot to call and ask for a view of the sunset, I’m sure they’ve given the four of us the best seat in the place to watch its slow-motion dive into the crashing ocean. Again, the evening is fogless. As I sip my mocktail and crack my crab legs, I know this night will file itself in my memory beside dinner at the Cliff House with my husband all those years ago, when we were still dreaming of this life and husband and wife.

It’s barely above freezing when we get back home (a true Wisconsin spring). But when I cup my fog globe in my hand and swivel my wrist like Mitchell taught me, those sparkles swirl up from its depths, happy as confetti. Until they settle, all seems golden again in the rare gleam of a San Francisco sun.

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Here's what I read, cooked, and created in the month of March.

What I Read

• Isola, Allegra Goodman (★★★★★)

• The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury (★★★★)

• Ghostlight, Kenneth Oppel (★★★)

• The 6 Types of Working Genius, Patrick Lencioni (★★★)

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (★★★)

• What the Night Sings, Vesper Stamper (★★★)

  
  

If you want to hear the rationale behind my rating, head to my Goodreads for full reviews.

What I Cooked

I don't think I tried anything new this month that wasn't in a cookbook.

What I Created

• A few pages of my project

• Some revisions on a 6-year-old essay from grad school

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May your days be filled with beauty, and may your heart be filled with the willingness to see and give thanks for it.