Monthly Review: June 2023

It's one of those in-between moments, easily missed but serendipitously caught. I'm in my brother's kitchen grabbing seconds when I glance out the window above the sink. It frames my family on the deck like a candid picture too good to leave on the camera roll. They sit suffused with golden hour sunlight, and I look at them for a moment.

There is my baby nephew, blue eyes wide, eagerly signing "more" in the hopes of extra iced tea or berries. My sister-in-law dutifully feeds him between bites of her own food. My older brother is sitting down at last after grilling a whole feast of fajitas for us. My youngest brother isn't even in the same timezone as the rest of us, but the middle brother is laughing with his wife and my husband as I observe them out the window.

My parents sit in the midst of it all. The strands of gray in their hair glint silver in the light––more gray now than there was when they moved away not even three years ago. This month marks 33 years of marriage for them, and spread around them are the tangible symbols of their union: us, their children. We are all here, some of us in the most fundamental sense of the word, because of them.

Of course, in the years we all lived together, I did not understand this. I was more likely to notice the indignity of a toilet seat left up or the irritation of another squabble spilling out of my younger brothers' shared room. These were far more blatant than the quiet beauty of a home in which, fluctuating momentary fondness aside, everyone did in fact love one another.

Removed now from these formative years in our parents' home, my brothers and I still bear its shaping influence as surely as the big Gronberg head and the lanky Mayes legs. I look at them now in this moment that will end as soon as I rejoin it, framing it now in memory that I may always see here the faces of the people who love me most, the ones that I love best. How beautiful they are.

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

What I Read

• The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes, Nancy Pearcey (★★★★★)

• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (★★★★★)

• The Selection, Kiera Cass (★★★)––reread

• The Elite, Kiera Cass (★★★★)

• The One, Kiera Cass (★★★★)

• Happily Ever After, Kiera Cass (★★★)

• The Heir, Kiera Cass (★★★)

• The Crown, Kiera Cass (★★★★)

• Everything Sad is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri (★★★★)

• The Midnight Library, Matt Haig (★★★)

• Poisoned, Jennifer Donnelly (★★★)

• The Grace Awakening, Charles Swindoll (★★★)

• The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead (★★★)

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

What I Cooked

• Pesto Chicken Tzatziki Salad Wraps

Difficulty: ★★

Flavor: ★★★★

Keeper: Yes

Comments: Super easy and delicious. I get the feeling I will be making these again before the summer is up.

• Peach Quick Bread

Difficulty: ★★

Flavor: ★★★

Keeper: Maybe

Comments: The batter seemed somewhat bland. A little more sugar and spice seem to be in order.

• Lemon Curd

Difficulty: ★★

Flavor: ★★★★

Keeper: Yes

Comments: I was worried this would not set, but it did, and that felt like a huge W for my first batch of lemon curd.

• Crispy Cheese Poblano Avocado Burrito

Difficulty: ★★★

Flavor: ★★★★

Keeper: Yes

Comments: The crispy cheese wrap adds absolutely nothing but stress to the experience of making these burritos. Not worth the effort.

What I Created

• Unpublished original poem "Hourglass"

• Unpublished original poem "A Liturgy for the Picking of Fruit"

• Original blackout poem "First Look"

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: May 2023

Almost as soon as we had yanked out the last dandelion root from the bed out back last summer, it was overtaken again. Tigerlilies sprouted on either side of the rock border, a veritable herb garden of mint spread a net of tendrils from end to end, and the dandelions' offspring came back to reclaim their heritage. There was too much to be done, so, naturally, nothing was done.

Over the winter, I thought nobly of checking out a good beginner gardening book, or tracking down a friendly-sounding blogger who could walk me through how to turn my dreams for the bed into a reality. Come spring, I wanted to plant a vegetable garden. But time, like gardens, tends to get overgrown with both commitments and distractions, so I researched nothing and learned nothing. Hence, I found myself squinting at seed packages in the Menards garden center, realizing that, if I wanted to grow tomatoes from seed, I ought to have started six weeks earlier.

In the end, I bought a package each of zucchini, cucumber, and scallion seeds as well as 2 cherry tomato seedlings. That was the easy part.

In between the intermittent rain showers of the first few weeks of May, my husband and I set out to do what ought to have been done in the fall and clear the bed. I knelt on my cheap foam gardening pad; he half-squatted next to me, and together we yanked and dug our way through the half-dead vegetation from last year and the half-grown sprouts from this year. We filled our yard waste bins many times over until, at last, we had emptied the bed.

And then, guided by the simple seed packet directions and half a YouTube video, I planted. I mounded the good new soil Mitchell had laid and deposited a ring of cucumber seeds. I hollowed out a space for the tomato seedlings and scattered tiny black scallion seeds between the two. I covered the zucchini seeds with handfuls of earth. In all, the whole affair lasted perhaps fifteen minutes.

It has been about two weeks. One of the tomato plants seems to be dying––too long in its plastic cup on my counter, I suspect. The spots of green in the middle of the bed could be either new weeds or baby scallions; I can't tell the difference. Yet, in that once dead and ugly place, tiny green shoots are starting to emerge, just as promised.

It will be a miracle if anything grows, but isn't it always a miracle? Isn't it always a sheer act of God to take the shriveled seeds we plant and turn them into something so alive it can nourish us as we have nurtured it? Isn't it beautiful that we can plant and water and hope for weeks before, at last, we receive the firstfruits of our faith and faithfulness?

I am watering my sprouts. I am hoping.

---

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

What I Read

• Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury (★★★★★)

• Every Moment Holy, Douglas McKelvey (★★★★★)

• A Thousand Heartbeats, Kiera Cass (★★★★)

• Room, Emma Donaghue (★★★)

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

What I Cooked

• Black Pepper Rub Chicken Fingers

Difficulty: ★★★

Flavor: ★★★

Keeper: Maybe

Comments: As a society, we need to stop pretending crushed cornflakes make good chicken breading. They don't. They're terrible. This might work well with panko, but I'm not sure whether I was crazy enough about the flavor to give it a second try.

• Creamy White Chicken Chili

Difficulty: ★★

Flavor: ★★★★

Keeper: Yes

Comments: I was not quite as thorough in following the instruction to melt the cream cheese as I should have been, so it was a little clumpy, but other than that, I thought it turned out well.

• Cheesy Green Chili Quesadillas

Difficulty: ★★

Flavor: ★★★★

Keeper: Yes

Comments: Tieghan Gerard is the only person who could make me follow a recipe for a quesadilla. I thought the avocado and rice would be weird, but it's basically like a burrito.

• Cowboy Casserole

Difficulty: ★★

Flavor: ★★★

Keeper: Maybe

Comments: Mitchell commented that this tasted like something that would be served at camp, and he's not wrong. For me, it was a little bland. I can see green chiles being a good way to resolve that issue, and I'd like to try this again with that variation.

What I Created

• The beginnings of an essay

• Half of a sonnet

• A few more pages' worth of progress in my new project

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 2023

I never believed the hipsters and old people who told me music sounds better on vinyl until my husband convinced me to get a record player. At that point, I had no choice but to recant, becoming a true believer from the first moment the needle dropped onto the spinning plastic and turned it into art. We bought a cache of secondhand records: 50s hits, orchestral compilations, big band music, and what must be nearly the entire discography of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. We had never actually listened to him, but my sister-in-law insisted he was great, and, since most of the records came out to about $2 a pop, we figured it was a cheap enough experiment.

"Do you know Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass?" I asked my grandpa over the phone a few months later.

I should have known he would. He even still had some of their records himself. He had always played 50s music for us grandkids, a decade before Alpert's prime, which partially explained the gap in my oldies music education. "We'll have to play it for you the next time you visit," I told him.

So, two months later, when my grandma and grandpa show up to surprise us for my nephew's first birthday party, we take them back to our place and pull out the bin of records. Carefully, we prise open the cardboard sleeves and fish the records out of their crinkling yellowed liners. We lift the record player's lid and settle each record in turn onto the felt-lined turntable. It swirls around like the kiddie orbiter ride at the Allegheny county fair in home videos from our childhood visits with my grandparents, transporting us back into the past.

For me, the dipping and soaring melody evokes a past I have glimpsed only in old movies, where dancing women wore dresses fit for Edith Head while their partners led them expertly through each step. But for my grandpa, this music is the soundtrack of a youth long since passed. I look over at him. Eyes closed, he rocks back and forth to the rhythm, tapping his hands and feet in time. For him, the past is not imagined but remembered, undergirding the melody of the present with the softest harmony.

He has told us of this past––growing up in small-town Massena, New York, spending summers on the family farm, pulling pranks with his younger brother. In memory, he is back there now.

But the needle moves ever closer to the center; the evolutions will cease all too soon. His memories will pass to us in secondhand records, cracking and skipping in places. The music will play on, and I know it will take me right back here. Like the old records, these memories will, in our safeguarding, still sing.

---

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

What I Read

• The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms' Magic Fairy Tales, G. Ronald Murphy (★★★★★)

• Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, Ellen Vaughn (★★★★★)

• The Inheritance Games, Jennifer Lynn Barnes (★★★)

• Teeny Little Grief Machines, Linda Oatman High (★★★)

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

What I Cooked

• Italian Sausage Soup

One would think that the time for soups would be past, but since we have had a lengthy and grumpy winter that just refuses to go away, I have continued to make soup. I found this one quite pleasant.

• Chili-Honey Chicken and Sweet Potatoes

This is now my third time trying a Modern Proper recipe. Conceptually, they always sound fabulous, but in practice, there is always something...off. In this case, it was the amount of salt (way too much). That being said, I liked the spicy sweet potatoes, and I am a sucker for anything that either a) is served with a sauce or b) can be made entirely on one sheet pan. This might be a once-a-year meal, but I do not think it would be a consistent rotation.

• Creamy Potato-Cabbage Soup

I love cabbage. I love creamy, easy soups. This should have been a slam-dunk.

Alas, it was not. It just tasted like nothing with a slight hint of vinegar. I would not make this again.

• Blueberry Crumb Cake

My best friend and I have decided to start getting together regularly to talk about books. For our inaugural gathering, I had planned to make something else, but then this little recipe floated through my Instagram feed. I had all the necessary ingredients, so I made it.

Oh, so good. It tasted like a happy little bite of summer. Definitely a keeper.

What I Created

• Untitled original blackout poem

• And, for the first time in a long time, I started working on a new story. I'm not sure how it's going to turn out or what it's going to end up being, but it's been fun to work on.

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