Three good things

and of course one complaint

1.     Mangos, Eaten Over the Sink

We are approaching peak mango season, although a trip to the Port Chester Whole Foods would tell you we are already at its height. I don’t know how our overlords at Amazon are ensuring that Whole Foods has early, exclusive access to such juicy yellow mangos, perhaps they are injecting the fruit with the tears of poor people that Bezos collects for fun? Whatever the case — they are delicious. I have no idea how to cut a mango into those neat cubes, so instead I peel it with a sharp knife and then consume it, feral, over the sink. I could always watch a mango-cutting tutorial on YouTube, but the majority of my mango-induced joy comes from this cavewoman-style gobbling with which I engage. A ripe peach is also best eaten this way, over the sink, and really, if circumstances and convention allowed, so too would a rack of ribs.

2.  Living Where the People Are

This past weekend, my husband and I travelled up north to a rural town in Vermont where we were promptly dumped on by two feet of snow. It was very cozy and very relaxing and very kid-free, but it was also very much in the middle of fucking nowhere. I had done no research on the trip because I figured a small town in Vermont would probably have a cute spade of things to do; a little bookstore to explore or a little cafe to sit at while little musicians strummed on their little banjos and whatnot, but this was not that kind of small town. This was a no-stoplight having, post-office boasting, rural-ass small-town. We stayed at this town’s very quaint inn and were the youngest people there by a factor of, I’m guessing, two hundred years. When I booked the inn I must have been having a Lorelei Gilmore fantasy moment and, while incredibly hospitable, none of these folks had their dialogue written by Amy Sherman Paladino. Don’t get me wrong, the inn was replete with inn-ly pleasures. There were crackling fireplaces, tastefully placed taxidermied animals (oh the unique joy of eating dinner next to a dead raccoon) and even a vintage 45-star American flag which really captured the attention of my husband for some reason. Imagine him: dad stance, furrowed brow while counting the stars over and over again to make sure he’s not seeing things, gleeful at the subsequent discovery of the commemorative plaque which confirmed his suspicions. Now — we were also close to a ski town which would have definitely offered us something to do were we the type of people who skied or snowboarded. When I told the innkeeper that we didn’t ski, she stifled a grimace and made the meager offer of the humble snowshoe, which you won’t catch me strapping into at my most nimble, let alone in my six-month pregnant body. I suppose I could have snowshoed, but I didn’t want to afford any onlookers that slapstick comedy routine free of charge.

Vermont is inarguably quaint and undeniably beautiful. Rolling hills, gushing streams, clapboard houses, charming white steeple churches but… nobody lives there?! When I told my husband to guess the population of the state he guessed three million to which I promptly laughed at him, called him a dumb idiot, and told him the actual number which I had not known until I googled it: around 600,000 people. We then looked at the suburban county we live in in New York, which has almost a million people. Following that, we played a population guessing game which is a fun game for the stage of marriage where you’ve run most other conversation topics into the ground. (We’re only three years in! Luckily there are almost infinite population statistics to be gleaned from the internet!) Of those 600,000 Vermonters, I’d say, I don’t know, 599,999 of them are white. And listen, I’m no stranger to white people, am one myself, love those guys, but this is a different level of whiteness, a Benjamin Moore Super White, and at a certain point you start feeling a little creepy about it because this is America we’re in after all, not Finland.

We laughed a lot and slept well and watched The Simpsons on Cable TV and it was a really an amazing weekend but the whole time we felt infinitely grateful for the fact that we live where the people are.

As a consumer of content *across platforms* I have always been partial to a rural cottage core fantasy. I feast my eyes on videos where women live rurally, tend a garden, and make loaves upon loaves of sourdough bread. I have watched many a Tik-Tok where women with long hair in canvas aprons wax poetic about how disconnected we’ve become from our land and our food systems. These videos have a way of worming their way into my psyche until one minute I’m scrolling, and the next, I’m on Zillow finding a cabin in the Catskills where I can live off the land and keep goats. One trip to an actually rural place scrubs this from my brain entirely. Poof go the imaginary goats.

The suburbs have not turned me into some country mouse, even though I am sometimes deluded into thinking so. I love the amenities of a population-dense area. Even though I think rolled ice cream is an abomination and poke bowls are disgusting, I am comforted in knowing these options are within a five-mile radius of my home. Sure, I’m disconnected from where the food came from when I’m assembling my meal at Chipotle or Chopt or the lesser-known Bango Bowls, but I’m certain I would perish without such easy access to bowl-based cuisine. I am a weak, albeit comfortable creature of the urban sprawl and I cannot imagine life any other way.

it was still very nice

3. The Butter Dish on the Counter

We are a butter-dish-on-the-counter household. My husband came from a butter-dish-in-the-fridge household and was somewhat horrified when I bought us a cute, floral butter dish from Anthropologie and placed that sucker on the countertop. What if it goes bad, he worried. It won’t, I assured him, although perhaps, at a certain point, it does. To keep butter on the counter is to live life ever so slightly on the edge and damn if it isn’t worth the thrill. I’ve said it once I’ll say it a thousand times: I am an absolute slut for room-temperature butter. Oh, that spreadability! I’m not advocating for those crazy Europeans who keep their eggs out, but room-temperature butter is one of life’s simple pleasures that you needn’t deny yourself. Butter on the counter is one good thing that breeds many good things— butter on toast with flaky salt, butter spread on a warm blueberry muffin, butter straight up if you are one of those Keto freaks.

one complaint

There is a group of moms who walk around my neighborhood with their strollers and their babies talking about things that moms talk about and they have not invited me into their fold, despite me being very friendly and charming each time I see them. I met the leader of their gang at a picnic, and while she was very nice, I’m also convinced she and her husband are pod people. Whenever we talk we seem to be competing for the Guinness record of most boring conversation ever had. Even so — she seems to be the Queen Pin Mommy on the Block, and I am desperate to be invited into her inner circle. My son is slightly older than their kids, they clearly all had babies around the same time, and therefore he is superior and wiser, so maybe they are actually intimated by him and by proxy me and my advanced mothering wisdom. Alas, until they invite me on their mom walk, they are my enemies.