Two Weeks Noticed: At The Dinner Table
A collection of favorite poems, images, art, media, and reflections as we go through the harvest season into winter.
The Kitchen Table
The reason I create on TikTok, and in this newsletter, is to create a warm space in the virtual world. It is the same impulse that has my apartment smelling like garlic and rosemary and chicken fat, as I wait for friends to come over for a Thanksgiving Eve dinner. I create in both ways because of the innate, savory joy of sharing what I love with people in a space where we can all be.
This edition of Two Weeks Noticed is all about one central place: the dinner table. At present, I’m a twenty something in my medical residency, and have only recently acquired a real kitchen table for the first time in my twenties so far. It is often filled with papers, old wrappers, a couple well-meaning books, and whatever else has not found its way to its home yet. These next two weeks, beginning with Thanksgiving, will mark a slight change to that: a challenge to myself, and to you, to eat at the kitchen table—or whatever you have that is closest to that.
I’ve recently followed an account where her goal was to set the table for her family dinner each night, to mark it as the end of the day and as a practice of being together. I was drawn by it, and also challenged: I love cooking and food and the calmness of ritual, but can one person deserve that kind of care? Is it worth it—making this meal, setting out a bit of time for detail, to slow down—for just me?
That question made me pause, and made me realize why it might be a good idea to take two weeks to sit for my dinner mealtime, and to show myself that act of care. To sit at the table, to light a candle, and to learn to tolerate this silence until it melts into quiet. This practice is simple, yet challenging: to slow, to make time for myself, to not require that time spent with me be useful or pleasing or ecstatic. This is what I hope to learn at my own table.
My Neighbors Cook For Me
My neighbors cook for me, but do they know that I love them for it?
When I come home, they make the simplest offering, not a meal, but an aroma
I do not yet know my neighbor’s names,
but I know as I rise up the creaking staircase and pause at my door.
From the door down the hall, I hear two college girls laughing, pop music just audible, and the scent of garlic and cheese wafting
I don’t know their names, but I do know Thursday is pizza and wine night.
The couple that lives next door
is less regimented, and more familiar with spice
I’ve seen them at the farmers market
Walking past their door always reminds me that I am running out of garlic.
It’s nice, you know,
all of us living together, even as we don’t
we hear each others company knock at doors, laughter through the walls
the aroma of dinner down the hallway
we love each other, that way
when i make my homemade vegetable stew, I add a few more spices and a bit more garlic, and i hope the couple next door notices it
when i make pizza, i play my pop music playlist, and i know what it is to delight in the ephemeral, the brightness, the giggling
we love each other, do we not?
our warm window lights, with plants facing the sun, greeting each other as we walk home
the blinking pattern of the television with the same program flickering the screens.
I am tired of putting such parameters around what gets to count
what gets to land as love,
I know that Sunday night dinner smells
are a gift to me
a type of love from strangers.
I hope when they walk by window
on a blustery winter day
they see me reading in the window, mug of coffee in hand
they are met with the smell of cinnamon and chocolate wafting from my apartment
i hope they know it means I love them
I do.
“She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence here with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay
“Even though she had an overbite and the shakes, she was six feet tall and beautiful, and not like a statue or a perfume advertisement, but in a realistic way, like how a truck or a pizza is beautiful at the moment you want it most.”
― J. Ryan Stradal, Kitchens of the Great Midwest
The Meals That Built You
I once asked a friend what it meant to have a celebration of life, as he called it, for a family member who had passed away. It was a beautiful idea—of death not just as the end, and funerals in their morbidity of focus, but a time to recount all the beauties that this person gave to the world, whether they were aware of it or not. It made me think.
Picture yourself, and your very body, at the center of a circle. From your hands, your feet, your head, come many different colored strings, and each thread pulled at leads you back to a meal. Splices of memory return to you, and echo in your body about that meal. Who made it, and what thoughtfulness did they put into it? Remember how your mother always made the best roast chicken, and your brother who only knows how to make one dish, but made it when you visited his first grown up apartment? Or the childhood teacher who made a fuss over every birthday, the bright colored treats each first grader brought in?
Food has built your body, and who is to say what remains. Meals are an offering and a receiving of ourselves, and live on in embodied memory.
If you’re missing someone this holiday season, ask yourself this: What was the best food we ever shared together? Write somewhere to keep, like a recipe for a warming memory to call back whenever you are hungry or lonely.
The Next Two Weeks Noticing:
Nonfiction: Pleasure Activism, by adrienne maree brown, is rocking my world.
Fiction: I am only now, finally, returning to MiddleMarch, which I began last year, though I am presently sorely tempted by the likes of
Podcast: Come As You Are, by Emily Nagoski
Screen Media: From Scratch, which is both a cheesy, sentimental love story AND about cooking
Ways to Support My Writing
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I appreciate you being here at all—and love hearing your thoughts. Any and all comments are always welcome.