Let's make something new this year.

At times, I thought the disaster that was 2010 may never end but finally, it has and I am ready to start something new in 2011. I'm ready to get back into cooking and writing about it. In December I moved into my new home, a townhouse in a much more populated area than Chestertown. School is nearby. I love my new job as a server and the people I meet there. I like my roommate a lot...in short, life has finally shifted and settled into a pattern that feels like real life. That term "real life" is a tricky one...what does that mean anyway? I couldn't put my finger on what I'd been experiencing until I was talking with my roomie a couple of nights ago. He was saying that he had been living in a dream world for the past six months, after having made some pretty big life changes himself. And it clicked in me.

I made this connection with the ideas of modernism and post-modernism that I learned about in American Lit with Dr. Abrams-Locklear. What she told us was that modernism is based on this idea that there is a center, an organizing core that holds "it" all together. I would guess that "it" is just us, our ideas about life and how life works, our comforts and loves. Like gravity for all of those things. In their World War I ravaged reality, modernists' works (literature and art alike) reflected the idea that the center will not hold. Actually W.B. Yeats used those exact words in his post World War I poem "The Second Coming." Then post-modernism is based on the fragile idea that there is no center. And there we go, I would propose, trying to create our own center because, let's face it, humans need the emotional equivalent of gravity. That's why religion and tradition and ritual exist. That's why we search for "the one" and probably why a lot of us turn to drugs and alcohol to sooth the pain of not being able to find a center. What I have found for myself and what I see in most people I admire is the discovery of that center within oneself. That's the only place I can rely on, that I house within my very bones and will not leave me until I leave this world. And for that reason, I absolutely must take the time to find that glowing spot inside and plug my weary mind into it daily. My friend Marky calls it "having a core," which I love because she's my running buddy and having strong core muscles is as essential in running as having a strong emotional core is in living a successful life.

Anyway, what any of this has to do with a food blog is that I have felt completely bereft of a center or core for a long time now. I've been adrift in a sea of "what in the hell is going on?" So much has changed in my outer life but especially in my inner life. There was a long stretch there where I wasn't really cooking or baking at all and I feared that that part of my life was over, that I'd lost that passion along the way or that it was only something to carry my through a painful time and now I would have to say good-bye to it. Which is an absurd thought seeing as how I come from food people. My grandmother is in her 90s and has continued to make delicious turkey stew from the bones and meat left over from the Christmas turkey. My parents met and got married at a restaurant two miles from where they now live, which my grandfather was managing at the time. We cook, it's what we do. It's how we take care of ourselves and each other. That being said, now a little over a month settled into my new place and new job and new routine I have been settling back into my old ways of grocery shopping and making tasty and healthy food and pouring over recipes that I want to try. I signed up to do Secret Bakers again (recipe post forthcoming). Everything has changed, everything. And yes, it was a very difficult year. I can say with certainty that it was worth the pain to build and repair the strong center I need to support the woman I want to be and the life I want to live. If it had turned out that, indeed, I'd lost my passion for cooking then that would have had to be ok. But I'm heaving a big sigh of relief knowing that my love of food is right where I left it. Here's to a new year of food adventures!