When I was a working artist in the nineties, I spent every waking moment reading, writing, working, thinking, writing, dancing, seeing art, hearing music, exercising, writing, reading and sleeping my way up and down the Eastern Seaboard. It would be hard to overstate how dedicated I was to whatever – and whomever – I was doing during those years, should you find yourself stating anything about me, but then you’d be talking about me and I hope it’s because I’m delightful now and not because I borrowed your husband for a torrid affair no one remembers anyhow. Like I said: dedicated. Single-minded. Obsessive. Completely focused on what I was doing, what I’d be doing next and how little time I had to produce the next project: that was my life. Miss Sasha could wander through here any old time now and tell you what a picnic I wasn’t to live with and when my brain went BOOM! I became a day at the land-mined beach.

That brings us to now. For the first time in my entire life, I do not feel much like using words. This is a baffling sensation for me. Words are my paint and paintbrush, my guitar and drum. I can barely summon the will to finish sentences half the time and if I had any skill at all with a camera this would be a photo blog. I don’t know what this all means. Perhaps it’s a stage of life or a stage in every artist’s life where the medium falls away and something else presents itself. At the moment, I want to communicate through the colors and textures of pickled beets and peach butter. The internet, while very useful, does not yet offer us the fragrances of cinnamon and sweet basil. I don’t know how to talk to you without rosemary-infused olive oil.

And there is never enough time to talk, is there? Especially when we don’t want to. There’s never enough time when berries are ripe and skin is warm with sweat and we move through this sweet quietude. In other news: near my sister’s house sits an enormous dairy farm. The homeowners’ association is most exercised about the aroma of cow poop on the breeze.