Ten things: little & sweet & lovely
A round-up of things to see, look at, think about, consume, and hear this week.
Welcome back to a particularly twirly round-up of things I recommend for the week. There are ten. Maybe too many of them have to do with flowers, I don’t know.
Eating flowers
A few years ago, my friend Mary Fons was living in England, and she bought an expensive magazine about… fashion? art? I can’t remember, but you know the kind of magazine: thick, glossy pages; ads for jewel-encrusted purses you’ll never see in real life; and that indescribable fancy magazine smell. (I guess it is describable. It smells like high-quality glue.) In the magazine was a “recipe” for a “flower sandwich,” which she tore out and mailed to me. I put it somewhere safe, and so of course I have no idea where it is anymore, but don’t worry: I remember it.
You take two slices of soft bread, and you go out into the field and find some flowers you can eat, and you put the flowers between the slices of bread, and the end. It was a beautiful recipe. I learned about eating flowers in New Orleans, which is lousy with nasturtiums (still my favorite flower to eat). Now I know you can eat a lot of flowers: pansies, rose petals, bachelor buttons, borage, dandelions, chamomile, clover, and on and on. Most flowers don’t taste like much — except, eating one feels like a strange magic, like you’re deciding that you want something as beautiful as a flower to be a part of your body, in the most immediate way, right now. Make sure your flower is edible before you eat it (you can use an app like Seek to ID the flower), but I don’t think you need the bread. Enjoy the experience of eating something that somehow has nothing to do with tasting, but everything to do with seeing from the inside of your self.
(Bonus: I also recommend Mary Fons. She is a quilting celebrity [!?!?] with a wonderful Twitch and YouTube channel and more.)
2. Suzanne Cunningham videos
Sometimes I go through existential crises, where I can’t watch any television because nothing is safe. In these times, I turn to calligraphy videos. I prefer when you can hear the nub of the pen on the page, but I will consume all kinds of these. Suzanne Cunningham is the crème de la crème of Copperplate calligraphers. Putting these videos on in the background can soothe the day into an orderly calm.
3. The Beths “Knees Deep” singles
Luke says that The Beths have a new album coming out, and I think these three singles might be my favorite songs of 2022 — they are at least my favorite songs of the summer. This is a relief because I worried that maybe I was not into music anymore.
