This past week, in making what felt like about the billionth pan of cornbread I have in recent months, I realized midway through mixing that there was not nearly enough sugar around to fulfill the recipe’s instructions. All I had on hand was a small amount of honey.

I had indulged recently in two loaves of gorgeous pulla – a Finnish cardamom dessert, pictured above, brilliantly topped with a thin coating of sugar (I appreciated and enjoyed every granule) – and reasoned maybe I would be wise to simply top my bread with honey. It worked.

On Remembering

I couldn’t believe it, a couple of weeks ago. For the first time in I don’t know how many years, I was sitting down to literally a slice of my childhood. Although my family is not Finnish, a friend of my family’s is, and two of her beautiful, nostalgic creations were delivered to me in perfect timing.

While lockdown has practically ended for most people, it seems, it has not for me and, for whatever reason, I have felt particularly touched by memories of moments in my life when I have felt the most joyful, fulfilled, authentic; and there have been few times when I have felt fully myself like I did when I was six.

For these gifts to have arrived now made them sweeter.

Enjoying my pulla-inspired cornbread, I wondered, given all of the people who may feel set apart and even separate from others’ designs right now, maybe it could be helpful to consider these conditions as signifying a sort of dearness.

I know that, to the degree that I have listened to the contributions of individual broadcasters and pundits recently, I have felt most heartened, uplifted, and encouraged by the most independent ones. (Perhaps if one feels simply separate from the recipe of a predictable dialogue-in-progress it is time to be glad. And to be frosting.)

Personally, I have always felt like more of a bar of chocolate, hitting my stride when combining my contributions in just the right proportions with colleagues with whom I am grateful to have had a simply natural, heartfelt, and purposed rapport.

Still, I felt like writing this essay for someone.