On cake and cut-up paper
What if you gave your soul what it was asking for?
A dinner party is a kind of ephemeral art, too. From the choice of the table decor, the menu choices, and the planned flow for the evening. This must be why I like them so much.
We’re sitting at the bird window, jazz on the stereo, drinking coffee and exclaiming about the sunrise that has now brightened the last of the leaves on our backyard trees. Swirly comes trotting from behind, nails clicking on the hardwood floor, and leaps up onto us, landing her back paws on my chair with her front paws precariously perched on the other one.
“Wow, that was aggressive,” says my spouse Janyce, pushing the dog to the ground again.
“Well, I am sitting in her chair,” I say, while getting up and moving to the couch with a view toward the fireplace instead of the window.
“Can you read to me the recipe again for the apple cake?” I say.
Janyce is looking into her phone, laughing at dog videos. We talked last night about reducing the sugar in the cake, because it’s full of apples and we felt like it should be sweet enough, but that’s not how baking works.
“Google says we can reduce the sugar up to a 1/3 but it could turn out dry if we are not careful.”
“You know what? It’s a cake. Let’s make the recipe the way it’s written,” I say.
If I was a little smarter about this, I would have planned for a dessert that was less sugar dependent. In fact, it doesn’t really fit into my general eating goals lately, but then again, this is not a weeknight meal, it’s a dinner party.
Fifteen years ago, I made a vision board while trying to remember what it was that I liked. The boys were not yet in high school and I was on the verge of leaving a relationship, and the house I jointly owned, and moving into an apartment a few streets away. I didn’t live there long but those years were some of the best of my life. Mostly because I had tapped into some of what my soul was searching for when I sat down and fooled around cutting up magazine pictures and words. What was it that I liked again? Just me? Not me as a part of a couple or me as a mom of two boys. What did I like? Well, I liked parties, big ones yes, but small dinner parties most of all. I liked the color red. I liked lots of uniform wine glasses lined up on a table. I liked snow piling up on wooden fence railings. I liked typewriters and pencils and books and stone cottages and shoes with lots of buckles.
In
this week, she calls temporary art pieces like my magazine collage “little gestures of the soul.” She is borrowing the phrase from an artist friend of hers who champions making conceptual, ephemeral art.I wasn’t making an art piece that day and I only saved it all these years because so many of the images ended up pointing me in a certain direction. I was amazed that the little cutout image of a living room I liked turned out to be so similar to the apartment I eventually found. It had big windows that looked out over a porch to the street. One of my friends loaned me an oriental rug—just like in the picture—and I pushed the couch up under the windows the same way.
The buzzer on the stove breaks my trip down memory lane. I can smell the aroma of cinnamon and clove coming from the kitchen and the sweet tang of baking apples. We’ve put the cushions and pillows out on the patio furniture and I’ve picked bittersweet sprigs from the tangled vines outside for the vase for the table.
A dinner party is as a kind of ephemeral art, too. From the choice of the table decor, the menu choices and the planned flow for the evening, and it just occurred to me that this must be why I like them so much.
