I sat down to make an episode about my grandmother and her scones. Mema. A kitchen in Georgia, a woman who ate a mediocre orange scone from a chain and decided there was no reason she could not do better, and did. That was the plan. Twenty-six minutes, one person, one recipe.
Then I started reading back through things I had written, old and new, and every time I tried to get to her I found water instead. A hot spring in Montana. A river in Colorado. The thick green air of a Georgia summer. It took most of a week to understand that the water was not in the way. It was the way. Episode Three, The Water Between Places, is out now, as audio and as a film, and this is the note from the desk about how it got made.
Three kinds of water
The first is a hot spring in Montana, where I worked at a resort and where I first got sober, detox and all, surrounded by people in linen robes who had driven across the country to let the water do something to them. I was there trying to survive myself. There is a difference, and the essay spends some time on it. I got sober beside that water, stayed sober beside it for a while, and then did not, and eventually I still had to leave. The water did not know what to do with me. It is water.
The second is the river here in Frisco, which is cold and fast and refuses to stop for anyone's big moment. You can lose somebody beside it and it keeps going. I have come to find that irritating and also the most honest thing in town.
The third is not water at all, which is the point. It is the flat green heat of a Georgia kitchen, a table, and the women on the phone saying remember when. That is where the watcher in me was born, the boy who noticed everything and said very little, and who grew up to sit at a front desk at nine thousand feet noticing things for a living.
What you carry out without knowing you packed it
The episode is really about leaving, and about the lie that you leave empty-handed. You do not. You carry out recipes, phrases, a way of folding towels, the habit of watching. I spent a very long time afraid that changing meant losing myself, and then another very long time trying to change on purpose, and neither worked. What worked, eventually, was noticing that it was the same water in every place. Different conditions. Same water.
Not a grand gesture. Flour. Butter. Cream. A kitchen.
That is the inheritance, and it is the whole recipe for the kind of person I am trying to be: notice, have extra, hand it over.
Five scones and a mountain
The episode opens with something that happened at breakfast the morning I recorded it. A guest ate a blueberry scone, then another, then asked if he could take some up Mount Royal. We wrapped five in foil. Somewhere on the trail he met a tired woman and a little girl and told them, as kindly as a person can, that they probably needed sugar. He handed over scones out of the foil and ate the last one at the summit. He told me at aperitivo hour with magic in his eyes, and he took photographs, two of which are in the film. He stays unnamed unless he ever wants otherwise. I ask the listener to hold that for the whole half hour. Five. Enough.
Mema's orange scones, in her own measures
Every episode ends with a recipe you can carry out of the room, and this one is the original. Not the altitude-adjusted house scone from Episode Two; the scone that came before it, at sea level, in a Georgia kitchen, written the way she measured. Two cups of flour. Half a cup of sugar. Zest the orange right over the sugar and rub it around with your fingers a little. Do not fool with the dough too much. The cream cheese is my addition, and I say so. The recipe is written down in the Kitchen, open to everyone.
How to listen, and where the places live
The episode is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and anywhere else you keep your quiet; the whole map is in How to listen. Every episode is scored with original music and released as a film, the words landing on the screen the moment they are spoken. The places of the essays are drawn as constellations in the Sky, and Georgia's star is lit now.
If you would like the house to write to you when the next one is ready, the door is the correspondence. It is already warm in here.