My easiest weeknight dinner, a nostalgia-busting history book, and a chic pill box
Plus a stunning fact about magnolias and an update on my dahlias
One afternoon, the August I was eight, my father and I found ourselves in the kitchen, the lights off to keep cool. I was teary over not being invited to a birthday party. Perhaps thinking to offer comfort and some needed perspective, my father told me, as he spread peanut butter on each slice of bread and then added the glossy, jewel-toned raspberry jam, that the sun was a star and would one day explode and incinerate the earth, erasing all traces of human existence. So don't worry about that party. He went back to work. I lay in the hammock and looked up at the washed-out blue sky, catatonic with grief.
We'd been studying Greek sculpture in art class; even though I hadn't yet stood in the cool air of the Greek and Roman wing of the Metropolitan Museum full of sculptures, both soft and hard at once, we'd been drawing David from photos. At the time, this was the oldest object I could think of, gone in a blinding flash.
My mother had a teaching job at Bennington College that summer and my father was in charge of our activities. He took my sister and I to every small museum, bookstore and architectural site in a 50-mile radius. Highlights included a machinery museum - human ingenuity made tangible from all the different styles of tools - and a trip to the fossilized dinosaur prints off of I-91 near Springfield, MA.
The isolation of our life in Vermont in the 1980s is almost unimaginable to me now. The farmhouse, built in the 1770s, was heated solely by wood. Three fireplaces with original chimneys still had the wrought iron swing arm where soups and stew would have cooked. Two wood stoves, one on each end of the house, did the rest. The cold would wake us up in the early mornings; there were no 'modern' amenities - no dishwasher, no laundry machine, and certainly no air-conditioning. No mail or newspaper delivery; dial-up was years away. We didn't receive broadcast TV, no cable line ran to us, miles up a dirt road.
The weather radio was the only source of breaking news, the siren blaring on occasion. We knew the National Weather Service folks' voices better than most others. The first thing I thought of when I read about the recent cuts to the National Weather Service was the way that those voices were a lifeline for us then and are still reliable when "modern" technology fails, and it does.
The regular news source was the newspapers my father drove daily to buy at the local general store. We listened to the radio on Friday nights for the oldies hour, but I don't remember listening to the news.
At one point in its long history, the farmhouse had been a stagecoach stop. I think about how relieved those travelers must have been when road weary and hungry, on horseback or in a carriage, they came around the bend and saw the lights of our house.
Leafy maple trees surrounded the home, their lacey silhouettes black against the fading sky. The gravestones of the family who had built the house were located farther up the hill. I'd trace the precise carved letters in the slate gravestones that were cool to the touch and wonder who had chiseled it. Had he known this young child? Had this been his wife? Had he lost family members to scarlet fever, too?
Even then, I could do the math of birth and death year; many of the stones marked the premature deaths of women and children. If I hadn't been fully aware of the fragility of life, I certainly was now. On the meandering walk back down to the house, we'd feast on black raspberries as the fireflies put on their show; the males would blink high in the trees, and the females would respond in the brush.
The trash pit used by the original owners was downwind of the house. That same summer, my sister and I spent hours digging through the soft, dark soil, uncovering pieces of lives once lived: buttons, leather soles of rotten shoes, pieces of long broken plates decorated with hand-painted flowers, shards of blue, green, and brown glass, and occasionally the greatest treasure of all, an unbroken bottle of patent medicine—some of these bottles today sit on a shelf in the room where I write to you.
It will surprise precisely no one that with this childhood, I would go on to study history; my undergraduate culminating research paper was on how the meaning of various words changed between editions of Noah Webster's dictionaries, published in the years that the young family interred on the hillside had eked out a living in what would eventually become my childhood home. What it meant to be a citizen, a republic, a democracy - I realize now that language (and democracy) are constantly evolving.
In graduate school, I studied the Gilded Age, a hypnotic time of technological change, increased globalization, and, as it turns out, cruelty, corruption, and excess. This article by Derek Thompson, The Story of the Gilded Age Wasn't Wealth. It Was Corruption in The Atlantic (gift link), features an interview with historian Richard White, who draws parallels between that moment and our current one. While many of us are aware of the technological innovation of the 1880s (factories! railroads! the lightbulb!) and the rise of famous families (Rockefeller! Carnegie! Morgan!) White argues that the true defining features of the period were grift and corruption and an accompanying decline in public health.
"By 1880, in the middle of the Gilded Age, if you lived to be 10 years old, you would die at 48, if you’re an American white male, and you would be 5 feet 5 inches tall. You would lead a briefer life and be shorter than your Revolutionary ancestor. And you were one of the lucky ones, because on average, 20 percent of infants would die before age 5. You’re living in an environment where, as America urbanizes, there’s no reliable sewage system. There’s no pure water. There’s no public health."
Despite remarkable industrial growth, ordinary Americans suffered, and this triggered the Progressive Era's reforms, which led to modern institutions of government.
Perhaps because of my early grief at humanity's eventual supernova-ing and later my training as a historian, I'm wary of nostalgia. History is brutal, violent, and unfair. My friend Stephanie, alert to this facet of my personality as only a good friend can be, first alerted me to The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible by Otto Bettmann.
The book challenges the nostalgic view of late 19th-century America. With tongue-in-cheek humor, Bettmann documents smells (no sewage systems! pigs running loose on NYC streets!), lawlessness, and the widespread suffering of the era, including frequent fires in crowded housing, exploitative landlords and labor conditions with long hours and low wages, rampant child labor, and political corruption at every level. Bettmann highlights the extent to which most Americans endured relentless hardship and neglect, making the "good old days" anything but, and that as much as things change, they stay the same.
A. I keep a copy of Bettman's book on my coffee table; it's a good conversation starter, and Tim likes to flip through it and regale me with one insane historical fact after another. This morning, he said, aghast, "Did you know 100,000 children were living on the streets in NYC in the 1880s?" I hadn't known this; it certainly adds another layer of context to the current political moment to understand the lived reality of the last time tariffs were this high. It's an excellent gift for the person in your life who has everything. I can promise you they don't have this!
B.If you're looking for an art project to do with the young people in your life, the YouTube account Art Hub for Kids is a great resource. Ben and I made origami rabbits last night. The key is to work on a rabbit together; when there is a tricky fold above my kid's ability, we'd trade rabbits and sidestep a lot of frustration.
C. I'm compiling a guide to my favorite stores for a future newsletter. I came across Casa Shop, and this gorgeous (and $$$) pill box jumped out at me. As you know by now, I love a utilitarian object (the humble pill box) luxed up. What a small joy (and it could make a good gift for the fanciest person in your life).
D. Another utilitarian object—a butter dish—is rendered interesting with a hypnotic pattern. It was made by PLOP Pottery.
When I read Kate Belew's post last night, I was brought back to those summer trips to the dinosaur footprints preserved off I-91. The magnolia down the street from me is blooming. In another time, dinosaurs walked under their blossoms. That feels like an expansive, deep breath—like suddenly, there is more room.
E. Alex introduced me to Linxicon this week. It's a game in which you try to connect two words using words with related meanings. We had more fun than you'd expect trying different words. And I suspect the Wordle -Scrabble- Words with Friends crowd will enjoy this.
F. This recipe for tuna pasta was a staple of my childhood. When I searched for it in my email tonight, I came across an email I sent my father in 2006 when Tim and I were newly married and on our honeymoon. I cook it the same way now, nearly twenty years on, as I did then.
Tuna Pasta with Capers
2 Tablespoons butter
1 can (7 ounces) white tuna in oil
Liberal amount of milled black pepper
1 can (2 ounces) anchovies, drained
1 teaspoon capers (I use more like a tablespoon)
1 pound linguine
Melt the butter in a saucepan and stir in the tuna with its oil, breaking
it up into small pieces. Mill in pepper liberally, add anchovies and
capers, and simmer for 7-15 minutes, stirring constantly. Cook pasta al dente. Drain well and toss right in the saucepan with the tuna and anchovies, coating the strands of pasta well.
These fancy and tiny anchovies were a gift and a delicious upgrade to this recipe.
G. A friend gave me some dahlias tubers last spring - they were desiccated and ugly and while I had no idea what was coming, I do hate waste. So I dutifully planted them in a dusty stretch of my back garden that I’d vaguely thought to turn into a cutting garden one day. Well, holy smokes, did these dirty tubers turn into the most gorgeous flowers - because I’d planted them late in the season - almost July by the time I got them in the ground - they didn’t start blooming till fall. As the rest of my garden faded, the dahlias just stole the show and along with it my heart.
The sneaky part of dahlias is that they are - relatively speaking - expensive - $10-$25 a tuber. So, come November, I dug up the tubers, shocked to see how much they’d grown and with a few panicked texts to my genius gardening friend Pom, I dried them out and then stored them for the winter. I set a Google calendar reminder for mid-February to "wake up the dahlias." Following some Reddit advice, I did indeed wake them up. This week, they started to sprout.
H. Cool Stones!
I. I subscribed to Homes and Gardens after picking up a copy in NYC.
As I watch those dahlias sprout through the soil, after waiting for what felt like an eternity, I think about that August afternoon in the hammock, staring at the sky and trying to comprehend the sun's eventual death. The magnolias that once shaded dinosaurs now bloom outside my neighbor's house. The patent medicine bottles my sister and I dug from the soil now sit on my shelf. Time folds in on itself in curious ways. This is why I resist nostalgia but embrace history: the past wasn't better, but understanding it helps us navigate with more clarity.
I hope you found this newsletter interesting! If you enjoyed it, consider clicking the ❤️ button — it really does help other like-minded readers discover my writing (oh, algorithms!). And, if you’re feeling chatty, know that it is a true joy to read your comments - they make me feel less like I’m just typing into the glowing void of my laptop screen and more like I’m having a conversation with you.
I often have a few finds that don't fit into the main image (my favorite part of the newsletter to create and the hardest to get 'right') or the overall flow. I put a few bonus finds here for subscribers as a tiny thank-you. Due to layers of Substack beyond my control - it appears that when I set this section as Paid it means only paid subscribers can leave comments. So this week I’m removing the paywall while I correspond with Substack to figure out how to resolve this.
Just one find:
Pretty vase for a single stem.
wow, especially love the final vase -- so beautiful and graceful. also, those dahlias!!!!!!
Love this post so much. Your essays are thought-provoking and also somehow kind, which I imagine reflects you as a person. As an architectural historian, I have to resist the nostalgia too (building materials and craftsmanship were objectively better in the past, but the act of living/working in these buildings was not.) But what I love about what I do as a historian is that this understanding of the past shapes how I understand our present.