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Month: March 2023

Friday Musings: In Abundance

Friday Musings: In Abundance

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One night last week I had a dream that I found a large yellow and green turtle in the bathtub, which immediately sent me running to some of my favorite dream interpretation websites like AuntFlo.com and The Dream Encyclopedia. And what words of wisdom did I find?? A few meanings were obvious. Someone or something in my life needs protection. I am a pillar of strength and stability in the face of destruction. I’m going to need lots of patience to get through the next few months. While these were good, especially that second one, I found myself looking for a bit more, so I kept digging. As it turns out, the fact that my turtle was yellow is rather important, since golden turtles symbolize wealth, prosperity, and abundance. Well now. This sounded far more promising. Wealth and prosperity are both measurable things that we spend a lifetime seeking to some degree, but very few of us will have them at any kind of extraordinary level. For the majority of us, an excessive amount of material wealth remains out of reach. Abundance of things that are unrelated to finances or possessions, on the other hand, is far more subjective, far less measurable, and far more attainable, making it a totally different matter. People may say that they have an abundance of wealth or prosperity, but the term seems more appropriately applied to things like an abundance of friends, or happiness, or tomatoes in the garden. And while it would be grammatically correct to also say that someone has had an abundance of misfortune or grief in their lives, the connotation seems to be off. Abundance is simply not a word often used to describe negative situations.

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Friday Musings: The Orbit of Ordinary Color

Friday Musings: The Orbit of Ordinary Color

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Just last week I was discussing spring cocktails at Recklesstown with a few customers. They’d asked me about some of the flavors in this month’s drinks that included things like fennel, dill, rhubarb, snap peas, and cherry blossoms. I confessed to them that I’d found this most recent menu to be one of the more challenging ones that I’d developed. Spring flavors, like the ones listed above, are quite delicate, which makes them far more difficult to feature in a drink than something as forthcoming as jalapeño or rosemary. My creative tendency is always to look for pairings, and so I’m accustomed to figuring out or researching what syrup or secondary spirit might complement the main flavor profile of the drink I’m working on. In the case of these cocktails, however, I had to quiet that impulse and allow this menu’s ingredients to fly almost solo, with just a gentle nudge here or there. It occurred to me that spring itself behaves in very much the same way when it begins to send its first harbingers to greet us. A bud on a tree, or a green shoot that pushes through the dirt, a new bird at the feeder, or something different in way the sun feels. I think the quality of these things is perfectly captured by the word nuance, especially in the way in which they could be so easily missed because they’re so fleeting. Before we know it, the tree is in full bloom, the perennial is two feet tall, the bird feeder has a no vacancy sign, and we’re complaining that it’s suddenly way too hot.

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