Cards, Lime, Salt.

On New Year’s Eve I take a tequila shot for my grandma. She died on January 1, 2021. Avid cookie jar collector, Hallmark movie watcher, sugar-free snow cone addict. She loved sunflowers and she was also my neighbor. I watched as Amazon packages of sugar-free snow cone syrup were delivered in arm fulls to her home for a snow cone machine she wasn’t strong enough to use most of the time. It made all of us laugh, and also drove us slightly mad.

New Year’s is my favorite holiday, and I can’t ever really put my finger on why. It’s like everything that has ever happened on a New Year’s Eve or day is folded together in one long timeline that lasts only seconds. The days after feel like the slow dwindling away of something magic— like anything you did during those days has some sort of navigation power over your life for the next year or years. 

When I was processing the grief of my grandma, trying to put language to something that wasn’t ready for it yet during this window of magic time in 2021, a tall professor who plays guitar like a mad man kindly said to me, “You find a place to put it once you get the language, but she’ll always be over there making snow cones.” 

It made me laugh while I was doing some sort of held back cry that sounded a lot like a fire alarm needing new batteries, chirping out every few minutes or so. My grandma willed herself to make it to 2021, and she did, and now she’s there making snow cones on this date that folds together all the New Years Eve and day memories perpetually. I can see her whole weight, all 100 pounds of her, leaning onto the handle trying to crush that damn ice. 

The tequila is because I like it, and because it’s something that would’ve gotten a fun rise out of her too— which I also like.

The anatomy of the New Year's holiday has come to feel like an assortment of objects: a deck of cards, a sharp bite into a lime, and a gracious amount of salt.

There’s the deck, with each card holding onto a New Year’s fragment. 

On one card is the time we drove up and down the hills to Denver, and ate the burrata at the recommended restaurant in town. That night you wore the cheetah bucket hat, and we danced in a living room of good company, and watched another team of sisters do the full Napoleon Dynamite dance. 

There’s the card that shows us in my favorite living room, our parent’s home, with grapes in our hands and spilling out our mouths as we tried unsuccessfully to eat 10 of them on the 10 second countdown. Sticky hands and grins and uncontrollable laughter. 

On another card is the time we watched Little Women, and the car broke down before 2020, but we made it home and thank god for Sonic mozzarella sticks.

The next card is building snowmen the morning she died, and the whole neighborhood followed suit in her honor. A whole cul-de-sac of snow people. We accidentally wore matching cardinal pajamas, and she became a cardinal too, like all the other beloved, wonderful, cardinal grandmas of the world.

Then there’s the other card where you set “more love, more life” as an intention on a stool at our favorite bar. Another New Years card shows the eve that you want to forget, but you can’t because that would be going against the mystical reality of New Years— it all folds together, the good and the bad, and that’s what makes it good. 

On another card, there’s the pool games, the champagne cheers with gyros at way too late o’clock, and the bullshit card game with the four of us that lasted until we were all too tired to laugh or talk anymore. The wave goodbye at sunrise, that was truly a thank you for the kindness and for changing my mind. A night that makes you say, “What was that? How funny.” I’d have that night again. But even if I don’t, I get to keep it in my deck. 

Shuffle up these cards, and they all feel like a captured moment in time on one day where it seems like there is pressure to do something or else it didn’t count. But that felt “doingness” of New Years is the bitter lime. 

There’s sometimes that moment we’ve been taught to feel on New Year’s— the panic of plans, of “Did we get a reservation for that spot? Did we need it?” It’s the trick part of New Year’s that if you entertain it, it can spoil the night, because there’s not enough room for magic with too many plans, or too many worries about not having enough plans. 

The lime is also the bitter part of leaving things behind. On a day that is seen as a holiday of change and hope, I think a lot of us are encoded, and owed, to feel a few minutes of what’s leaving us before a new start. For me this feeling happens right as I start moving into the new year while still in the old one, a foot on each side of the timeline at around 9:00pm in the old year. These days are so glued together, that the two feel like one. 

Then, there’s the salt. The lack of control magic. The space between plans, letting go of the old year, and letting go of expectations for the new one. Setting goals aside with the assurance and confidence that you are in alignment with something, and it is okay for you not to know the next step this very second. 

It’s the feeling that you’ve set everything in motion, and it’s time to see what happens in the empty spaces. It’s the driving in the dark with headlights feeling. It’s the “whatever happens, happens” expression that takes miles and miles to get to and genuinely feel. To me, this is the salt, because it’s tiny, flavorful, and gets everywhere when your cooking style is messy like mine. Those days after New Year’s feel like a good tasting meal that you don’t want to drink or eat anything after for a bit. Regardless if the time was good, or the time was bad, it’s was noted in the glued together hours of New Year’s Eve and day, printed on a card, shuffled, and sealed up in a box. The salt helps the feelings linger. 

I guess I like New Years because I don’t feel time in an everyday way, and that feels like something to celebrate and wear until it wears out. I hope you found a memory to collect and carry into this new year and the years to come. Cheers! 

The Carry-On Home

There is a small empty mason jar labeled “sage, rosemary, and garlic salt” in my spice cabinet. The spices are from a farm in Mexico.

Logically, I know that once a jar is finished, it’s time to get rid of it. But with this one, I don’t. I wouldn’t feel good tossing it away because this small jar still smells like the lush farm from four years ago when I unscrew the cap. That’s real magic. 

I remember the calm, hazy land surrounding the farm to table restaurant where I bought the jar with the handwritten label. This was the last stop and purchase before the journey home. I also remember my cooler cousin confirming that we would get to the airport on time despite wanting to live at this farm forever. Actually, there’s a lot of small details I can recall just by smelling this empty 4oz jar. 

I remember my cousin’s promise that we would make it to the airport in time was followed up by a trusting hand squeeze. I remember the bathroom at this farm that, I kid you not, looked like the chest pocket of Eden, overgrown with tropical plants spilling from the walls and surrounding large golden mirrors. I’d never met a bathroom like that and still haven’t. So ridiculously beautiful.

“Where were the walls in there?” I might have asked my cousin because the walls were so covered with plant leaves that I couldn’t tell if they were buried in green vines, or if there were no walls at all to begin with.

“Just one of those stupid views.” She might have said back with a wink. This is a common back and forth phrase we say to each other when presented with a view so beautiful, we can’t quite believe we are there. This view just happened to be a farm’s bathroom in Mexico.

The memory flashes that are attached to this empty jar of farm spices are: 

A pizza with an open-eyed egg on the top for me to dip the crust in. 

A bouquet of pickled and green spicy vegetables overflowing like a real vase of a Bloody Mary.

A fear of missing a flight because this is just too damn good.

Rock climbing and dodging cacti with kids.

Our braided hair that picked up salt from the Pacific Ocean.

I remember the store owner, and declared mi novío para la dia, who tells me that the souvenir hearts with wings of the city have no real meaning except to sell. I buy some thinking that it's so funny to have “no meaning” in a glass blown winged-heart ornament that to tourists represents the area. I can’t wait to gift something with no meaning, I tell him. The guy got me, but sometimes it’s nice to let yourself get got.

What I am getting at, is that there really isn’t a measurable amount of “enough-ness” to justify what makes a good memory. There’s no hierarchy when it comes to the memory of a good smile line, a perfectly hot egg sandwich, or a long list of a day with inside jokes, new foods, and a fresh 100 photos on the phone. Or, a warm day inside with games, mismatched socks, and simply hot food. They’re all lovely, and to me, they all have the same amount of weight when it comes to a good memory. A good memory is immeasurable— whether the jar is still filled with magic spices, or it’s empty. Memories are preserved in pictures, smile lines, the eggs we buy now, the games in the cabinet, and the socks that we purposefully wear mismatched to remember the good day inside. It’s the things we choose to carry.

There’s nothing new to the simple truth that smells can take us back to a memory as well. Everybody talks about the smell of coffee, or the smell of a family recipe baking in the oven that gets louder and louder in the room. Smells have strong associations, and so do little winged heart ornaments that have “no meaning.”

I name all the homes that I live in. The home I currently live in is named the “carry-on home” because when I moved into it, I figured I wouldn’t be here long. But I have been here long enough now, and words change associations over time. Being nicknamed the “carry-on home” when I first moved in, meant that I would be able to pick this place up and fit it in a suitcase for the next place I moved to. Instead of being the home that I could pack up in a carry-on suitcase, it became a home that carries all my carry-on souvenirs. It is now a home overfilling with plants, tokens, little ideas, and pieces of travel that I’ve picked up and reimagined in my home. It’s still the “carry-on home,” but with a different meaning for now.

I don’t have a bad memory, or a great memory, but I like to remember everything. It isn’t often we hear somebody say “I really want to be bad at remembering things,” although I wouldn’t mind leaving behind a few sticky bad ones if it didn’t cost me anything. I think if our minds are memory maps then it makes sense for us to naturally want to name things and tell stories. If a map was unfolded across our minds we might find vibrant cities in our lives that we found good times in. We might be able to trail our finger down a blue lined river littered with pool tubes and cold drinks that represented the easy times where everything was in flow. There might be countries that represent the places or goals we haven’t yet figured out a way to— Morocco, building a garden of rosemary and irises, learning how to drive a boat— but we will find our way there, one day.

We want to remember. When we name a place, we can find a way toward it. When we hold onto something, we can add it to our homes and our memories. Storifying and collecting might be the closest thing we have to picking and choosing what we remember in our own capacities. Storifying and collecting informs us of who we are and where we want to go. There’s a sacredness to the limited mental space we have for memories, and what a lovely and mostly unrealistic idea it would be for us to be able to pick and choose them.

My cooler cousin Steph is one of the people who has definitely infiltrated my home with words and habits I want to collect and live in that I remember when I smell my little jar of spices: travel and also get cozy at home. My “carry-on home” is dually, the home I can sink into with pieces from everywhere, and the one I can pack up quickly. 

When making a pair of earrings, I transfer meaning into something I can wear, and reiterate the importance of a memory I want to keep. I hold onto the empty jar of spices because I am afraid that if I get rid of it, I’ll forget it all. So I make these earrings, Steph’s Golden Studs, to remember her laugh and arm punch, our adventures, and her coolness. When I wear the earrings, I remember the farm in Mexico, the salty Pacific, and the confusingly beautiful bathroom that made me feel too fancy. I’m given a lesson in remaking the meaning of a home as a nest, while also being able to leave it for a while here and there. 

There’s a specialness and movement to things.

People Are Solid Gold

I have some very glittery friends and family. 

Each of them is their own snow globe. I can’t pick out just one scene that stands still inside of them, or, an even harder choice, just one song that is played when the tiny golden knob on the bottom is twisted. 

The globes all look undeniably cozy, sitting there in a cubby, holding memorable scenes inside their small set designs. Each of them looks ready for a good shake up, just to see where the glitter falls.

All of the “Remember the time so-and-so did this, and so-and-so did that!’s” caught in a glass globed body of nostalgic, distilled water:

The lost bus we hot-wired down by the dirt red lake. The room we thought we locked ourselves out of. The trophies of making shit funny. Those meals and drinks we can’t help but order when we go to our favorite spots. 

The worn decks of cards. The books borrowed. The donut briberies. The really fun bad ideas. 

The scars shaped like countries on our bodies. The forest scrapes. The karaoke and cannonballs. The manifesting of  fat tips. The hopped over waves that could’ve crushed us. The times we were over that place, so we went to Target, and then to bed early. 

The well-crafted parody songs that came out naturally on a nice, long car ride.

The great grasshopper ambush of 2005 that sold us out when we were sneaking on that car lot. The thank-god-there-were-no-cameras-like-this-back-then moments. The camping in the rain looking like a real Van Gogh painting in the pink rocks of South Dakota. 

The wedding where I only knew you. 

The blue jean baby curtain call with Elton in a robe on the keys. The whiskey shots with virtual chess matches. The arm punch after finding the lost ring in the Prague cemetery.

The forfeiting of the last slice of pie— 

“You take it.”

“No you.

“No you.”

“Fine, I’ll take it. But I’m not happy about it.” A staple Midwestern dilemma.

The dance classes we were humbled by, and all the times we sang Queen.

Truly, my sentimental muscles are all legs that could run laps around the next guy.

But these scenes are all tiny decorations on tiny tables and tiny shelves in the sparkling snow globes, and all the nicknames we’ve had are plastered to the walls like framed artwork.

Maybe these snow globes of people, and the events we shared with them, represent both the comfort of the daily we can hold on to, and also the way the glitter of the novelty can mix us all up, and fall on just the right objects that need to be touched at the time when we need that memory of resilience, or a good crying laugh, the most. 

Glitter landing on the edge of a tiny picture frame holding a photo of the 7-hour move catalyst featuring a car filled to the brim with everything: snacks, old flour we were going to do some baking with, candles almost burnt down to the end, and every shred of paper, washed bone, found feather, journal, notebook, text book, and a fiddle leaf fig tree just getting its first leaves. All of it camped out in the middle of Kansas on a short journey South with gas station pizza, and not knowing what will come in the next months or years.

What felt like a life knocked out by flames, and the days ashed, was really just glitter getting tossed up like a devilish reminder that we truly have zero control in this world, yet, we made it through this and that even when our eyes couldn’t see through the snow. It’s a very pretty tiny picture in a snow globe now. A reminder of things we can do.

The knobs on the bottoms of the globes when twisted play songs we sang in the car, songs we danced to, and laughs that those amazing humans fully own, and that mine irresistibly begins to morph into when I am around them— especially that one friend that is absolutely contagiously affecting the walls of my home with crackling laughter like static, and I hope those walls hold onto it and get stained up good and forever. 

Or, the other good human who makes heads turn with that laugh that is so different it announces itself to everyone in a room. A laugh that is a true signal of someone who has more good life in their body than they can hold onto by themselves, and they don’t care who knows it, or grabs a handful. That laugh that is sharing, foaming off the top of their frosty, cold beer glass. 

I name my jewelry after people. The closest ones, the ones I wish I knew, and those people that blew into my life one day with too many good things to say, or things that made me laugh too hard to forget.

”You’re not your first thought. What you are is your second, and what you do with that first thought.”

“People are solid gold.”

”I always pack three extra pairs of underwear in case I shit myself three times on a trip.”

The people in my life are all big statements that I want to carry around with me, and that’s exactly how the jewelry pieces get their names. A pair of earrings named after a friend who misses the flowers and plants around her home in Thailand, is a reminder that both the real and imagined pieces of Thailand are mesmerizing, and the lemongrass broth she made with the octopus popping on the skillet is just as equally mesmerizing. The necklace named after the friend who still doesn’t have their ears pierced, who wears the purple wedding dress, and that one time made me laugh into stomach cramps as she heckled a cliff jumper into safely taking the plunge to meet his friends in the water from across a small canyon, gathering a crowd of laughing hikers that watched to see if he would do it.

He didn’t.

These fragments of stories probably don’t mean much to you, because you’ve got your own with your own people. But I do hope that looking at the funky colors on a pair of earrings like “The Poppy Seeds” reminds you of someone playful, or “The Maleena Boots” reminds you of the kid that might travel the whole world when she can. The jewelry is meant to be personified, and if nothing else, a statement piece that maybe one day you will pick up and remember all the good times you had in them.

The Dot, Dot, Dot

I had a friend tell me once that questions that start with “what” are really safety masks for questions that begin with “why.”

‘What are you doing?’ oftentimes is a question that is really asking “Why are you doing that?” or, “Why do you do it this way?” I think about this thought from a friend sometimes, but not often enough. Sometimes asking myself “What am I doing?” Is really an easier, if not more panic-ridden question then “Why are you doing this?” Sometimes it’s safer to remain in the static energy of panic, than it is to wonder about all the “why’s” with a fat mug of steaming coffee and awkward silences with myself. I wonder if other people can relate to this feeling too. The “what” questions seem quicker to answer, like ripping off band aids for the busy-bodied people. Just cauterize the wound already, am I right?

The “why” questions feel like drawing blood, putting a slide of it under a microscope, and really figuring out why something is in you. This comes at the cost of there being no end, a scary ellipsis of inconclusive results, and a rapidly growing spider web of whys.

What am I doing? That’s easy. I’m making little, mostly and hopefully pretty, ceramic things with my hands.

Why am I doing it? I like to tell stories. I like to preserve and collect stories.

I had a teacher who told me to keep a list of things I wanted to do in my life in my wallet. When I finished something, she told me to make a new list, filter it and see what I wanted to keep, and take out what wasn’t for me anymore. 

“Then put it back in your wallet, and look at it every once in a while,” she said, swinging her feet off her desk. I loved her because even when she was teaching, she felt so wrapped up in her own story. What a world hers must be to live in, I often thought. Who cares about this class? How did I take a little bit of her with me?

Ten years ago, I wrote a list that looked like it was afraid of asking for what it wanted. The list basically shook itself without my help, it read so scared. It looked like I had already decided that I would take the crumbs to my own goals. What is kind of funny now, is seeing how each crumb on that list was actually an ambiguous map on my toast plate.

Pottery, coffee shops, maybe a book, travel led me to friends, stories, a craft that hotwires both sides of my brain together, and happy triggers— the lesser talked about of the triggers.

I make tiny, pretty, warm things because I want to keep the stories on me, in the rooms I live in, the places I go to be a part of…and I want to keep adding to their ceramic stories. I desire each piece to feel like a long ellipsis— a dot, dot, dot— that people can collect stories with.

But who can say? Sometimes, when you get to the bottom of a “why,” you realize at the deepest depth of the well, you just like doing something. There might not be anything stronger than that. Maybe you just like wearing something. Who can say.