22. Polaroids from Los Angeles, 2004.
In the summer of 2004—before I was a mother, before I was a business owner or a former business owner, before I knew words like “branding” or “pitching” or “building a platform”—I was newly 28 years old, and Duncan and I had moved to Asheville three years earlier from Boston, gotten married, and bought a ramshackle house on Short Street. I baked bread at the West End Bakery at 3am and waited tables at Early Girl Eatery to support what I considered to be the real work of my life: proofreading the local anarchist newspaper and building community gardens, protesting the war and, you know, just generally trying at every opportunity to use my body as a wrench in the works of the global capitalist patriarchy.
That summer, Duncan and I took a trip to Los Angeles to visit our friend Jared and his boyfriend John. We slept on the futon in their living room in West LA, and woke up every morning to wave them goodbye as they set off on their bicycles, in their smart business casual, to their urban-planner/designer-y jobs. After they were gone, it was back to the futon: coffee, sex, and binge-watching DVD box sets of Absolutely Fabulous. We probably wrote out some postcards. Mid-day, we packed our backpacks with books to read, and filled our water bottles with gin, tonic, and limes, and rode our hosts’ extra bicycles to the Santa Monica Pier. We swam in the cold water, ate fried fish and onion rings from red plaid paper trays and rode the ferris wheel. I felt the pleasant sense of loneliness I only get at the beach—the feeling of being around so many people but so far away, the sounds of them muffled and muted by the surf and the wind and the sky and the gin, the feeling of being all alone, all together, the feeling you get from a good Carson McCullers or Raymond Carver or Dostoevsky story.
Some days, we walked around Downtown or the Fashion District, past blocks and blocks of samples stalls spilling out into the street; one Friday night our friends took us to a party at the LACMA and a woman stopped me in the bathroom and asked excitedly about the $2 thrift store dress I was wearing: “is THAT a VERA?” It felt like living, like being alive, like being a part of something larger than myself, like being in the center of things.
When the sun started to go down, we would get back on our bikes and ride to the farmers market on the way home and pick up fresh produce for dinner, and cook beautiful meals for our friends and their friends.
We did this every day for so long that we lost track of what day it was and missed our flight home. We were there for so long that our friends and their friends had a going away party for us, piles of sushi and sad goodbyes and promises to keep in touch.
Duncan wanted to learn to line dance in LA, which I thought was patently ridiculous. What does LA have to do with country line dancing? Of course, our friends took us to the Farmers Market, where a huge crowd of regulars happened to be attending their favorite weekly country-western line dance, in full regalia. What do I know? We joined in, welcomed lavishly.
You never know that you’re living through the end of an era while it’s happening, but sometimes, you get a glimpse. I have a small box of a few dozen Polaroids I took from the late 90’s to the early 2000’s, and these were the last of them.
I didn’t know, when I took a picture of a mural of Emiliano Zapata on horseback next to a Dorito’s truck in LA in the summer of 2004, that it was the last polaroid I would ever take before they stopped making the film. We had no idea that we would have a baby the next year; that whatever “our twenties” had been was now emphatically over, the portal sealed shut behind us, a new, much more precarious era being born. We didn’t know—couldn’t know—how much heartache we would cause each other, how the hot water heater would explode the day after I came home from the hospital, anemic, how we would get drunk and dig our heels in and defend ourselves from each other like animals in a cage, grasping and striving: the money, the baby, the money, the baby. How we would break up, how our love would wither and die, and we would become two wholly different people.
Nor did we know about the healing, how those two new people would meet and fall in love. How we would remember the trip to LA as our favorite vacation ever, up until we went to Paris in 2017, to sleep on a different friend’s futon, go to a different art museum and a different sushi restaurant, ride different bicycles and different ferris wheels, this time with our boy, eleven years old and wide-eyed. How we would learn to turn towards one another, to protect one another, to befriend one another, to befriend ourselves, making peace with the people we were in the Polaroids, and the people those people would become.
Home
Venus in Retrograde Rose Petal Marmalade!
Roses are sacred to Venus, the ancient Goddess of love, beauty, sexuality, and fertility. Back in 2020, when Venus was retrograding through Gemini, I shared this recipe on my website, along with these words from Chani Nicholas:
“Retrograding every 18-months, the myths associated with Venus’s backward motion are of the goddess’s great descent. Venus was known as Inanna by the Sumerians. Her famous underworld journey is a tale of reckoning, awakening, and integrating the powerful material of the unconscious into consciousness.”
The mythology and astrology surrounding Venus is beautiful, but the astronomy is equally amazing, as this website explains:
Venus stations retrograde five times over an eight-year period. The points where it meets the Sun while retrograde in the sky forms a pentagram or “rose of Venus.” This inferior conjunction occurs exactly every 584 days demonstrating the beauty and timeliness of the Universe. Venus will meet the Sun again in Superior conjunction once direct. This cycle of alignment determines if Venus is a morning star or an evening star. During the time from an Inferior to Superior Conjunction, Venus is a morning star being seen in the hours before sunrise. From the Superior to the next Inferior conjunction during its next retrograde, Venus is an evening star being seen hours after sunset.
Venus also retrogrades through only five signs; Capricorn, Aries, Gemini, Leo, late Libra/Scorpio. The last time Venus stationed retrograde in Leo was eight years ago, in 2015. Take some time before we enter this retrograde to think back to where you were and how you felt during that summer. Ask yourself if you need closure to any emotions of that period and how your heart has grown since then. Honor the person you were back then and the person you have become since. While you don’t want to spend too much time in the past, it’s important to make a note of where your heart was eight years ago and the journey it has endured since.
Here’s the recipe:
Combine:
2-3 cups loosely packed fragrant rose petals, rinsed
juice of one lemon
1 cup sugar
Massage the sugar and lemon juice into the rose petals until you form a thick paste.
Bring to the boil:
1 cup of sugar
1 1/2 cups of water
Add the rose paste to the sugar water and simmer gently for 30 minutes. Pour into jars and keep refrigerated. This sweet, delicate, syrupy jam is beautiful swirled into plain yogurt, added to tea, or spread onto toast with cream cheese.
The World
I’m on Threads! What could go wrong? Honestly I’m enjoying it so far; it has early-internet vibes and all the former twitter people are so happy to have a new spot, which is v. cute.
Thank you to
, author of , for including me on her excellent roundup of substack publications focusing on recovery: Sober Stack. It’s a great list and a helpful resource, and I’m grateful to be included.A Card: Three of Swords
One thing I love about working with Tarot: there is no sugarcoating the pain, no toxic positivity here—instead there is the understanding that the only way out is through; that feelings require acknowledgement, reckoning. And so it is with the Three of Swords, aka the Lord of Sorrow. This card is about heartbreak, loss, grief, separation. IYKYK, amirite? But just as we recognize it, we recognize that no feeling is permanent, and that this too shall pass. Every storm runs out of rain. If you are in pain, my wish for you is that you are witnessed in your pain with love and care, and supported in your grief and healing. And don’t forget that the card that comes next, the Four of Swords, is the Lord of Rest from Strife. So be it, so it is.
Home + The World features personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. Currently, all content is free; the paid subscriber option is a tip jar. Y’all have been so incredibly generous, and it’s truly amazing, humbling and astounding. Thank you. If you feel so moved, please share this newsletter and help me grow my readership! I thank you so deeply for being here and I thank you for being you.
⚔️❤️ Jodi
Another beautiful story of self love, life love and other love. Gritty, honest and effervescent, flashes and flashbacks of times we pass through only to bathe in nostalgia.
Every one of these has struck a chord for me ❤️❤️❤️ I could drink it up.
But also, LOL at Duncan in front of an internet cafe. You could never lie about when these were taken. What a time! What an era!