Delicate Grounds

Color, Shapes, Kitchen, and Beyond the city

Sep 16, 2025

Autumn’s workshops are here, with more to come soon — join in for an in person creative session in Chicago and San Francisco in the months to come. To start, strengthen, or sustain a creative writing or meditation practice, schedule a virtual 1:1 session. Watch these essays in podcast form here, share with a friend, or pair your writing with a journal from Odette Press.

It is Saturday morning when I cut the delicata squash in half, then half again, pushing the seeds out through each center, gathering the discarded pods into a pile in a small bowl. Cut in half, then cut again, I move the knife around the edges to remove the hardened skin, forming squash into waning crescent half moons. The heating stove waits.

A day later, walking along the limestone path outside of the city, I will look up to see that same half-circle splayed out in the sky with a view of the half moon in the clear sky. I note the reddening landscape, walking, watching as crimson leaves striate swathes of bright red through the still-green leaves, their cells oxygenating and changing, vines winding around deadened branches and telephone poles. I move my feet against the path in a steady rhythm, much like the knife as it cuts against the wooden board the day prior. Grass, still full and green, glistens in the dew-laden morning; goldenrod breathes in wind against the highway. Later, back in the kitchen, tulsi, brewed for tea, shimmers, sifting sunlight through each of the floating leaves, promising its steady grounding, the glass full of that that same yellow-green gold of September’s shifting season.

That morning, I took the pile of golden yellow squash and placed them carefully into the bottom of the cast iron pan. Half a squash is still a squash, and half a view of the moon is still the whole moon, too, and we are always already whole, and therefore nothing is lacking. Inside the darkened void of the pan I heat a generous well of olive oil, bubbling low and slow around a large, pressed clove of garlic. The atmosphere is olive and allium, their fragrances wrapping around each other, rising into the air as each meet.

I go for low and slow that weekend, arriving to September without urgency, cooking down the delicata in the pan. This letting go of quickness, of any leftover energetic excess, becomes a transformation like the morphing colors I’d see painted out across the forested path I’d drive toward, then soon walk through.

Dashing spices — cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom — over the top of the squash, I place a lid over to cover. The heat will rise, the squash will warm, as the cast iron starts to condensate. The squash will soften, shift, and become sweeter inside the kitchen, while outside, twenty minutes from the house, I will follow the soft unfolding of the limestone path and watch as leaves continue to shift their shapes and form. I will marvel at their transformation, much like standing quiet and awe-struck noting how time takes form. For now, the stove is on low. The flame is a steady rhythm, and I watch the squash cook down, listening in for any too-soon quickness, an excess flame, leaving the golden crescent shapes on heat until they release their firmness. The squash hold their shape until they soften and only then do I take them off the flame, once they start to insinuate a gentle lean towards the form of jam. I dot a constellation of salt along the top and add the slightest dust of red pepper flakes to serve. In the dish, the red flakes look like the crimson leaves I’ll see the following morning — flushes of red and yellow against the cooling morning canopy.