Saltspray Rose
Salt, summer tastes, and 6 years of Odette Press
Come, let’s write, flow, and bloom brightly into this sun-laden season. If you’re in NYC, join in for my upcoming workshops: Paper Marbling in Greenpoint, and Marbled Paper Roses and Taste & Write: Meditating on the Senses in Prospect Heights. Full calendar below, with some August classes announced, below.
In the summer, salt comes. Salt and tang and brine bloom on the tongue in the morning, then rise, and fade away. Taste is memory shifting. Citrus and sumac. By the East River, in the waning light of gold time, and on the trail that leads to the lull of the ocean, saltspray rose: rosa rugosa, a hearty shrub, bright blush of fuchsia, comes in varying stages of unfolding. Bud, bloom, opening. A gathering of stems rooted into the sand and soil, grounded in place.
Sea salt, saltspray rose. Rose is said to be a bringer of confidence, and petals good for the skin. I add rose into sugar, sumac, water. Tart and floral, tasted and brushed onto the cooling skin of cake.
Travel by bus to the beach. It’s an altar to moment, season, and place. Excitement is a rose blooming; breath expands into the moment slowly. Summer heat is a fierceness. Summer heat is a slowness. Wind blows, breath exhales, sweat on the ground. Bodies primed for heightening, slowing down settling.
On the side of the road, in the sand soil, sumac grows. I ask the man in the store on the corner if he carries it. “Sumac? No,” he says, looking both confused and annoyed, but I find it anyway. Red, soft, abundant, waving there in the gusts of breeze.
In an image somewhere, tucked away in a folder or a box, in high contrasts of black and white, is a four by six inch photograph of my grandmother, Odette. Salt air, seaside, she is rooted along the rocks, sitting by the shoreline of the Mediterranean. She is steady and serene in Beirut sunlight and calm by the sea, her mouth tilted slightly up at each end like a canoe on easing waters, a woman on the edge of laughter, a person whose stare is seed of understanding, knowing seemingly all of life’s secrets, who will open and unfold them, blooming her wisdom, deep heart and caring, given the right timing, temperature, environment.
In another image, she is there at a table: her mother, their friends, the smallest face smiling, this images a two by two inch square. They are vestiges and survivors of genocide, strong rooted tendrils of present lineage. There in the image is a table with plates of food, tables bursting with summer season, heat, and togetherness. Cucumber, cracked wheat, lemon. Olive oil. Olive brine. Doused in oil, heated on the hearth, shared with friends. Salt on salads, passing plates and tidings in Arabic. Dancing in bricked corridors, underneath archways, joy beaming. Photographs as remnants of the lingering taste of laughter. Joyfulness. My grandmother with her mother, her brother, and friends. Mountains of food, shared communally. Memories of mountains and the Mediterranean.
I remember memories with her vividly, and some as they fade away — her stories of people and places, how her love of travel is what brought her out of her apartment, into the world, and what brought me out of mine, into the world, too. Whenever I ship a journal anywhere across the globe, or in the road trip that started Odette Press, I take the memory of her with me. When I am by the ocean, having dipped feet into the wild air of the frenzied city and then into the sand beach, then to taste the salt air of the Atlantic, I remember memories she told me in stories, sitting in the summers, winters, autumns in the gaze and the hands of my grandmother.
As I age, I take the lingering fragments of these moments and write them down. I root into them and watch them grow. I wearing them carefully into the folds of what I remember. I cook them down, simmer them, remember them, stitch them into books, fill the blank pages, bake them into cakes. Lemon skin, garlic skin, rose on my own skin, hints of ocean and chocolate, midnights in Maryland in her living room, heat nights and her fierce insistence in the form of no option to refuse a slice of cake.
There, she told me of her memories — what she remembers, what she wished she could forget. Days of going from mountains, to cities, to beach. Histories of violence. The memories, strengthened in the waters of the mind, corroded by salt of time and condensed down with heart of hearth and grief. Memories of sand bars and salt water. Pomegranate — or was it apple? — tossed into the ocean then consumed: bright bite, salt, brine. Meals shared together on placemats at a teakwood table. How to crack the pomegranate in a bowl of water so the juice doesn’t turn the kitchen into a bleeding scene. Dry toasted pita, fattoush. Sumac, sweetness, tart juice. To be loved is to be held in fierceness, to be cared for, to be transformed over the fires of our hearts, bodies, and minds, across landscape and distance. Memory pass as Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean waves in each year since her passing. I write, breath, root in, savoring this remembering, moments like the morsels they are.
Then, it’s present tense, New York, lunchtime. Sweat pools and steam rises like the climates in a midweek kitchen — where olive oil is heated over on a hot July stove, held gently against damp skin, and folded gently into a cake for celebrating. These hands are vestiges of her, too. I trace memories like sidewalks along the edge of the city at sunset. Rose petals opening, catbird calls from trees in the soil, rooted into steady and sanded ground.
How does memory connect us, and what are you rooting into? Food and nature as mother tongue; food as language beyond time, land, words, and letter forms. The cells of salt from tear, sea, story, hers, ours, everyone, and mine. I open to a blank page, click the pen and the stove on and begin. Days, years rise and pass, watching memories swelling, growing, and thinning, the rising crest and fall of wave, strengthen them, rooted like rose in the soil in the process of writing them down. These memories are ingredients of life. Our stories are soil, sun, ocean. Our hearts are the offering.
Summer is salt, ocean brine, olive oil. Crunch of chip and texture of sand at the edge of the Atlantic. Summer tastes like brightness, acid, infinite variations of olives. Ocean waves crashing. Sumac and lemon. Strawberry, loss, gain, and memory. Citrus drinks and eagerness. Salt on top.
This week, write what you remember. Write what you imagine, sense, wonder, or don’t know. What does summer taste like? What do you want to remember, and what do you want to forget? Write what your skin says, what your memories of salt taste like, how summer lands, your histories of memories, what you learn from the landscape, how the waves of life revive you, what grounds you in your heart and tongue. What does the present tense ask for? What does the sea say?
Tomorrow, come, and let’s bloom into practice.
classes and upcoming experiences
come explore your creative practice in nyc and beyond
celebrating: six years of odette press this weekend
Recipes here and here. Last year’s cake, a code for you to use on journals and cards, an essay on my journey to Odette Press and an invitation to Taste & Write next week.
nourished by, nourishing:
Morning runs and remembering endorphins, reading about roses, and the benefits of handwriting on memory. Before bed, write what you want to remember, then exhale what you want to forget. For stress relief, try expressive writing, the therapeutic journaling protocol from Dr. James Pennebaker. I have a few spots for one on one writing, meditation, and creative conversation in the schedule for summer season. Reach out to learn more, and let’s practice.
Loved this beautiful piece! Peace, Annie