Volume 2, Issue 1
November 18, 2024
Photographic print by Lisa Congdon, available to buy. We used to covet brand-new Pink Pearl erasers in school, and my friend Carli and I were a little too obsessed with getting those grey, squishy kinds in art class.
Fall Never Fell This Year, And It May Never Fall Again
I have a Pinterest board called “Everything Autumn.” In it is a DIY pumpkin fairy house. A Jack Skellington made out of brie peers up from a charcuterie board. A butternut squash and goat cheese hand pie promises to be a simple recipe. All-purple mums bedeck the front steps of somebody’s cool townhouse, a refreshing non-orange spin on the season.
Somehow, this is the most aspirational Pinterest board I own.
The first whiff of mid-September and I rush to buy a plaid coat. I already bought one last year, though; it will have to do, though it doesn’t look as cool as the ones I see on Instagram.
I put pumpkins on my front porch, but they don’t look as good as my neighbor’s gourd display down the street.
I buy a pumpkin-themed drink from a coffee shop. It just tastes like syrup and cinnamon.
We go to the diner by the graveyard and for a minute, I think it will happen. It is October, after all. And the air has that tempting chill. The crows are cawing and the leaves are curling on their stems where they’re drying fast. But no; something about the angle of the sun and the fact that I have to go to work after this and I didn’t wear my plaid coat. So it isn’t fall then, either.
This year, it was never fall, and I’m starting to think it never will be again. Fall has transcended. It’s not fall anymore. It’s Fall™. The desire to experience Fall™ has become too strong a cultural narrative. Everyone is in on it. My inbox explodes with home decor and boot sales. My entire Instagram feed is persuading me to host a girls’ craft night. And what happens, I’ve discovered, when marketers, creators, people create too strong a narrative around something is that it suffocates the thing itself. It is no longer the moon; it is the finger pointing at the moon.
If only we could quiet our cultural narratives and stumble onto things uniquely and truly (imagine discovering sex, or love).
I have those memories for fall — sensory memories that have nothing to do with achieving a moment. A whole afternoon running around a campsite’s woodsy playground, before spending a cold and dark night with blankets around the fire. Jumping into a pile of leaves over and over again.
Adult fall is more about scheduling and purchasing your way towards that moment. But maybe you don’t have the time or the money to do the thing. Or maybe you do the thing, but the feeling never comes. You are not experiencing the magic of a girls craft night. You are just painting a flower onto a pumpkin, feeling slightly uncomfortable and wondering what TV you’re missing at home.
“You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? Something is off. Your clothes never wear as well the next day. Your hair never falls in quite the same way. Even your coffee tastes … wrong.” — Everything Everywhere All At Once
A quote about impending doom in a fictional multiverse shouldn’t be so relatable.
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It’s November. I have half an hour to kill before my first morning meeting, and we take Chip to the park. I have given up on fall. I’ve moved on to winter. My ceramic tree figurine is already displayed on my entryway table. In my head I’m planning holiday recipes.
It’s cold; the coldest it’s been thus far. Jake sips an iced coffee while we sit at a public picnic table and watch our dog run around, stopping and go-ing from some mysterious motivation.
I am watching the trees. They are almost bare. A single brown leaf starts to swirl down from way, way up. It is the only leaf in the park making its journey.
“Do you think you could catch that leaf?” I ask Jake. It’s coming closer and closer to where we are.
Suddenly he bolts off the bench. He full-on runs toward the leaf; he misses it by inches.
I try for the next one, and I am successful. It feels amazing to run in the cold and to catch the crisp brown leaf in my hand and to laugh with Jake. I give it to Chip, who crunches it excitedly, though he doesn’t know quite know what to do with it.
A gust of wind rattles more leaves loose. We are running and stretching to clasp our hands over leaves, sometimes ending up with a palmful of air, sometimes winning a leaf; grown adults who have stumbled onto the kind of pointless, silly, magnificent style of fun you almost feel ashamed to enjoy.
We leave the park. I am eyeing the trees as we do, ready to sprint at the sign of another leaf, but it doesn’t come.
I don’t think “This is fall.”
I don’t think anything at all. I just feel that wonderful feeling of being out of breath by accident. It could have been anything falling out of the sky, snow or pollen or magnolia petals. I don’t care.
What I care about: a feeling as life-giving as cold air in your chest.
Jack Skellington brie board from @makefoodlovely
This Three Ingredient Aioli Has No Right To Be This Good
Friendliness is a pinprick of light in these dark times. A compliment from a stranger in a coffee shop. A dm conversation with an old friend, where you avoid the life-killing “how are you?” and just skip right to commiserating over politics. Anything that feels like warm, positive outreach — a gesture — a gift — a small good happening with another human that makes your life better.
Maybe me giving you a really good aioli recipe will make your life better.
While this entire sheet pan recipe is worth making — especially if you like brussel sprouts — the optional garlic aioli has become a sleeper hit in my household. Why this three ingredient recipe is so good is one of God’s great mysteries (though the answer is probably: mayonnaise). We’ve enjoyed it as a dipping sauce for various veg and, most recently, sweet potato fries.
My only advice is to follow the recipe exactly, as the magic only works when I do so and not when I convince myself eyeballing it is the same thing.
Fun fact: You can buy a giant two-pack of Frank’s Hot Sauce at Costco (at least, you can at the Conshohocken Costco near me).
Garlic Aioli recipe from Mary’s Whole Life
¼ cup mayo
1 clove minced garlic
2 tsp hot sauce (recommended: Frank's Red Hot)
Mix together.
Three Entry Points Into Calmness
Here are three pieces of media through which I can confirm I’ve found a smidgeon of inner peace:
If you want to move your body, Josh Chen’s Morning Stretch Flow is 20 minutes and ridiculously good-feeling.
If you want to sit against a wall of your home in utter silence, this five-minute guided meditation makes me feel all droopy and quiet.
And finally, this picture of Chip yawning next to Jake has been scientifically proven to boost happiness.
Here's What You Missed
If you’ve found your way to this corner of the internet, you’re missing one of three things:
1) What the first two years of From Sarah newsletters covered
2) What’s changed in my life since we last left off
3) Who I am/why I write these newsletters/what’s even going on here
So here’s what you missed.
What the first two years of From Sarah newsletters covered:
Recipes I still make (like buffalo cauliflower)
Essays on topics I still think about (like our relationship to waste)
Mostly just a girl arguing with herself over whether sunlight is vital to her mental health while living in a few different boxes around Brooklyn.
What’s changed in my life since we last left off:
We moved to Philadelphia
We have a new best friend: Chip the dog
I now get plenty of sunlight
One time, we went down to city hall to the Marriage License Department on the fourth floor and paid $100 for a Quaker self-uniting marriage license. This was filled out and signed by Jake, myself, and my parents as witnesses, and passed off to Jake’s brother Jesse to drop back off at city hall. I have no reason to think Jesse didn’t actually turn it in, but I guess we’ll find out come tax season.
Another time, we invited sixty of our closest friends and family over to my parents’ house. We said vows, we traipsed all over the property for photos until my wedding dress was six inches deep in mud, we drank bee’s knees and had a darn good time.
Who I am/why I write these newsletters/what’s even going on here:
Genuinely — lately I’ve been feeling like if I don’t express myself more I might become a sad sack of potatoes. (Farmers market potatoes — but still).
I got my MFA in Creative Writing a few years ago, and I spend a lot of time working on literary fiction projects both large and small. That’s not the content you see on this blog (well, there’s always the chance for a guest appearance).
The words you see here are ones I’ve labored to make simple and understandable. The content is mundane, which I mean in a positive, re-imagined way.
Sometimes I just want to express myself as a human. And express myself in a way that includes specific parts of me — my femininity, my relationship with my partner, my consumerism, my domestic pursuits — that feel like they need to be cloaked and contorted for literature, or transmogrified into a giant firework. I like expressing myself in this way because I think it includes more people. We all have to navigate food, and hobbies, and our giant and irrational brains. We have all thrown a barely-eaten casserole into the trash and spiraled about our relationship to waste.
Please get to know me here, and as my other work goes out into the world more, get to know me there.
Don’t forget to subscribe.