Delicata

The rain on the coast is just different. It makes itself known in the nearby trees before it is felt on the skin. The salt of the air renders the sky’s spit indistinguishable from your sweat. It feels like the kiss of the ocean.

I woke up thinking about mice and scallops. The former need to be managed tonight with the live traps procured from hardware store yesterday on the way to dropping Ellen at the airport bus. I suspect they just walked in the front entrance of the house, as the screen door has long since stopped closing. Last night, when I got up to use the bathroom, there was the unmistakable sound of someone small nesting in the vanity. So we'll trap them out – I'll escort them to someone else's neighborhood – and keep the front door shut.

Scallops are a happier thought. This morning at six, before she left for her life-guarding gig, the teen I’m here to keep an eye on let me know she’d be home for dinner, and I asked her if she would like me to cook. After the striped bass I made for her and her mother Sunday, she answered an enthusiastic yes. Does she like scallops, I asked? And she replied an even more enthusiastic yes. (Ellen assured me the only thing the girl doesn’t like is marinara sauce, but you never know.)

I have two delicata squash from the market and it seems obvious to use those – they’ll marry the scallops nicely – though I don’t want to fuss with the oven in this camp-style house. The solution will be to clean and slice the delicatas both ways, once long ways and six or eight times across, and pan sear them with chopped shallots, sweetening the pan on which I’ll also sear the scallops. Then some broth to keep it all moist as it cooks, with torn basil added. I’ll serve it with a dark-green salad laced with chopped parsley and mint, with those bright little tomatoes from the market, plus a cucumber, because whatever comes from the sea seems to want a cucumber.

The best days are the days that start with the thought of what to eat when the day will be ending. I would rather be able to peruse menus, as I did in Florence and Paris a thousand years ago, and make that the big decision of the morning. But this is not a tragedy, having to cook it myself. (If it comes out not quite perfect in texture and taste, there is much less sense of disappointment, perhaps because the bill was paid hours earlier at the market.)

My long foray this morning down to the bay and along the shore, back up through the sandy woods, was taken up chiefly by this dinner plan – a much better way to begin the brain than to be thinking too hard of my mother developing a respiratory virus and what’s happening in the larger world. Walking through the path that winds through the flattened reeds, I took note of the industriousness of the sand crabs, who had together in digging their holes turned up a metric ton of peaty grains. As I came upon them, they scattered rapidly before me into their dens, as if they knew me to be the neighbor who talks too much and stays too long.

And then I found myself on Long Island again, wondering why I didn’t cook more fish back then. I suppose it was because my grandfather was a butcher and meat was free. My mother did make (or have me make) cod fillets on Fridays. But she never ventured beyond a white fish.

It is funny, that life in East Northport, the life of the Long Island masses, was so disconnected from the sea that was the reason the long spit was settled by everyone who found it. No one I knew ate mussels or oysters or tuna that didn’t come out of a can.

It was only when I quit college and became a mortgage broker that I was introduced to all that at the fancy restaurants my boss-boyfriend favored. Even then I didn’t eat raw shellfish, having taken an invertebrate zoology class at Georgetown, having realized oysters and mussels are basically the lint trap of a dryer, the HEPA filter of a Kirby. But I did eat exquisite pieces of fish with sauces paired so perfectly you would think the fish had lived in them.

I had never really thought about it until today, but it is true: Most people on Long Island where I grew up just didn’t eat much fish. Of course, they also didn’t go swimming in the ocean. And they didn’t take the train into the city. Their lives were so intentionally bland. I wonder sometimes if it was as a response to the war, and how it was my mother stood suburban Long Island after Paris and Berlin. (Of course, she didn’t.) As I stood for a moment this morning and looked at the boats in the mist of the bay, I remembered how dull was every man I dated there. They didn’t read books. They didn’t think about where things came from, or where they went.

(A funny memory of going with my boyfriend Tom to see “Dick Tracy,” and my complaining endlessly afterwards that it was the typical vision of women – Madonnas and whores, and never the twain shall meet – and him telling me it was just a comedy, and would I stop? I didn’t stop; I left him for graduate school.)

A friend asked me yesterday how you get back to liking your husband after you have children, and I said you have to try and remember what you came for. I am lucky Aron reminds me what I came for. When I washed up on our driveway after the hellish trip home from New York last Thursday, although he was on a phone meeting, he had sauteed me up two chicken thighs with onions, broccoli, and tomatoes, squeezing a lemon over all of it. And when he got off the meeting, he told me of interesting things. Though I like to be alone sometimes, I am glad I am not alone all the time.

By the time I returned from all these thoughts today, my clothes were wet through, and so I needed a shower. The outdoor option was the obvious choice. And oh, an eight a.m. shower in the rain on the coast. Making love with the ocean.