Music is an integral part to baking and cleaning. Put the right mix on, and you can forgot about the fact you don't have health insurance yet, or the possibility that the next rent check might overdraw your account. Listening to a hopeful, yearning song like "Skylark" makes you almost forget the nauseating pain of your recent break up.
Music takes you to another realm, where you can safely pretend that your life is always this: baking pies, washing up after yourself, taking a break to play with the cats. Rolling the dough. The hot, soapy water. The snow melting down the window. The fragments of conversations, poetry, and dreams that jumble through your mind as you wait for the timer to ring. And then you'll have a friend or two over and talk about whatever, while the music sets the mood. Playing Hildegard Knef, you can pretend your hair is always washed, your bathroom clean, and your dishes matching. You can pretend that you are happy, content with life, and proud of what you've accomplished. But in the midst of this make-believe, you realize this isn't all fake; this is who you are and this is what you wanted. This is your life. These moments. You are connected.
Is this what Virginia Woolf meant when she talked about the party mindset in Mrs. Dalloway? Things aren't real in some ways, much more real in others. Reality and unreality merging over a slice of pie, a cup of tea. Our pretend selves/our actual selves.
All that being said (nice and good and sweet as it is), my actual self drank himself to sleep last night and woke up at noon, despite his cat's best efforts to start the day at nine. I then promptly went down the Lana Del Rey rabbit hole, which led me to discover you can make a pie in the time it takes to listen to one of her albums! I had woken up with two and a half hours to make a pie, get ready, take care of the cats, and get out the door in time for afternoon tea at the Langham, which meant that today's baking was matter-of-fact, unpoetic. I was making a pie because I said I would do one a week.
Looking through my Good Housekeeping cookbook this week, I stopped on blackberry pie. It sounded perfect. The cherry pie was delicious and gone the day after it was made (split between three people), and we were all craving it. I decided to stick with fruit pie, and work on the crust. I'm not sure what happened between choosing the pie and grocery shopping, because I ended up with more than twice the amount of blueberries than blackberries I should have bought. It took me until today on my way downtown to realize my mistake.
I rushed out of the house and to the red line, conscious that I couldn't remember where we were meeting, but fairly confident I'd just figure it out when I got there. I was almost off the train before I looked at the time and realized I was an hour ahead of schedule. It took me another hour to realize there hadn't been a time change, I was just confused.
But the sky! My goodness, the buildings were cloaked in fog, nearly invisible. And then the release of the rain.
When I got home I took a picture of the pie. Every time I set it down bits of charcoal-like crust fell off. I need to remember to knock off fifteen to twenty degrees next time, and cover the pie with foil partway through baking.
It's a mess, but hopefully a delicious, unexpected mess.
so beautiful.
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