Woman Does Not Live By Bread Alone

And a Shameless Plug for a Must-have Cookbook for Your Kitchen Shelf

Me in my happy place with people that make me happy.

My friends!

It’s been a minute since I last wrote on here, but it’s not because you’ve been out of sight, out of mind.

Nope. Not even close.

If you read my last post you know that my husband, Shawn, and I decided to sink our life savings into the silliest and most luxurious dream imaginable: owning a bookshop. Turns out, dreams require a lot of tending when you decide to plant them in the soil of real life. And that’s what we’ve been doing over the past month and a half. Tending the stem, leaf, and flower of a dream come true.

But I think about you all a lot. Because there are two things I figured out about all of us that hang out in this space: we either love food, love stories, or love them both.

On the food side of things, there isn’t much to report. It just so happens that when a mama who used to stay home full time exchanges her domestic hours for working ones, well, time in the kitchen gets squeezed to what amounts to a slow dribble that just about feeds the mouths in her nest, but even that is up for debate.

Now, don’t hurry out to the post office in despair and overnight us your favorite casserole. We’re actually holding up just fine because, lo and behold, what one sows they will reap in time! All those years of acquiescing to my children’s pleas of “can I help you make dinner?!?” is producing a full and flavorful harvest as my Lovelies are now taking their turns in the cooking rotation each week.

Yes, sometimes when The Oldest is in charge, canned soup and toast are on the menu, but since it wasn’t cooked by me, I have no complaint. But then one of your children (The Middle) makes Jessica Seinfeld’s Quesadillas with Chipotle Cashew Queso and subs in cauliflower for the broccoli, which takes the recipe’s status from delicious to absolutely DIVINE. Your chest puffs with pride and you declare to yourself, “I did good raising these babies.” It’s a surefire way to get your Mama of the Century Badge back if you lost it somewhere along the way.

(And now for our commercial break: Jessica Seinfeld’s fabulous and beautiful cookbook “Vegan at Times”—where you can find the lauded quesadilla recipe from above—is for sale at our little bookshop, Nooks! If you’d like to order a copy, just email us at hello@nooks.gallery and we’ll pop it in the mail to you. Or better yet, you could come by the store and pick it up!)

Now back to your regularly scheduled program…

So in a sentence, I’m not cooking much these days. And sometimes it gets so busy pruning and feeding this dream of ours that I actually forget to eat, too. But no worries. I’m getting fed in other ways. Because I’m learning something about myself that I never knew before.

I love, love, love to hear other people’s stories.

I mean, I own a bookshop, so it’s a given that I love stories printed on paper and hugged in the arms of a beautiful cover. But to hear people’s stories from their own lips, to see the faces of these storytellers as they stand on the other side of the counter and share with me where they’re from, what brought them through our doorway, what books they love, what books they don’t, well, it’s a seven course meal for my soul.

There was the book collector who browsed around the shop until his gaze got caught on our display of the illustrated Harry Potter books. “We have those at home,” his wife said with a coy grin. “But we’re not allowed to actually open them. He’s stashed them away in a closet.” Her husband got a boyish, bashful smile on his face. “I will one day. One day when we have beautiful shelves to put them on.”

Yes, these customers of ours are book lovers, but they are movies lovers, too. Like the mother with a taste for the old classic films that filled theaters when Hollywood’s lights shone on the likes of Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. When I tell her my kids love “Singing in the Rain” and “White Christmas,” she nods. “Yes, those are good,” she says, “but you need to show them ‘Bringing Up Baby,’” and the glint in her eye tells me there’s a story there for another day.

And then, sometimes, they go deeper. And I get the real story behind the soft cover of their smile and flowered sundress or baggy jeans.

Like the quiet kid—long hair, thick glasses—who’s awkward in his own skin, but he’s roaming the city, looking spaces and places that make him feel like he belongs.

Or the woman bobbing on the choppy waters of motherhood, her child’s stroller and the city sidewalks it rolls upon the only things keeping her afloat.

Or the widower with too much time on his hands that used to be in his wife’s.

Or the 32 year old who’s moving back home into her childhood bedroom while she fights the cancer that’s now lurking in her body.

I hear these stories and ones like them everyday in the shop, with my elbows propped up on the checkout desk and my ears perked up like our dog Winnie’s do when she hears words she loves, like “frisbee” or “eat” or “Mama.” I’m finding these stories are a sustenance I didn’t know my soul needed just as much as my body needs food. But it does. And they fill me in ways that few others things can.

All this gets me wondering…are there hidden hungers in us?

Are there appetites within us that we never recognize or simply ignore, that if satisfied might lead us into a state of thriving that we’ve never experienced before?

Just a few thoughts to toss around in the old salad bowl of the soul and see how they taste. Feel free to add a few of your thoughts down below in the comments.

You know, it’s kind of funny that through the years, I would tell my writing classes that you have to find the time to write, and it may not come in huge chunks; you might have to find it in the nooks and crannies of life.

And then we bought a bookshop called Nooks, and I found myself not writing at all.

A few weeks ago, a friend came into the shop, and in the midst of our conversation she asked me, “How’s your writing going since buying this place?”

I smiled, “Well, it’s not going anywhere right now. I just don’t have the time.”

She reached over and took my hand. “Friend, you have to find the time. You know that,” she said with a smile, “but I’m just reminding you.” It’s good to have friends in your life who specialize in giving gentle reminders (fyi, see picture above for what such a friend looks like—love you, Beka!)

So that time that my friend was talking about? I finally found it. And now I’m writing this to you from the literal Nooks in my life.

It feels good to be back.

Till next time, friends…keep looking for the food that satisfies.