Gardening saves the damn day. Also, tucking in and then cooking a squash.

I awoke with a vise-like headache and the familiar achiness of a cruddy cold coming on. My body felt stuffed with cotton, my humours peevish and off. Tom was sneezing and sounds raspy. The boys had circles under their eyes and were both listing toward the wrong side of behaved.

One slammed my bedroom door and stalked off to nowhere. I don't know why. The other set up an enormous fake-food snack bar called Buttville on the floor next to my bed. He forced me to buy pizzas and sandwiches and to consider making something with his blender. 

There were moments of promise. Ol decided that I should have a real breakfast in bed, demanded I stay put, and asked Tom to make coffee and chocolate chip pancakes. He made place cards, brought up TV trays and joined me to dine. We are "table 40" because "you're 40, Mom." Indeed.

But there was also world war level bickering, and at some point, we all blew. I grabbed Oliver and desperately zoomed to the nursery. 

I off-gassed for the entire drive, fuming silently about how damn hard it is, more than ten years in, to complete a newspaper article or two on a weekend morning, steaming about just how stupid (and therefore even more irritating) sibling squabbles can be.

As we turned into the nursery's parking lot, I felt my blood pressure start to drop. We chose a cart and hurried through Annuals, slowed momentarily in herbs and veggies, and then regained focus: Perennials. 

It is still quite hot here, but a definite tinge of fall is in the air.

I sense the awakening of my acute need to roast and eat huge quantities of root vegetables and their kin. This happens every year, and I always go big before gastric distress reins me in to reasonable quantities. For christ's sakes, I roasted a huge butternut squash last night (try this recipe!)and almost finished it at lunch today. (As an aside Oliver had become very attached to this squash and actually shed a few tears when I cooked it which I only did because he'd been carrying it around for days [we even tucked it in next to his bed one night; not even joking; WTF?] and dropped it several times and it had a small crack which would have turned into rotting nastiness and so duh, I cooked it.)

Heirloom pumpkins, decorative gourds, and to-be-Jack-o'-lanterns spill from bins and tables. Halloween decorations seem to have bred overnight; ghouls and ghosts and gravestones beckon from every variety store in town. And with it all come new plants, bulbs, grass seed, and towers of folded leaf bags. 

It's all very exciting in some way, and I felt my heart skip a beat with anticipation. (Then I blew my nose for the 93rd time. Damnit.)

Long story short: perennials, dirt, composted leaves, a white pumpkin, renewed spirits, an absence of inane anything, and we returned home.

Several hours in, Tom called from the front door: "Don't you think you're overdoing it a bit out there, Em? You have a cold. Drink some water."

I gave him the hairy eyeball from behind the enormous, gas-powered saw I had vrooming, vroomed it with gusto, and returned to the hedges and trees like Sweeney fucking Todd on speed.

"Honey, you've really been out here for quite a while," he called another hour later.

"Help me put on this backpack leaf blower thing, man."

"Mom, can I stuff Pop-Its in my Nerf gun and fire it and see what happens?" Jack asked. "Sure, hon." I replied. "Just stay over there in the median."

I really think that kid was working off some negative energy today. 

I blew and raked and dug and planted. Two neighbors drove by slowly and said, "Do you know your children are in the trunk of your car?"

"Yes, thank you."

The neighbors looked a bit confused.

"They'll be fine. I'm over it!" I said in a tone that I now believe sounded slightly insane.

They drove away.

I shoveled and hacked and fertilized (organic, natch) and mulched.

A couple walked past. "Say, aren't you flexible! Those knees!"

"Thank you." Lovely and a bit odd.

When my arms started shaking and I ran out of mulch, I considered it might be time to go in. Turns out it was 5:30pm.

Mother of god. I think I had some negative energy to work off today. Thank god the soil is such a generous taker. I don't know who or what I'd be without land to work.

I showered, sat on my bed, blew my nose for the 154th time, realized I couldn't quite get up because my legs felt wobbly, and so ordered a side table. You'd have done the same.

And now, a couple hours later, I'm back in bed, this time with Tom, Oliver and Nutmeg too. Ridiculous, sweaty, and slightly delightful. Just like today. 

**Bonus pics.

Waiting for the birds.

Celery, fennel and apple salad; bacon chicken done in a cast iron pan; lightly creamed kale with toasted breadcrumbs.
 

A celebrated salad

Friends, I was so delighted to find that my Tomato, Peach, Chevre and Herb Salad with Apple Vinaigrette was recently chosen as a Community Pick on Food52. 

FiggyPudding's review was so lovely, and if you try this salad before tomato and peach season are gone until 2017, I hope you enjoy it. 

YES! I absolutely love the combination of peaches and tomatoes. I used gorgeous heirlooms and they really shined in this dish. It came together super-fast, was stunning, and was better than any Caprese. I would make this time and again in the height of tomato season...

Fifteen years

I lived on 91st St and Lexington Avenue, in a 4th floor walk-up apartment a block from both the renowned 92nd Street Y and the bus I took to Columbia each weekday morning. I liked my route. An M bus snaked north into Spanish Harlem and then west along Central Park's top edge before turning north again and toward my stop at 116th and Amsterdam.

I loved watching the City go by: power commuters pounding the pavement with a bagel in one hand and a phone in the other; nannies strolling children to school or the playground; the bodegas raising their steel bar doors; neighbors greeting each other; vendors selling Greek paper cups of coffee; the regulars hop on and off the bus. 

That Tuesday morning, I felt like a regular myself. I was seated on the left side of the bus, in a single seat if I recall, and it was a beautiful day. Blue skies, leaves starting to change colors, a nascent fall crispness in the air. I got to work just before 9:00 am. Our permanent offices were in Hamilton Hall, but renovations meant we were in a temporary building then, two to an office. I was sharing space with one of my favorite colleagues, Peter.

I don't remember if I'd heard the news before I arrived-cellphones then were flip, data-free ones-but as soon as I walked in, I knew something was wrong. We all gathered around a screen and watched as the second plane slammed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. I remember gasping, looking around, everyone in disbelief. Classes had just begun, new student energy was still buzzing around campus. It was a perfect New York day. I'd just felt like a regular.

It was all utterly dissonant.

And then the South Tower collapsed. Just 56 minutes after being hit. A 56 minutes that felt at once glacial and like warp speed. I can't adequately describe what it was like to watch that mighty structure crumble in on itself. To watch people jumping from windows, to watch the smoke and fire juxtaposed against the blue sky. To watch replay of those planes flying so purposefully and directly into a monument to a vibrant, wholly unique city. 

The North Tower collapsed just 29 minutes later. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was hit. And some spectacularly brave passengers forced a fourth plane to crash land in Pennsylvania instead of into another DC target. 

And still we gasped, mouths agape, shellshocked expressions on our faces. Few people could get a phone line; those who did started phone trees, and family and friends called other family and friends and even strangers to let those loved ones know each of us was alright. If memory serves, my mother was one of those called.

Some parts of my memory of that day are so clear but others are as hazy. I don't remember anything of the sounds, but I do remember the smells. 

My friend, Jessica, and I walked home together that evening. Public transportation was at a standstill, and as we picked our way south and through Central Park and back to the East Side, I noticed shellshocked faces everywhere, all of us woozy with stupefaction but kept from going completely numb by the smell. 

If you looked south down any of New York's avenues, those sturdy aortic drags connecting the bottom of Manhattan to the top, you'd see a thick gray shroud butting up against whatever blue was left in the sky. It was a shroud of the thickest, densest weave, and its seismic perfume reached up and up and up more than a hundred blocks right into our nostrils and windows and doors and bedrooms.

The gray shroud reached like hands towards the living, reminding us for days after the Towers fell and thousands died and people were so brave and unified and generous just what had been forced onto the City. 

I remember being in bed that night, safe and wrapped in clean blankets, and thinking "it's in here with me, that smell and all the particulate debris it carried up here in its wake." It was an unbelievably strange sensation.

Perhaps you lived in New York too, or read about everything that day and afterwards. If so, you know what strength and spirit and resilience the City showed in response to the grotesqueness foisted on it. 

I remember making donations at our neighborhood fire station. Remember seeing posters and photographs of missing loved ones. Remember the flags beating proudly in the wind. Remember the smell finally dissipating. 

9/11 didn't terrorize me or even mark me much. But that's because I was a lucky one (and because I'm white), and for that I am ever grateful. I didn't know Tom then but he worked in DC and remembers where he was when he heard that the Pentagon had been hit. You can still see the differential colors in the Pentagon's west side: the gray of the original stone versus the gray of the stones used to repair the gaping wound left by the hijacked airplane. I notice it every time I drive by.