{"id":7937,"date":"2021-07-31T13:57:34","date_gmt":"2021-07-31T18:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/?p=7937"},"modified":"2021-07-31T13:57:34","modified_gmt":"2021-07-31T18:57:34","slug":"the-edit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/2021\/07\/the-edit\/","title":{"rendered":"The Edit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I AM HAPPY<\/span><\/strong> to be home. I was sorry to leave Delaware. I am loving the cool breeze, the dry air, the deep blue sky and the rustling leaves here in our backyard on the Vineyard. I am missing the enveloping warmth of the hot, humid, languid days of last week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am happy it\u2019s the weekend and that we could splay out on the back deck this morning, books and phones and coffee and toasted cinnamon raisin bread strewn about, freshly clipped flowers stowed in mason jars of cool water in the shade. I am wishing I didn\u2019t have work to do, many hours of it, inside, and bills to pay and housework to do. But I am looking forward to a long walk and grilled chicken for dinner. And maybe a game of Scrabble if there is time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I was beside myself with excitement and joy to see all the flowers blooming in my garden when I got home. But bummed that a critter has apparently eaten the first ripe beefsteak tomato. And sad when I think of my father outside in the sun, dutifully pruning and hauling and replanting his garden plants, but with no family dinner to look forward to tonight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m happy for the quiet day here with my partner, but missing my Dad and sister very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It occurs to me once again how much influence the narrator has over the trajectory of a story. (Just think of the impossibly fictional creation of a social media feed\u2026even my own, where I mostly show the pretty flowers\u2014not the rotten or bug-eaten ones.) Amazing how details are carefully plucked from life and arranged in a row to advance one (white-washed) story line over another.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But real stories are never linear, and real emotions are never constant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I craft my own stories so that they lean positive, mostly because I do want to share the joy I feel like I\u2019ve worked hard for, and because I think it\u2019s especially great to show how life smooths out in sobriety. But also, I probably don\u2019t dwell on the negative or the controversial as much because I\u2019m not as confident there. I have to be very very sure of my knowledge of a subject before condemning an action with opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But on a given day or in the space of an hour or a minute, no matter how much joy I\u2019m experiencing, there are always moments of malaise. Mostly they pass quickly, and I am back on the bright side. But sometimes they linger on in the background, naggingly present, even though I\u2019ve made every effort to stash them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Living in joy is a good place to be, but it isn\u2019t possible all the time and even difficult for some people to do most of the time. (Understanding that is called empathy.) I like to think of it as a choice, but it isn\u2019t \u2013 at least not in the moment. Though it is a\u00a0series<\/em>\u00a0of a zillion choices, starting with making the decision to be honest about what you feel, which can change like the wind direction in a nanosecond. And sometimes you feel two ways at one time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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All the little choices that move you towards the light matter. I chose to live on Martha\u2019s Vineyard because the suburbs of New York were too frenetic for me. I chose to quit my job as editor in chief of a national food magazine because, in sobriety, I discovered that I actually don\u2019t handle stress well. I\u2019ve made a lot of bad choices, too, over the years, but they are surprisingly less frequent now that I listen to my gut (whenever I am quiet enough to hear it). (And choosing to plant a lot of flowers this year was definitely a very fine decision.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a good life, interrupted by occasional bad things, like everyone else. That\u2019s my story for today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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LOOKING FOR RECIPES?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Visit cookthevineyard.com<\/a> and sign up for the free weekly newsletter<\/a>. (Something I do as part of my day job.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If you arrived here from the internet and would like to subscribe to the Sixburnersue blog, click here.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I AM HAPPY to be home. I was sorry to leave Delaware. I am loving the cool breeze, the dry air, the deep blue sky and the rustling leaves here in our backyard on the Vineyard. I am missing the enveloping warmth of the hot, humid, languid days of last week. I am happy it\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[168,181,149,163,164],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7937"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7937"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7948,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7937\/revisions\/7948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}