Spring begins

Becoming French, Poetry and Baking Again

A French Valentine

My intention was to send this on the first of February but I was returning from a trip to Portland that day. Then, I got completely whisked away by a project that had a deadline mid February, and my daughter Alma got her first cold hours after submitting (fortunate timing on her part, honestly). Eric and I then promptly caught the cold from her, which led to us chuckling on Valentine’s Day about how quickly the wheels fell off. “Let’s have a do-over.” I said. “In a year.” he replied.

If you used to read my Mend newsletter, you know that Valentine’s Day was my favorite holiday. As a little girl, I painstakingly planned parties for my family and my grandparents. I made red and pink heart-shaped decorations and organized a circuit of game stations around the house.

I continued this tradition (less games, more baked goods) through college and even into my twenties, hosting annual parties for my friends. The invitation usually included a poem. All of this was very aligned with how I felt at the time, which was that Valentine’s Day was a holiday to celebrate all love, not just romantic love.

Eventually, though, Valentine’s Day became a big seasonal holiday for my company Mend, and suddenly this thing I loved became deeply intertwined with work. I always had a lot of press interviews around that time (producers loved the talking point that we saw a spike of breakups around Valentine’s Day), and we often planned content marketing and partnership pushes for the holiday.

Now that Mend is behind me, I don’t really know how I feel about Valentine’s Day. Friends and family still text me on the 14th because they know it was “my thing,” and I find that part sweet, but…maybe I’ve changed my mind? It’s not that I dislike Valentine’s Day. It’s that it still reminds me of work. I need more time to decouple.

Actually, what I’m realizing is that I need more time to decouple from Mend in general. Between having a baby and jumping into new projects, I haven’t had time to reflect much on what an intense decade of company building I just finished.

Anyway, my goal for February was to start sending out a hodge podge of updates on the first of the month as a way to chronicle the year, but here it is on March 1st instead. At least I wrote it (is what I’m telling myself)!

Rain and Portland

Eric, Alma and I ended 2024 with a road trip to Big Sur and the Bay Area, so the start of this year was all about staying home in Santa Barbara. Except for a couple days of very light smoke and ash, we were almost eerily unaware of the tragic fires happening only two hours away in LA. I think, like everyone, I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard the first rain drops of the season on the roof in the very early morning on the 26th.

We did take one short jaunt to Portland, where my brother and his family live, to celebrate my Dad’s 70th. It’s the first time we have ever all been together in one place, and it’s the first time my brother met Alma, so it was a good reminder why I wanted to move back to the US at least for a while: proximity to family. Recently I have mostly been reminded of why I left, but that’s another newsletter entirely.

As far as Portland goes, here are two recs. Providore Fine Foods was a nice stop. I spent too much time in their amazingly curated chocolate section and then, overwhelmed by choice, ended up with no chocolate at all and a sandwich I didn’t really want instead. How’s that for a metaphor?

The truth is we didn’t leave the hotel much, and the cozy fireplace in our room kept us rooted there pretty heavily while family cycled in and out. It rained a lot, as expected, and it felt eerily empty downtown when I ducked out to run an errand with my Dad. Everything in the pharmacy was sadly locked behind plexiglass, even Pringles, which felt beyond dystopian. But I wasn’t there for the weather or shopping.

My “Parisian” sandwich consisted of prosciutto, brie and mustard, to which Eric responded “They have clearly never been to Paris.” Lol. Still delicious despite the misnomer.

My second rec is a vegan Indian restaurant named Maruti, where my brother arranged for my Dad’s birthday dinner. The food was excellent and the owner was so warm and welcoming to our big group. My brother and I grew up mostly vegetarian and I was vegan for most of my twenties, but I eat mostly everything now. Even so, it’s fun to dip back into plant-based life from time to time, before faithfully returning to my French butter.

Je suis française

On January 13th I received a very unceremonious email in the middle of the night from someone I didn’t recognize in Nantes. It said that I was French and I could download my French birth certificate if I clicked the link in the email. I immediately assumed it was phishing. A minute later I forwarded it to Eric because I did in fact apply for French nationality last summer and presumably at some point they would notify me of the decision.

After some investigating, we realized it was not an attempt to steal my identity. A couple weeks later I received another more human-sounding and congratulatory email from the Consulate General of France in Los Angeles with an official invitation to a citizenship ceremony, but for a moment it was so funny to receive such exciting, happy news in this way. It felt very…French. You’re French now. Download your birth certificate. Let the paperwork begin.

I have a lot of big feelings about becoming French and European that make me teary eyed. I’m so happy that I can live and work freely in France and Europe without going through the hoops of visa/residence permit renewals. I’m so relieved that my family now has at least 1 passport in common between all of us. I’m so excited about the possibilities. And I’m very honored that France accepted me.

I’m also proud of the effort I put into this over many years. I took the civics classes. I passed the language test. I waded through the application paperwork heavily pregnant, often in tears. I studied French history in every spare minute after Alma was born, mumbling all the names of kings and presidents and ministers while I paced around the house wearing Alma in her carrier. I will forever have warm and fuzzy associations with La Marseillaise because I sang it over and over again while nursing Alma in the dark.

And then, finally, last summer I was summoned for an hour-long interview, which I did in French while my hungry newborn was waiting for me in the lobby. Attending the citizenship ceremony this month with 15 fellow new citizens was the cherry on top. And now I’m French and always will be. It’s surreal.

The party favor from my citizenship ceremony. Best cookie ever.

Returning to Instagram

I posted on Instagram for the first time in 6 years in January as an experiment and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. There’s just something so nice about sharing a slice of your life and getting a little heart or DM back. Call it dopamine. Call it community. Call it whatever. That part is mostly nice. Everything else about it though (the non-friend content, the addictive UI, the politics of Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg) is decidedly not nice and much darker.

When I deleted Facebook permanently and deleted Instagram in 2018, I had no intention of ever returning to either platform. I still haven’t returned to Facebook (and never will), but Instagram is harder. For years, I felt no pull to it at all. Once I deleted it from my phone, I was gone. Cold turkey. Then I started using it again when I knew I was moving back to the US, as a way to catch up with friends and stay in touch with friends in Europe when I left.

I’ve thought a lot about how maybe this is where I want to share more, which is why I’m writing this hodge-podgy newsletter. But most of my friends aren’t here to read it. Instagram is the only reliable place to stay connected to all of my friends across the world at once. So the dilemma remains. I’m going to give it a few more months.

Poetry for this season of life

I find myself with very little time to do any kind of concentrated, long-session deep reading. I’m in a season of my life where I just don’t have large swaths of time anymore. So I’ve been reading a lot more poetry and it’s been lovely.

Recently I went to my local bookstore Chaucer’s and picked up a thin book of Bashō and a giant anthology from Copper Canyon Press that I can thumb through whenever I have a spare minute. This is about all I can do, and though it’s been an adjustment, it’s also been great to just accept how things are.

Here’s a bit I underlined the other day from Vicente Aleixandre’s poem Who I Write For (edited by Lewis Hyde):

A return to baking

2025, the year of the wood snake, is all about shedding, growth and transformation. I feel that deeply and I’m sure you do too. Whenever I need comfort, I return to one of my first loves: baking. January started with a galette des rois, king’s cake, which is a pastry you make on Epiphany in France. When you buy one in France, they give you a paper crown to award to the person who bites into the fève, a little charm planted into the pastry. This would be a liability nightmare in the US, but it’s a fun game for kids in France. In Paris, we ate them all month long. Then I developed an allergy to almonds and had to stop. Now I just bake one for Eric to cure homesickness.

Here’s the one I made last year.

There was an overflow problem but that didn’t prevent it from disappearing immediately. Here’s the one I made this year.

A little better. The small thing on the side is a little cherry tart with no almond frangipane (that was for me and my sad almond allergy.) Here’s the admission that I’m finally ready to say aloud: I’m a really imperfect baker when it comes to puff pastry, and maybe just in general. Usually people associate baking with precision, but I’ve never been precise. I never measure things perfectly. I rarely weigh things. I make substitutions as I go and adjust the recipe on the fly based on how I feel that day. Then I forget what I did and can’t replicate it. I know that my style of baking would make someone from Ritz-Escoffier cringe. It’s sort of like how Parisians wear red lipstick. A little smudged. A little je ne sais quoi. And yet, I must say the output is almost always delicious. No one ever seems to mind while they’re fishing for crumbs on their plates.

I used the leftover frangipane to make a full cherry pie later that week, but I forgot to take a picture of that and it was also pretty terrible looking but delicious. Terrible Looking, But Delicious. A great name for a cookbook.

So that’s a bit of a ramble on what’s been going on this winter. I have the goal of writing two posts here in March. I’m putting this out there because maybe it will help me stick to that goal despite everything that is going on in the world that makes it feel like my writing is unimportant.

I’ll leave with you with my favorite bit of Bashō at the moment and a gorgeous tree in my backyard that has started to bloom, which makes me miss living in Japan so much that I have to clutch my chest.

Here comes Spring.