On Travel

Featuring photos from our latest trip!

Welcome to this week’s post, the first in a series of essays about travel, a topic that has been on my mind since we returned from our trip to Italy. On Friday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for pumpkin maple cake with an accidentally perfect tahini maple whipped cream frosting. I hope before then I will figure out a shorter title for that recipe.

There’s just no easy way to sum up a trip that spans three weeks. When people have asked me how our trip was, I look at them like a deer in the headlights, feeling like I’m sitting for an oral exam I forgot to study for. All of the sudden, imposter syndrome rushes in—did I even go to Italy? I did, though, just like everyone else on your Instagram feed. And it was wonderful, obviously. Is there anyone who has had a bad time on a trip to Italy? I would like to meet that person and ask them what they did wrong.

Gaeta, Italy.

Travel is something that feels like a necessity to me. Over the last three years, Colin and I have been lucky—truly, stupidly, lucky—enough to spend large chunks of time in places we do not call home. From California to North Carolina to Western New York, these destinations have been wide-ranging and wildly different, but each of these trips has given me a balm for what ails my spirit.

As a proud home-body, this feels contrary to my very nature to embrace. I almost cried when we got home after this trip, seeing my cats and my cookbooks right where I left them. I crave the space that Colin and I have created when we are away, the comforts that we have in the safety of our home. My mom often tells the story of returning home from a long trip as kids. When he opened the door, my brother ran from room to room, yelling “My stuff! All of my stuff is here!” as though he expected it to have left or changed while we were gone. The older I get, the more I understand.

The first time I felt this way was in August of 2009. We had just spent the summer at the lake, and I hadn’t been back in our home for three months. When we walked in the door, I was struck by how high the kitchen counter was, how the handles of the drawers felt so much heavier in my hands than the ones at the cottage. I felt like I had landed in an alien spaceship that had been constructed to carefully replicate my childhood home—it looked the same, but something about it felt foreign. My literal perspective had changed.

Bologna, Italy.

Travel awakens a part of me that is lulled to sleep by the routine-ness of the spaces where I spend my days. I work at home; I walk miles through my neighborhood and to and from the beach; I take the same train downtown to see friends. If I’m not careful, I go weeks without seeing something new.

As I mentioned in this interview with Giulietta Pinna of Limonata Creative, Colin and I decided to (mostly) stay put this summer in anticipation of our trip. As the weeks went by, I felt a part of me dimming. One day, we were showing some out-of-town friends around the Loop and took a route I almost never walk. The newness of the views of the tall buildings felt like a lifeline that someone had thrown me from across an ocean.

Last year, when we returned from Italy, I spent weeks cataloguing the photos I had taken and the light that I had captured. There was something different about it. I was and still am convinced that sunlight filters through the atmosphere differently there. (Maybe it’s all the cigarette smoke?) I have been hunting for that light since we left. In the year between our trips, I tried everything I could to replicate that light in my studio. I was chasing that change of perspective, the new way of seeing things. Three weeks of seeing different light, eating different foods, and walking different streets changed me as an artist, and, I think, as a human.

Firenze, Italy.

In some ways, longer trips are made even more difficult by knowing that you have to snap back out of it and return to every day life. In the early days of the trip, I pretended we were there forever. Then, as our days dwindled, I had to think about coming back and what that would mean. Over the last few weeks, even as my body sings every time I eat a kale salad, I have felt flashes of loss—for the trip, the people we become on vacations, the discomfort that permeates every interaction in a place where you do not speak the language fluently, and yes, of course, for the light.

Over the next few weeks, before the start of the holidaze, I’ll be cataloguing my feelings about travel and Italy. A trip of that length, especially in contrast to the one we took last year, made me think, hard, about who we are when we travel and what it does to us as people and to the places we choose to go. It’s something I’m curious to continue exploring, and I’m excited to hear about your experiences as well.

PS: I do feel like this is a great opportunity to tell you that I sell travel/food prints on Society6. Check ‘em out! I haven’t put the new photos up yet, but I’ll get to it sometime.

See you back here on Friday! I’m actually so, so excited to give you this cake recipe, which, if I had it my way, would replace pumpkin pie on every Thanksgiving table forever more.