Volume 3, No. 35: An Essayette of Delight

After Ross Gay

Greetings, book and treat people! It is September, though it’s in the 90s here and I’m hiding in my cave, so I can’t say that I’m happy about it—though every day brings us closer to October. I’ve been swimming at the lake every morning for the last two weeks, and I’ve been thinking basically nonstop about delight.

I accidentally threw myself an impromptu Ross Gay readathon at the end of August. I read Be Holding during the Sealey Challenge (reviewed here), and I was so utterly in awe of it that I decided to reread Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude on the last day of August (which I wrote about here). I also spent a week listening to Gay’s upcoming essay collection, The Book of (More) Delights, mostly while driving back and forth to the lake. It’s out on September 19th, and you really ought to preorder it or put in your library hold—go on, I’ll wait. If you need more convincing, I reviewed it here.

Gay’s work is an incredible gift. Like The Book of Delights, The Book of (More) Delights is a collection of essays and essayettes (a word I adore) about daily joys. Since reading it, I’ve been writing down delights. It’s not an everyday practice (the writing, at least), but noticing the world in this way has been—well, everything.

Writing down my own delights is the best way I know to honor the gift of this book. So here’s an essayette of delight, after Ross Gay.

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Oh!

This morning I met Julie at the lake. Swimming at Ashfield Lake is a delight I could write several hundred essayettes about, and meeting a beloved there more than doubles the delight. But I will leave the infinite beauties of the lake unwritten for today.

After we swam, I drove into Greenfield to pick up some books at the library—more poetry, even though the Sealey Challenge is almost over, because one of my favorite things is reading poetry in September, after the Sealey, more slowly but with the same sense of awe. I also picked up a cookbook, because checking out cookbooks from the library is one of the ways I’m letting myself get excited about fall—I’m dreaming about slow afternoons rolling out dough and feeling at home in my body in my kitchen in a way I never do in summer.

I was already in town, and it was a glorious Saturday morning, bright and sharp, late September in the air, and even though I know it’s going to get hot again (September is a trick month, a heartbreaking month, really—it’s fall in my heart and my brain but not in the world I actually walk through), I felt a rush of happiness at being out and about, walking down the sidewalk, a person alive in this little town. So I went to the bakery, which was crowded, the line stretching all the way along the counter to the door (a typical Saturday morning there, and I love this, I do, this shared ritual, all of us waiting in line for bread and bagels and pastries, the best in town), and I waited my turn to order a ham and cheese croissant, which—a miracle!—had not yet sold out.

I ate my croissant at a small table on the sidewalk and—well, look. This croissant. When on lived on Nantucket, there was a croissant I loved at a bakery I loved. A ham and cheese croissant. I used to stop there in the mornings on the way to a job, back when I was landscaping, my truck parked alongside a dozen other trucks, rakes and shovels and bags of potting soil neatly (or not so neatly) piled in their beds. The bakery is famous for its morning roll, a gooey cinnamon concoction that I really cannot describe—except to say that the fame is well-earned—but it was the ham and cheese croissant that I coveted. I was not the only one. The place was always full of gardeners and painters and carpenters at 7:45am, and whether or not you’d score a ham and cheese was entirely dependent on your timing. If you were lucky, you’d pull up just as they were pulling a tray out of the oven. If you weren’t so lucky, you’d arrive at the end of a rush, just six croissants left in the case, your fate determined by what the four people ahead of you in line decided to order.

I didn’t stop there every day—maybe twice a week—and I mostly managed to snag a ham and cheese, though when I didn’t, the morning bun was just as good. What I remember most vividly is that first bite, sitting in my truck, windows rolled down, holding the croissant in one hand, the other cupped under my chin to catch the cascade of flakes. What I remember is the utter, unbelievable bliss of it. Bitting into the buttery pastry, crisp and then soft, and then the oozing, gooey cheese and the salty ham, the whole thing—well. Well. My god.

When I moved off the island, I knew, in that way you know a thing sometimes, righteously and with a certain kind of resigned glee, that I would never find another ham and cheese croissant as good as the one at Wicked Island Bakery. I knew. I knew it so certainly that the first time I ordered a ham and cheese from Rise Above, I thought to myself, even as something akin to enlightenment was happening in my mouth, incredible—but not quite the same.

Anyway, this morning, eating that heavenly croissant, that miracle of butter and flour, a sublime human creation, a frankly outrageous pastry, the deliciousness of which I do not have the words for—I was not thinking about those long-ago mornings on the island, or about any of the dozens (hundreds?) of ham and cheese croissants I’ve had from Rise Above in the last three years, or about that time in the spring of 2021, a little less than a year after I moved here, when I went back to Wicked Island on a visit, and ate a ham and cheese, and realized just how inferior it was in comparison, or about how, even though I now know I was, in fact, very wrong, and I have, indeed, found a better croissant, it does not diminish the gloriousness, the perfection, let’s say, of the Wicked Island ham and cheese. I was not even thinking about how the moment—sitting on the sidewalk, downtown in my little town, eating the best croissant I know, the butter, the melty cheese, my heart, what a party—was a delight worth writing down. I was not thinking at all. I was just gobbling—savoring—perfection.

On the way home, I decided to make a detour to my favorite orchard. I had that pleasant buzz I sometimes get on a mundane Saturday morning like this, made of up little treats and little errands. I wasn’t quite ready for it to be over. So I drove down Route 2 just a little way to Apex, which sits on the top of a hill with sweeping views north and east—to Greenfield nestled in the valley below, and the surrounding hill towns, and Mt. Monadnock in the distance. I love the simple, airy store and the rows and rows of apple trees below it. I bought a bag of honeycrisps—my first apples of the season!—and sat down at one of the picnic tables. I bit into that sharp sweetness, looking across the fields and woods, the dips and swells of the hilly landscape, to the ridge I walk on nearly every day. I don’t know how to tell you this in a way that captures how fast my heart was beating: I was sitting on a hilltop orchard looking directly across to another hilltop, a meadowed ridge with a different but equally beloved view, a place I know in every season. There are infinite ways to know a landscape in your blood, your skin. This is one.

What’s truly wild is that none of this—the lake, my beloved library, bitting into that blissful croissant, eating apples in the sun at Apex, the view, the pleasure of a leisurely Saturday morning in town—is, as Ross Gay would say, the delight of record. Delights, all. A glut of delights. A storm of delights. But it is something else that has been living inside me all day, so insistent that it danced me to the notebook in a whirlwind. I was driving home from Apex, down the hill on Peckville Road and a quick right onto Fiske Mill, which turns into Shelburne Line, a road that wends through woods and fields and little meadows, up and around, in between hills, it’s just a road, in other words, the kind I drive on every day, a road whose contours I know well, a road I take to and from Apex every time I go there, which, in the fall, is often, maybe once a week. So I was driving home on this road, Shelburne Line Road, and there’s this one place where it winds through some woods and then opens out onto some fields, a little farm, the kind of farm you find all over rural Massachusetts (barn, jumble of outbuildings and machinery, old farmhouse, big round bales wrapped in white plastic, pastures on either side of the road sloping up into woods, cows spread out across the grass, chewing placidly), before dipping back into the trees again. I love this movement in the landscape, this blending of human and non-human concerns, I love it wherever it happens, but I especially love this particular stretch of road, and so there I was, in my car, watching the cows and the clouds, the memory of water from my swim still silky on my skin, library books and a bag of apples on the seat next to me, and I thought—I may have even said it out loud, I can’t remember—but the words came to me, clear as anything, right there on that road, Saturday morning: “Oh. Oh! I live here.”

August 26