Today we've got cookies and sisters on our hands. You may remember me talking about Zoe, my youngest sister, and the weekend she graduated. But I'm not sure that I've talked a whole lot about Rachael. She's the middle sister in our family and loves to cook and eat as much as I do (see proof below). Actually, she's a far better cook than I am. She's one of those intuitive kitchen people who just wings it without a recipe. Confidently. And it all turns out just fine. There's another  area where Rachael and I differ in the kitchen: she's a planner, menu-writer, and list maker. Now, don't get me wrong: I love a good list. But I'm not the kind of person who maps out what I'll prepare and eat for the week, makes a shopping list, and lets that list dictate what I buy at the grocery store.

Summer. Barbecues, road trips, flip-flops, rope swings, a new swimsuit, homemade popsicles or rides with the windows down and feet out the window. Reading outside. Doing just about everything outside. Gardening. Sprinklers. The list could go on. Lately I’ve been thinking about the time when summer actually felt like an eternity. Remember that? The days right before you or your friends had a car and you came up with impossibly creative ways to pass the time--perhaps feeling bored and tortured, not realizing how you’d look back on those listless, empty afternoons with nostalgia and longing. During those summer days, the above list would look quite different: making chocolate chip cookie dough and eating it straight out of the bowl. On the roof. In our underwear. Or walking downtown barefoot with my best friend Kristin to buy fried rice from the one and only decent Chinese restaurant in our small town. We'd wear cut-offs and put on lots of fruity lip gloss and hope to be noticed. We’d spend hours making mix tapes and sneak bottles of Zima and clove cigarettes into the garage for a smashing afternoon of pure daydreaming. The Cure. The Flaming Lips. Sublime. Tori Amos. Kristin and I would sneak out at night and traipse around the park with boys much too old for us. Those were the days. How little we knew and how much we thought we knew. But such is adolescence.  I don't really miss that. The one thing I do miss is the cadence of the days, the way they literally folded into one another into a beautiful, long swath of months we called summer.

Some of you have very sweetly written me to ask how I'm doing after this post. Truthfully, it's day by day. This Thursday is the first day that I'll be living alone...for the first time in my entire life (with the exception of a very brief period in Boston that didn't work out all that famously). Yep, and I'm 31. When you've been with someone as long as we have been together, it's just the way it's always been. So I have days where I'm excited to rearrange the furniture, and I have a lot of days where I'm really anxious and worried. I bite my nails, watch bad late night  TV, and eat strawberry jam out of the jar. Today's  been one of those days. I've discovered days off from work aren't necessarily great for me--there's a little too much time to think and be in my own head. It's important to stay busy. But the more I try and figure out what it is I'm so worried about, the more I realize it's really just the unknown. It's not knowing how I'll feel next week or this summer or who I'll go to first with exciting news or wake up in the middle of the night with a terrifying dream. So I'm trying really hard to just sit with that. Sit with the unknown and try and not figure it all out this second. Because I can't. And I'm guessing it's not ready to be all figured out.