In the Weeds
Also: An A+ aperitif, an underrated book series, and snail mail
I have long treated the last weeks of August that bleed into September as my personal New Year. The beginning of the school year—now a job—and the fall season waiting behind the curtain offer, to me, far more promise and excitement than the calendar turnover. The smell of cherry tomatoes and freshly sharpened pencils. J. Crew catalogs in the mail. The anticipation, at once comforting and daunting, of returning to a 9-to-5 schedule.
Perhaps above all, it brings a long-awaited escape from being in the weeds, snarled in August’s limbo. Instead of languid, dog-days peacefulness, I’m stuck between boredom and restlessness, and somehow possess a misguided confidence that the humidity will give way to rightful early morning chill.
Hazy little delicacies do occasionally prevail. The croak of a bullfrog, plucking green beans from the vine, a golden pint of beer at exactly 5 p.m., watching Mr. Heron alight on an oak branch in my backyard, the first fire on the patio after a teasing seventy-degree night.
To escape the weekday chokehold of the August weeds, I spent every weekend in the company of friends—DC, London, the shore over Labor Day.
Karis and I wandered through the weekend markets in the capital and must have visited no less than six bookstores; I haven’t been to DC since I was quite little and loved exploring its historic neighborhoods and marveling at Georgetown’s brownstones.
Moving my freelance operations overseas for a bit, a swath of my August was spent in London in Emma’s flat. Emma, Stella, and I cooked dinner and laughed and gossiped and it was wonderful even though it made me horribly nostalgic for our time in our beloved college flat.
Annual pilgrimages were made to the stalwart favorites: Present & Correct, Shreeji Newsagents, Labour & Wait, John Sandoe Books, and Bao Soho. I stumbled upon a great new find: Clutch Cafe, a two-level menswear store in Fitzrovia overflowing with an impeccable selection and high-effort coolness.
Yoga classes were frequented. Gilmore Girls episodes were watched. Hugo Spritzes were consumed. It was calming to be back in the orbit of my girls, to sit around a table and play rummikub and read peacefully from Emma’s couch while the din of Central London wafted in through the windows.
Down the shore, Rook coffee and a cash-only bagel shop fueled a breezy LDW, where we played Peanuts with increasing inaccuracy until late into the night, Skizzy Mars, A$AP, and Isiah Rashad soundtracking. Little pieces are falling into place in my friends’ lives, and I never anticipated how fun it would be to watch it happen—even if distance continually refuses to be in my favor.
On the in-between nights: The family frequents tennis courts in the evenings (Harris has been obsessed), Dad fires up the pizza oven when Trystan comes to visit us for a few days, and there are always cosmos on the mudroom table.
Wading through the weeds brought with it some necessary lessons and a few hard-learned truths. The lucky thing is, in this unconventional new year there doesn’t exist the same pressure to start over; instead, it favors adapting, a nice end-of-summer shift. It’s not all magic, all the time…but a lot of it is.
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater is one of my best friend’s all-time favorite books, the first in a series she’s spoken endlessly about and one I just never quite got around to reading. Big mistake. Huge.
I fell head over heels in love with every single page of this book about four friends at a Virginia all-boys school, their friendship with a girl from an extended family of female psychics (their house felt very Practical Magic), and a quest to uncover magic and the legend of the sleeping Welsh king Glendower. It’s beautifully interior and character-driven, with passages dedicated to meaningful description, and pacing that genuinely earned its reveals and twists.
To me, the only book that feels true to its YA category is the series’ first; despite featuring high school characters, the maturity, romantic nuance, and even the sentence structure felt wonderfully adult—think Kelly Link writing about teenagers in The Book of Love (a decidedly adult novel) but with perhaps more snark and 2012 humor. I proceeded to read the rest of the series (The Dream Thieves, Blue Lily, Lily Blue, The Raven King) in a great glorious rush.
Since we missed July, the rapid-fire reading recap is as follows:
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai—a modern campus novel and a take on true crime podcast culture.
A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane—love, pining, and high school basketball.
The Singer’s Gun by Emily St John Mandel—classic Mandel: shipping, noir-style. Also marks my completion of her whole oeuvre.
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer—devoured; I love the PNW; cringier than I could have ever imagined.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton—a brilliant, eye-opening graphic memoir about the Canadian oil industry.
The Booker Prize longlist was released last month, so I plucked a book off at random. Audition by Katie Kitamura was tense and fairly uncomfortable for the entirety of its 200 pages, following a semi-harrowing relationship between a woman and a young man of dubious relation. I understand what this was trying to do, but like many lit fic novels, it was tedious and complex.
Ross Gay’s Book of Delights was, as you may guess, delightful. These vignettes, written by Gay over the course of a year, are like small ampoules of bright light. I swear this man could talk about a garbage truck and make me shed a tear with his thoughtfulness. That Gay is a poet contributes to making his prose shiny-bright, as funny as it is necessary (and true).
In short form, I’ve been loving the articles by The Malin Journal, the editorial component of The Malin workspaces that have cropped up everywhere from Williamsburg to Savannah. Their editors curate pieces on work-related content from the intriguing history of the business card to the world’s most beautiful office lunches.
The drink of the summer has been the “Lil Ripper,” lovingly named by someone at Bon Appétit (charming, but with teeth bared). The easiest aperitif, I love its simplicity, its bitterness, and the fact that it acts as a vessel for several large olives. The amaro is dealer’s choice, but I’ve been going back and forth between Averna and Cynar and favoring the latter.
Peaches from the garden were abundant, so having a peach Dutch baby for breakfast, grilled peaches with dinner, and baked peaches sprinkled with brown sugar for dessert was the norm for a few weeks. My mom and I have made so many recipes from The Peach Truck Cookbook by Jessica and Steven Rose that have all turned out delicious, but I’ve also been turning to Ina Garten’s early cookbooks for on-the-fly risottos and fruit-forward sides.
When I wasn’t setting off her smoke alarm, Emma and I ate well in London, and Ukiyo Handroll Bar and Osteria Angelina were two standouts. Angelina, an Italian-Japanese fusion spot, had some of the most unique pasta—you could watch them rolling and crafting the pastas from your seat—and a umami-forward tortellini that was to die for.
Stella and I also visited Mahali and Co., a bakery in Battersea, which had the most unique, decadent pastries by miles. We scarfed a savory scroll with chive and cheese, but the shining star of our haul was a ginger brulee, laminated to perfection and filled with ginger custard and burnt sugar. It was biblical.
Seven (unrelated) songs for September.
Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover by Sophie B. Hawkins
Earth (feat. Future) by Mac Miller
Silverfuck by The Smashing Pumpkins
Fire Fly by Childish Gambino
I Don’t Want to Think About It by Wild Strawberries
Pieces by My Vitrol
A.D.H.D by Kendrick Lamar
Smashing Pumpkins defies the laws of seasonality, but there is truly nothing better for the soul than listening to Siamese Dream in September. This is a no-skip album for me, at once raucous and mellow. College in the fall is on nearly uncontested rotation, occasionally punctuated by September soul and 90s alt.
It’s no longer school season for me, but high school favorites—Childish Gambino, Mac Miller, Thundercat—come back around, all backpacks slung over a single shoulder and boat shoes with the heel flattened. My brother is the ultimate Mac devotee, but I often turn to his music simply by virtue of his nearly endless oeuvre, released and unreleased. “Eggs Aisle” is, no question, one of my all-time beloved songs, but it’s particularly nostalgic to revisit GO:OD AM in the fall.
If you want ten minutes of magic, this 2012 video of The Field playing at Pitchfork Music Festival should do the trick. When it comes to music, millennials really did have it all…
Enjoying Wild Plum Books (from online & afar). There’s this bookstore in St Helena, CA that I’ve always wanted to visit called Wild Plum Books—in my mind, everyone in the cast of Norah Ephron’s Something’s Gotta Give comes here on the weekends. Considering that I, alas, have no imminent plans to visit wine country, I’ve been reveling in their gorgeous Instagram (thank you, moodboards and thoughtful recs from the delightful owner) and recently subscribed to their newsletter, Elyse Chambers’ ChickLits, for book recommendations and playful edits. Between that and the knowledge that they recently made their own label for a wine release, this is my kind of place.
Matt Hranek’s The Negroni. A friend gave me this single-subject book for my birthday one year and it’s gotten miles of use. Matt’s men’s lifestyle brand, The WM Brown Project, appeals to a very specific aesthetic of European classiness and tailored function. The man knows his way around a cocktail. This book has well-curated recipes for classics to clever variations, and never fails to mention bar snacks and ribboned peel garnishes.
Papier D’Armenie burning papers. When in London, I popped into Marylebone’s The French Pharmacy and was delighted to see a basket of these tiny French incense booklets at checkout. These books of perforated incense papers are versatile little things, and I prefer to leave them unburnt to scent a bathroom or linen drawers. The Rose is classic and especially fragrant on its own, but the Traditional is best when burned.
Handwritten correspondence, letters, and thank-you notes are things I love and pen often. After a desk drawer clean-out that left me reeling with stationery supply overload, I commandeered one of my mom’s chic organizer boxes (from the Martha By Mail catalog, of course) and put together a little correspondence box that keeps my tools of the trade in one place. Below, some of its components, tips, and other mail accoutrements that I love, use, and defend in the name of print.
Collect any and all cards, letter paper, envelopes, and letterpress fixings; anything from airport postcards to your finest cardstock is fair game.
I think we should bring the Rolodex back, but at a minimum, knowing and having written down your friends’ addresses, so you don’t have to text them every single time, saves time and face.
G. Lalo and Original Crown Mill stationery are stalwarts. I buy (on sale) a new box of G. Lalo once in a blue moon; the ones with deckled edges are simple but elevated and are perfectly weighted.
One of my top antique “to-hunt” items is a vintage toast rack—stay with me here—to store my mail. They are the perfect size to hold all manner of mailed materials and are utterly charming.
Someone had the bright idea to pre-fill lined labels with a return address instead of scrawling it across the envelope, which I thought was clever.
It is possible and very cool to make your own envelopes; I once made a set lined with comic book paper from a flea market comic book haul.
Bone folders are an underrated tool for crisp letter folds. Vintage letter openers are desk statement pieces, but Penco also makes one for $5.
Letter paper and corresponding envelopes are surprisingly important if you don’t want to origami your notes. I always buy Basildon Bond sets when I’m in the UK (specifically the classic air mail envelopes).
Don’t forget a roll of stamps (like a pane of the Goodnight Moon ones), because there really is nothing worse than realizing you’re out and have to go inside and face the USPS employees.
You’ve Got Mail might have made emailing sexy, but print still rules. Thank you notes are everything. Love letters are best. Snail mail makes the world go ‘round.
Thanks for reading this month, all. Apparently, the '90s are back (see: Ethan Hawke’s Canadian tuxedo, Elle Fanning’s corduroys, and Emma Stone in general at the Telluride Film Festival), so it’s already shaping up to be a good fall. Wishing everyone a lovely, productive September and, if you’re like me, cheers to the new year!
I sometimes post on Instagram @gracerobrts.
My Goodreads is here and I am always looking for reading recommendations.
My Apple Music is @gracecroberts, where my playlists are regularly updated and cared for.
Just want to say hi? My email is gracecroberts@gmail.com.
See you next month!
Sincerely yours,
Grace
Peach Dutch babies and Goodnight Moon stamps xx
I’ve always felt the same about back to school. This year is a big new chapter for you and I’m excited to see what it brings for you!