Erica Bauermeister Quotes

Sometimes, niña, our greatest gifts grow from what we are not given.

If you live in your sense, slowly, with attention, if you use your eyes and your fingertips and your taste buds, then romance is something you'll never need a greeting card to make you remember.

While the egg yolks cooled, he directed the beaters at the egg whites, setting the mixer on high speed that sent small bubbles giggling to the side of the bowl, where a few became many until they were a white froth rising up and then lying down again in patters and ridges, leaving an intricate design like the ribs of a leaf in the wake of the beaters

She'd seen it with Isabelle, the way things could become so permeated with memories that story was more important than function.

Her song was so beautiful that it could take people back to all the things they wished they had done, and all the things they wished they could be.

I loved to walk in her garden after dinner; it felt alive, even in the winter. She always told me that rosemary grows in the garden of a strong woman. Hers were like trees.

I listened, while the scents found their hiding places in the cracks in the floorboards, and the words of the story, and the rest of my life.

We sat in silence, letting the green in the air heal what it could.

Every time we prepare food we interrupt a life cycle. We pull up a carrot or kill a crab- or maybe just stop the mold that's growing on a wedge of cheese. We make meals with those ingredients and in doing so we give life to something else. It's a basic equation and if we pretend it doesn't exist, we're likely to miss the other important lesson which is to give respect to both sides of the equation.

Isabelle had always thought of her mind as a garden, a magical place to play as a child, when the grown-ups were having conversations and she was expected to listen politely-- and even, although she hated to admit this, later with Edward, her husband, when listening to the particularities of his carpet salesmanship wore her thin. Every year the garden grew larger, the paths longer and more complicated. Meadows of memories.

Of course, her mental garden hadn't always been well tended. There were the years when the children were young, fast-moving periods when life flew by without time for the roots of deep reflection, and yet she knew memories were created whether one pondered them or not. She had always considered that one of the luxuries of growing older would be the chance to wander through the garden that had grown while she wasn't looking. She would sit on a bench and let her mind take every path, tend every moment she hadn't paid attention to, appreciate the juxtaposition of the one memory against another.

Scents were like rain, or birds. They left and came back.

You know, Ian," Antonia commented, "my father always said a person needs a reason to leave and a reason to go. But I think sometimes the reason to go is so big, it fills you so much, that you don't even think of why you are leaving, you just do.

Break the cinnamon in half.'

The cinnamon stick was light, curled around itself like a brittle roll of papyrus. Not a stick at all, Lillian remembered as she look closer, but bark, the meeting place between inside and out. It crackled as she broke it, releasing a spiciness, part heat, part sweet, that pricked her eyes and nose, and made her tongue tingle without even tasting it.

The more she cooked, the more she began to view spices as carriers of the emotions and memories of the places they were originally from and all those they had traveled through over the years.

Because people want their bodies to smell like oceans they'll never have time to visit. They wear a perfume that promises sex, when all they really want is someone to snuggle on the couch with in baggy pajamas. We'll all choose a good story over the truth any day.

I walked across a bridge that doesn't exist. And after that, being scared just didn't seem so important anymore.

Caroline had felt more comfortable thinking of beauty as something separate from her, like a scarf or a coat you could check before going in to a show. She wondered now, however, if she had treated more things as a part of herself rather than an accessory, perhaps everything would have turned out differently.

She became a frame for the picture that was her son and daughter.

The results of the irrevocable decisions in her life, the commitments she had leaped into without thought, with only the sure and perfect knowledge that it mattered not where her feet landed because her heart was certain.
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They walked back to the chopping block, Claire carrying the crab in her hands. Helen paused. "You know, I'd like to ask you something a friend asked me once, if you don't think it's too personal."
"What is it?"
"What do you do that makes you happy? Just you?"
Claire looked at Helen for a moment and thought, the crab resting on the block beneath her hands.
"I was just wondering," Helen continued. "No one ever asked me when I was your age, and I think it's a good thing to think about."
Claire nodded. Then she took the cleaver and cut the crab into ten pieces.

She looked at the produce stalls, a row of jewels in a case, the colors more subtle in the winter, a Pantone display consisting only of greens, without the raspberries and plums of summer, the pumpkins of autumn. But if anything, the lack of variation allowed her mind to slow and settle, to see the small differences between the almost-greens and creamy whites of a cabbage and a cauliflower, to wake up the senses that had grown lazy and satisfied with the abundance of the previous eight months. Winter was a chromatic palate-cleanser, and she had always greeted it with the pleasure of a tart lemon sorbet, served in a chilled silver bowl between courses.

The women ranged in age, but they were all old enough to know that in the currency of friendship, empathy is more valuable than accuracy.

Maybe your mind won't remember what I cooked last week, but your body will.

It's amazing how easily we can cast ourselves in the role of hero.

She quickly realized she had an affinity for the older books and their muted scents of past dinners and foreign countries, the tea and chocolate stains coloring the phrases. You could never be certain what you would find in a book that has spent time with someone else. As she has rifled through the pages looking for defects, she had discovered an entrance ticket to Giverny, a receipt for thirteen bottles of champagne, a to-do list that included, along with groceries and dry cleaning, the simple reminder, 'buy a gun.' Bits of life tucked like stowaways in between the chapters. Sometimes she couldn't decide which story she was most drawn to.

It was like trying to teach subtlety to a thunderstorm.

When Marion had been a teenager, she wanted a tattoo. As an oldest child who did mostly what was expected of her, she had been fascinated by the abandon tattoos implied, the willing, blind leap into commitment.

As I took off the rumpled sheets, the smell of the people who had slept in them would lift up into the air. There was the round, almost sweet sweat smell of a child who had spent a day happily exploring, or the sharper-edged odor of one who'd gone to bed unhappy. With the bigger beds, I came to understand the way the scents of two people could mingle as effortlessly as rainwater, and to recognize the times they stayed apart, the smells resolutely separate. Sometimes there were those unreal perfumes, jumbling and talking too loudly- but underneath them I could always find the person. Sadness, like the dark purple juice of a blackberry. Fear, like the metallic taste of an oncoming storm. Love, which smelled like nothing so much as fresh bread. In an odd way, the game wasn't that different from reading the smells of our island. Scents were always about what was growing and what was dying. What would last through the next season. This was just with people instead of trees or flowers or dirt.

We are all just ingredients, Tom What matters is the grace with which you cook the meal

A signature scent is a brand," she said. "It works fabulously for helping people make emotional connections with places, but if a person wears the same perfume all the time, you risk muddying the memories.

Breath is life in

It felt as if my whole life had been shaped by things people wouldn't say.

She felt about her zester the way some women do about a pair of spiky red shoes
a frivolous splurge, good only for parties, but oh so lovely.

Helen found ways to sneak summer into the dark months of the year, canning and freezing the fruit off their trees in July and August and using it extravagantly throughout the winter- apple chutney with the Thanksgiving turkey, raspberry sauce across the top of a December pound cake, blueberries in January pancakes.

When a couple came to class together, it meant something else entirely - food as a solution, a diversion, or, occasionally, a playground.

What did she do that made her happy? The question implied action, a conscious purpose. She did many things in a day, and many things made her happy, but that, Claire could tell, wasn't the issue. Nor the only one, Claire realized. Because in order to consciously do something that made you happy, you'd have to know who you were. Trying to figure that out these days was like fishing on a lake on a moonless night - you had no idea what you would get.

The kids threw the rumors out like lit matches, to see what would catch. I stayed silent, listening to the fizz and spark of their words, pretending I was water, putting them out.

I used to know a sculptor ... He always said that if you looked hard enough, you could see where each person carried his soul in his body. It sounds crazy, but when you saw his sculptures, it made sense. I think the same is true with those we love ... Our bodies carry our memories of them, in our muscles, in our skin, in our bones. My children are right here." She pointed to the inside curve of her elbow. "Where I held them when they were babies. Even if there comes a time when I don't know who they are anymore. I believe I will feel them here.

I've been wondering," Isabelle commented reflectively over dessert, "if it is foolish to make new memories when you know you are going to lose them.

Irreversible decisions are good for the soul, word lady.

Stories of her children when they were small, their round little bodies barely containing their personalities, which bloomed and glittered and melted into her.

Marriage is a leap of faith. You are each other's safety net.

Back before there was time, I lived with my father on an island, tucked away in an endless archipelago that reached up out of the cold salt water, hungry for air.

TIME WENT ON, life with the children unfolding in its own ecosystem, small plastic toys seeming to grow up from the carpet like mushrooms, clothes falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Every once in a while she would blaze through the house and clean everything
at which point, the process would start all over.

They said - Adults need to have fun so children will want to grow up.

And that night she dreamed in French.