Orange-Almond Tart and Home

This week's dish for French Friday's with Dorie was just perfect. Not just because it was superbly delicious, and it was, but because I made it on a visit home. As much as I like being on my own and I haven't been in the same city as my family for eight years now, I am really a homebody. It's harder now since I can't go home as often and that my family no longer lives in St. Louis. I still hate saying I'm going home when I mean back to Atlanta because it really isn't my home. It's not terrible, but it's not the same.

I got to Lawrence/Kansas City just after they'd had a big snow storm. It was unbelievably beautiful. Because the temperatures had been so frigid, the snow was incredibly soft and powdery. I don't think I've ever experienced snow that soft. It was like sand! Betsy and I walked to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and probably spent as much time outside in the snow as inside in the galleries. Just perfect.

They, whoever they are, that you can't go home again. But I've discovered time and time again that it's not the case. Yes, it's not the same, but it is. It's sitting around the kitchen table, baking, and running errands. It's practicing piano and stirring up fights. 

My mom is the most hospitable person I know. Her style isn’t like Michael’s mom’s with the guest bedroom always prepared with the nightstand stocked like a hotel minibar and it isn’t like the 50s housewife perpetually armed with a batch of sweets. Instead, it’s her ability to make people feel like she really wants to spend time with them and visit with them. It’s the way she drops her work to watch Arthur with me or hides brownies under people’s ice cream or had my great-great aunt and great-grandma help her in the kitchen or organizes games of badminton in the yard.

One of the greatest things she and my dad instilled in us growing up is that we must always try to create the conditions for people to be good. The variation of that is, I think, that we must always try to create the conditions for people to feel welcome and at home. When I first started having my NYE parties, I stressed big time over the decorations and food and dresses and wound up exhausted and didn’t enjoy myself. Things gradually scaled back over the years and I think much for the better. A great to-do is fun, but I’d much rather be able to enjoy myself and my friends and just all sit around the kitchen table over coffee and wine. Even though I don't feel totally myself in Atlanta, I find the closest I get is in cooking with and for other people. Having dinner parties or delivering pies. 

I sent my dad to the store to pick up the oranges for this. I was so surprised when I sliced them open and discovered they were blood oranges. He had picked them out especially because he knew I'd appreciate them. My mom helped with each step of the process and made her own little berry tartlet to go along with this while Mary and Betsy were at the table making cards. We missed Ken an awful, awful lot. The tart, though, was just delicious. 

Maybe it's childish to refuse to accept my new locations as home. I've been here for almost three years now, but I think I felt more at home in Germany than Atlanta. There's nothing I can quite put my finger on, which I think is the hardest part. I think if I could really identify it, I would be able to deal with it. In general, though, I do like Decatur a great deal and the local coffeeshop has become my home away from home. I don't want to move back home, either. At least not yet. What I most want then is not just to reside somewhere, but to live, flourish, and grow somewhere and create the conditions for other people to do the same and spend time with people, to be home and be at home. 

I miss the Super Sassy Lady Squad especially around Valentine's Day. In "Building Dwelling Thinking" Heidegger writes, "The real dwelling plight lies i this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man's homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even thinking of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling. But how else can mortals answer this summons than by trying on their part, on their own, to bring dwelling to the fullness of nature? They accomplish when they build out of dwelling, and think for he sake of dwelling." Dwelling is fundamentally preserving and staying with and I think of hospitality and generosity as precisely that. So, perhaps, even in the unheimlich I'm ever learning to dwell, trying on my part. 

My mom just called me and at first the only thing I could hear was polka music. She had found a polka cd and called me because she wanted to dance with me and demanded that I get up and polka with her on the phone. So I did.