Timing (Rhubarb)
Accepting and adapting to what is
Two bunches of rhubarb, two weeks and 3,000 miles apart. The first, from the Wallingford Farmer’s Market in Seattle in late June, was firm, red-skinned, and juicy. The second, the last of the season at my local Hastings-on-Hudson market in mid-July, was thinner, dryer, stringier, some red, some green. The first I sliced on the bias, tossed in sugar, and roasted at 350℉ until they were softened and a bit caramelized but still firm enough to pick up and eat off the tray as they cooked, which my friend Jordan and I did (it was her kitchen). I put them on top of oatmeal with raspberries and nasturtiums for breakfast. The second, dryer batch, I knew would be happier with a different preparation: Tossed in sugar and lemon and left to macerate overnight, then added to Joanne Chang’s muffin batter. The rhubarb melted in to the pillowy golden crumbs. Caleb and I ate some warm, shared some with neighbors, and froze the rest to eat toasted on busier mornings.
One of the biggest changes I’ve experienced since leaving my job and having many fewer structured demands on my time is my experience of time itself. I’ve gone from days of back-to-back 30-minute calls to…space, governed mostly by my intuition of how I want to move through it, letting go of trying to control time and adapting to what is. If the rhubarb is juicy or stringy because it’s later in the season, I can’t change it, but I can choose a different recipe.
It’s possible I’ve swung too far. I didn’t know what month it was when my friend and former co-worker Allison called me recently (I guessed August; she reminded me it was still July). I missed a flight for the first time in my life, enjoying my unrushed morning with my friend Cate in the final hours before leaving her family’s lake house for the airport (I ended up exploring a city I’d never spent time in, Charlotte, getting a massage and getting on standby to a flight later that day). I paid my credit card bill one day late (the world didn’t end). I’m holding time less tightly, sometimes missing things but ultimately trusting that whatever happens will be ok, and it is.
Working at a large public company in tech, I often felt like I was on “machine time,” moving at a rapid, unrelenting pace. Out of that context, I’m noticing other markers of time: the moon, the sun, how the environment changes with the seasons, and what’s happening in my own body. I control none of this. If my period is a day early or two days late, I can’t control that, only accept and adapt to it.
I’m listening more, too, to the timing of other beings. My plants tell me when they need water or don’t; our cat tells us when she’s hungry or wants to go out (and in, and out…). I’m considering more whether now is the right time for someone to receive the communication I’m sending them, not just my own desire to send it and move on. To not force things too soon or over-communicate. To give relationships their own space and time to unfold.
I learned a new word recently, marcescence, from Asheville herbalist Asia Suler’s new book, Mirrors in the Earth. Marcescence refers to a characteristic of some deciduous trees to keep their leaves long past the autumn season when other leaves are dropping. Nature doesn’t have just one timeline.
“It is worthy, and good, to live one’s life by the rhythms of the natural world, but everywhere you look you will see a spectrum of existence that thrives on the sheer diversity of timelines. Microclimates, niches, the tiny shifts of daylight that make it so that a tree on the hilltop will act completely differently than one down in the cove. Marcescence reminds us that we navigate our particular cycles of birth and death by following the rhythm of our own inner metronome – and that no matter how baffling that timeline might seem, it is adaptive, sacred, and filled with hidden wisdom.”1
Trees losing their leaves at different times, including some seemingly “late” or past their season, is a helpful metaphor for me. In attuning to my own internal sense of timing, I am slowly dropping my limiting beliefs that I should be “done” by now with grief or other feelings, that I should have moved on to the “next thing” by now. If I haven’t dropped my leaves yet, that doesn’t mean new growth will never come, just that the cycle I’m in is not yet complete.
I’m adapting my way of being from machine speed to my own speed. I drove to Lenox, Massachusetts last week to meet up with my sister, Tara, to hang out and enjoy time together. Driving is difficult for me, especially on the curving, narrow-shoulder highways of the Saw Mill and Taconic parkways (the route to Lenox from my house), but I love my sister so I made the drive. Google’s algorithm predicted 2 hours 10 minutes each way; on the way there the drive took me three hours and on the way back it took me five. I took my time. I chose a slower route back to the highway on the way home. I stopped for lunch, gas, nature pee, breathing, stretching, reading Thich Nhat Hanh in the sun at an overlook pullout. I felt my feelings and my sweaty palms and racing heart, let my hyper-awareness and hyper-vigilance surface and subside. I took all the time I needed, and my timing was perfect.
Recipe as feeling: Timing (Rhubarb)
See what’s ripe, what’s past its season.
Adjust accordingly.
Trust your own timing.
Consider what others’ rhythms may be.
Actual recipes
Roasted rhubarb
Renée Erickson, chef and owner of The Walrus and The Carpenter and other Seattle restaurants, included this simple recipe in her cookbook, A Boat, A Whale, & A Walrus, co-authored with Jess Thomson. You slice the rhubarb on the bias, toss it with sugar and a pinch of salt, and roast at 350℉ until they’re softened but still have their shape (she says 8 to 12 minutes; I’ve used a lower temperature and cooked them slightly longer and that also works well). Serve room temperature (she suggests with ice cream; I like it on yogurt or oatmeal or just eating it plain off the tray).
Rhubarb muffins
Joanne Chang, chef and owner of the Flour bakeries in the Boston area, published this recipe for raspberry-rhubarb muffins on the Today website so I won’t repeat it here; she has several cookbooks including Flour with Christie Matheson that this recipe is from and everything in them is delicious. Variations I’ve tried on this that all work are adding more rhubarb and omitting the raspberries if I don’t have them on hand; doubling the proportions and freezing leftover muffins wrapped in foil so I can reheat them in the toaster oven; and making the muffins with cold ingredients instead of room temperature if I haven’t planned ahead.
Asia Suler, Mirrors in the Earth (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2022), p. 95.
Thank you for this--its timing--impeccable!