You Do Not Have to Make the Most of Summer

I don't chase that version anymore. Not because I stopped caring about beauty — if anything, I care about it more than ever. I just stopped believing that beauty needs to be produced. Some mornings the most beautiful thing in the house is the way light comes low through the kitchen window and lands on whatever is sitting on the counter, unstyled, un-arranged, just there because it's summer and that's where it landed.

This is my invisible rule for the season now: if a thing is already good, I try not to improve it into exhaustion. A ripe tomato doesn't need a recipe. An open window doesn't need a project. An ordinary Tuesday doesn't need to become content. It's allowed to just be a Tuesday.

If you want a way to actually do that, here is the only one I've found that works. Pick the hour of the day you like best — for me it's the early one, before the heat — and refuse to schedule anything into it for the rest of the summer. Not a walk, not a project, not a phone call. One protected hour is worth more than a whole list of plans, because it's the only one you'll definitely get.

I think we inherited a strange idea somewhere — that summer is a test we can pass or fail. That if we didn't get to the coast, host the dinner, finish the reading list, our own particular season, we somehow did it wrong. I don't believe that anymore, and I don't think you do either, not really. I think we're just tired of feeling like there's a better version of right now happening somewhere else.

The smell of a kitchen with the windows open before it gets too warm to keep them that way. There's a particular half hour, early, when the air hasn't caught up to the day yet.

Whatever is ripest at the market this week, eaten with almost no effort. Salt, maybe oil, nothing else required.

The quiet stretch after everyone's finished eating but before anyone's cleared the table. Nothing is being accomplished in that stretch. That's exactly why I've started protecting it.

Both of these came out of a stretch of studio days where I wasn't trying to make anything impressive — just useful, and honest about what it's for. The pitcher has an oversized handle because pouring shouldn't be fussy; a full jug is heavier than people expect, and a handle you can get four fingers through is the difference between pouring and bracing. It stands ten inches tall, which is the height at which a jug stops being a jug and starts being the thing on the counter you notice.

The rope-handled bowl looks as good half-empty as it does full, which felt like the right kind of piece for a season that isn't supposed to be performed. The rope isn't decoration either — the handles are wrapped because bare stoneware handles on a wide bowl are a wrist injury waiting to happen when the bowl is full.

I'm not going to tell you that you need either of them. I'll just say that if something in your kitchen is currently being asked to do more than it can gracefully do — if you're pouring lemonade from something never meant for pouring, or serving from something that only looks right styled — these were made for the actual using, not just the photographing.