Member-only story
Featured
How To Save A Summer: What I Dried All Summer Long
Rediscovering the old art of sun-drying, one jar, one herb, and one memory at a time.
COME SUMMER, the sun’s showing off, nobody’s hungry anymore, and everyone suddenly becomes very serious about drinking more water, aka staying “hydrated” as if it is some new trend to follow.
Every year, the season opens with the same scene: conversations about how this year’s heat is somehow worse than the last, and people toggling between weather forecasts and water-tracking apps.
I’m a part of the same crowd, or at least I was until this year, when I willingly walked myself into a rabbit hole of hydration and wrote a three-part series about it. Besides that, I had another summer goal: to learn a few more varieties of mango pickles from my grandma.
Life, however, had different plans for both of us.
Earlier this year, I had made a list of all the pickles I wanted to learn from her. Then she fell seriously ill and became a frequent visitor to the ICU. Between caring for her and hospital visits, there wasn’t much time left for anything else. Both my mental and emotional capacities were working overtime, and on some days, I could barely write. Not much has changed since.
