The Last Stretch of Summer Doesn't Need to Be Rushed
Every year around now, I feel the pull to start rushing toward fall — new candles, new palette, new everything, weeks before the weather has actually changed. This year I'm doing the opposite and letting the kitchen decide: while the tomatoes are still coming in, the summer pieces stay out and nothing gets swapped for autumn.
Summer isn't over. The tomatoes are still coming. The evenings are still long enough to sit outside without a sweater. There's a real cost to skipping ahead of a season before it's finished with you — you miss the actual end of it, the part where it gets a little slower and a little more golden right before it goes.
So I've started letting the food tell me when to change the table, rather than the calendar. As long as dinner is still mostly something raw in a bowl, the lighter finishes stay where they are — the white ones, the shallow one, the handmade ceramic serving bowl that gets salad in it three nights a week. The week the tomatoes stop and the squash starts, I'll swap them over. Not before. It's the only seasonal rule I actually keep, because the kitchen enforces it for me.
There's a real cost to skipping ahead of a season before it's finished with you.
This bowl has been out on my counter most of the summer — the drip glaze catches the light differently depending on the hour, which feels like the right kind of piece for a season that's still quietly changing its mind.
Two things about it I only know from making it. The white glaze goes on thick around the rim and then it moves in the kiln, so it has to be measured to stop short of the foot; glaze that runs the whole way down welds the bowl to the shelf it's standing on, and that is the end of both. And it's eight inches across and four deep, which sounds unremarkable until you toss a salad in it and nothing lands on the counter. The inside is glossy and sealed, the outside is left as raw clay, so it goes in the dishwasher and still feels like clay in your hands.
See the drip glaze bowl if it calls to you.
Handmade to order in my Cary, NC studio — please allow about four weeks.
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A few things mentioned: the large drip glaze bowl, the berry bowl colander, and the lace texture grand serving bowl.
Autumn will get here on its own schedule. It always does, and it has never once needed my help. The only part of a season you can actually lose is the end of it — the slow golden fortnight nobody photographs, when the tomatoes get sweeter and the light goes long and nothing is being anticipated. I would rather be standing in that than shopping for the next thing.
Are you holding onto summer a little longer this year too, or are you already leaning toward fall? I'd love to know.