Peach and Barley Salad with a Hazelnut Persillade. Tuna Salad for Adults.

All the usual long-winded existential dread you've come to expect from your salad newsletter—and more! (A lonely goat, chummy donkeys, Turk's-cap Lilies, Calabrian peppers, etc.)

Barley and Peach Salad with Hazelnut Persillade

LONGTIME READERS OF THIS newsletter may or may not know that back when I made the sudden decision to dedicate my remaining years on this glorious terrifying planet to salad, we were well into the Pandemic. But by then, I had already been living my own sort of personal lockdown for almost five years, in an unincorporated community in Ashe County, NC, where it was lonely and beautiful and sparsely populated.

This issue gets into it a bit.

I had come back to the South just as capriciously—and ended up staying longer than I expected after an extensive series of unfortunate incidents led me to believe I was no longer fit for human society and that the only thing to be done about it was to stow myself away in a rickety converted horse barn on a meadow next to a stream at the bottom of a mountain, presumably to keep people safe from my terrible personality. (People, by the way, who’d have stepped over me if I had died in a ditch.)

The meadow I lived on in Ashe County, NC.

It was a rash decision. For the most part, though, my isolation offended no one, and it ended up being a fruitful time for me in ways that modern culture and bank accounts cannot begin to measure. I frequently remind myself how lucky I was to have landed in a place that treated me with such tenderness.

Nature doesn’t care if you’ve fallen into a hole so dark and deep that it feels like you’ll never climb out. Nature doesn’t gossip or hold grudges. Nature is not a shallow jerk who cares what everyone thinks. Nature is not small.

The number of times I almost died trying to pick Turk’s-cap Lilies growing on steep hills was a lot. Totally worth it.

Instead, nature gives you glorious vividly colored songbirds and butterflies and all the flowers you can pick—which, in my little patch of countryside, included tiny, crested iris, wild rose, Turk’s-cap Lily, wild geranium, Joe-pye weed, wild magnolia, black-eyed Susan, painted trillium, mountain laurel, trout lily, and bluet, to name just a few. Nature offered me an early-Disney-cartoon existence in which I became friends with a small herd of cute, chummy donkeys and a goat named Trixie, who was as lonely as I was, but who had a better excuse for it. (She was tied to a rope attached to a clothesline next to a barn.)

A wild iris I stole from nature. It lived in a pot inside my house for a surprisingly long time.

I also had snakes, terrible and long, lounging in my garden and in my mind as I tried to sleep at night. To this day, I try to forget them.

Forgetting can be a useful tool when it comes to fear and sorrow. But one thing I wish never to forget is that what I was doing out there on the meadow was trying to disappear—to make myself small. So small that when I returned to whatever remained of the life I’d left behind I could slip past customs undetected with my painful psychic baggage still in tow.

Trixie, a very good goat.

Which doesn’t work. You can’t go home again, thank goodness. And why would you try to appease anyone who wants you but just in a different size or color—or with a completely different personality? Or, worse, a robot version of you, programmed by them?

Part of the reason I’ve been thinking about that Middle Earth period of my life is that it was, to use a word I loathe, also very healing. Nature is healing! Especially the flowers and the donkeys. I’m nostalgic for it.

But I left the barn several years ago, and now live in the suburbs of Atlanta, where it is densely populated but still remarkably lonely, possibly because I mind my own business to such a degree that I verge on hermeticism, thanks to the fact that my socializing skills got extremely rusty while I was out in the meadow. It turns out being social is not like riding a bike.

The gang of chummy donkeys from my old neighborhood. Bring them carrots and they’ll bite you on the butt. I’m not kidding.

And when I was looking for an affordable house to rent here, with a yard (thanks to Cookie’s digestive issues), one realtor asked: Are you sure you need a house with extra bedrooms?

I’m happy to say I’d changed enough to ignore her unspoken demand that I step aside, stop trying to take up more space than society has allotted single women with no children, and go live in a home for quiet little spinsters in flowered dresses with their hair in a bun covered in a snood.

But I did come very close to telling her: Those bedrooms will be for the ghosts of the children I never had. The ghosts of the husbands I never married will probably be in the garage most of the time, rewiring lamps.

Instead, I declared (at least in my mind) my right to live spaciously: Keep your societal norms, Realtor Lady. I’m doing what I want. And then I rented the house.

Calabrian peppers, smoked almonds, green olives, anchovy paste, red onion—all of it goes into our Adult Tuna Salad.

I bring this up because lately I’ve been afraid that I have relapsed a bit, at least where this newsletter is concerned. When I started out, I had no doubt that what I wanted to do was just write like Emily Nunn—a woman who has never had any real desire to keep up with or be like the “leading” food writers. And who, in spite of her long experience at fancy, big name publications, is not even sure if a “food writer” is what she even is. I’m just a writer who also happens to love giving you salad recipes.

But as this community here on Substack has changed and grown and become extremely competitive at a breathtaking speed, I’ve felt the natural doubts that come with upheaval. I’ve wondered if what I do might no longer be enough. Do I need to change, too? To be more like the rest of this new and unfamiliar society? Do I need to be briefer, faster, more concise? Rein in my bad personality?

If you visit (not that anyone is invited to), please don’t bring your cucumbers to the living-room rug. Enjoy them in your bowl. (Cookie loves salad.)

Without being conscious of it, I may have tried to do all these things (except be briefer; long-windedness is just my nature). I even thought about closing down this newsletter, despite the fact that I’ve never loved any job more.

I was making myself . . . smaller. And it felt awful. Because in another life, it almost destroyed my soul.

Gorgeous toasted hazelnuts: so good with peaches. Chop them by hand.

I’ve never been interested in taking over the world. I just want to keep enjoying the freedom to be me—and to have a yard for Cookie, who has never seen a meadow.

So rather than disappearing I’ve decided to raise high my freak flag and forever let it wave. I will take up all the space my soul requires—no more, no less (unless I get some kind of grand bee in my bonnet, in which case I’ll start looking for a bigger house). And I will continue serving my crazy salads to anyone and everyone who wants them.

Today, that means a barley and peach recipe as vivid as the meadow outside the barn back in North Carolina—and a tuna salad that doesn’t swim to the beat of other tuna salads.