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There is a stretch of two lane road not far from where we live that winds through mountains and small towns, the kind of road that exists alongside the interstate rather than instead of it. Most people take the highway. We take the back road.
We always have. Partly because neither of us has ever been in much of a hurry to get anywhere in particular, and partly because there is something about those roads that the highway cannot offer. The pace of them. The way they move through places rather than past them. The sense, driving through a small town with its shops and its church and its one set of traffic lights, that time moves differently here than it does on six lanes of concrete going seventy miles an hour.
It reminds me of before. Before the interstate made it unnecessary to know the names of the towns between here and there. Before convenience became the only thing that mattered.
These are the drives where we talk. About everything and nothing in particular. About things we have been thinking and have not yet said. About things we disagree on and things we have always seen the same way. The conversation unfolds without effort on those roads, the way it does when two people have been talking to each other for long enough that silence is just another form of the same thing.
Because sometimes we do go quiet. The radio on low or just the sound of the road and the air coming through the windows. And that silence is not awkward or empty. It is comfortable in the way that only happens between people who no longer need to perform for each other.
It is on those drives that he puts his hand on my leg.
Not every time. Not as a habit or a routine. Just sometimes, wordlessly, his hand moves from the gear shift or the wheel and rests on my leg and stays there. And I will place my hand on top of his. And we will sit like that for a while, not saying anything, just driving.
It feels like a sigh of comfort. That is the only way I know how to describe it.
I have written in another essay about wanting more spontaneous tenderness. About wishing he would come up behind me in the kitchen without being asked, or motion for me to come closer on the sofa rather than waiting for me to move toward him. Those things are true and I have not stopped wanting them. I mentioned it to him once or twice over the years. He made a joke of it, gently, the way he tends to deflect things he does not quite know how to meet directly. I understood. I did not bring it up again.
We have been together long enough that I know the shape of how he loves. It does not always look the way I imagined it would when I was younger and had ideas about what love was supposed to feel like. It is quieter than that. More practical. Less given to grand gestures or spontaneous declarations.
But on a two lane road through the mountains, windows down, going nowhere in particular, his hand finds my leg and stays there.
And I have come to understand that this is not the absence of tenderness. This is what tenderness looks like for him. Wordless and unhurried, offered without announcement, on a road that takes the long way round.
Twenty years in, I think I would rather have that than flowers.
— Kate
I have always known that plastic was not ideal. That it sheds into food and drink in ways that are not particularly good for you. That knowledge sat somewhere in the back of my mind for years without doing much, the way inconvenient information tends to do when changing would require effort.
What changed was not a single dramatic moment but a gradual accumulation of things we were learning, and a growing sense that if we were going to take our health seriously we ought to take it seriously in every room of the house, not just in what we ate.
The kitchen was the obvious place to start.
We moved toward glass where we could. Not all at once and not perfectly. We still have plastic containers and bags and we use them in certain situations. But where there is a choice, we choose glass. Real dishes replaced paper plates, which I will confess I had always loved for the obvious reason that nobody has to wash them. Then I watched a video showing that the side of a paper plate where you place your food has a plastic coating. That was the end of the paper plates.
The pans followed. We switched to stainless steel, though I will admit I have not yet worked out how to fry an egg in one without it becoming a lesson in patience, so the non-stick pan still makes an occasional appearance for that specific task. We are working toward cast iron. These things take time.
The bigger shift happened at the ingredient level, and that began not with my husband’s health but with our daughter’s. A couple of years ago we discovered she had food sensitivities, soy and sesame among the most significant, enough to cause real discomfort. We started reading labels more carefully. What we found there stopped us both.
Soy is in almost everything. Not in hidden forms or under unfamiliar names, simply present in product after product in plain sight. And alongside it, ingredients I did not recognise at all. Things I had to look up. Things that turned out to be preservatives or emulsifiers or compounds I could not explain the purpose of. Things I could not understand why anyone needed to put into something as simple as a loaf of bread or a tin of soup.
We started looking at seed oils next. One video showing how they are produced was enough. The extraction process, the chemicals involved, the distance between what goes in and what comes out. It is not something you can unsee. And then I learned that canola oil, which I had used for years without a second thought, began as rapeseed oil, used as a lubricant for engines during the Second World War. I have not bought it since.
The thing that brought it all into focus most clearly for me was bread. When I make bread at home the ingredients are flour, water, yeast, a little honey or sugar, salt, and sometimes an egg or a splash of milk depending on the type. When I pick up a loaf from the supermarket there are twenty, sometimes thirty ingredients or more. The same food. One of the oldest foods there is. And somewhere along the way it became something else entirely.
We meal prep on weekends now. My husband will make a chicken or pork dish in portions large enough for several days of lunches. I divide out full fat whole milk yogurt into portions and add fresh berries. Dinners during the week are simple, a steak or a burger when I get home, something left from the day before if there is anything. We buy grass fed beef and air chilled chicken when we can find them. Everything tastes better than it did. I made a homemade version of a sports drink recently and it was genuinely no comparison to the bottled kind.
I will not pretend this has been seamless. There are evenings when I get home tired and there is nothing prepared. On those nights convenience sometimes still wins. A frozen pizza from the shop, cooked and eaten without much ceremony. It happens less than it used to. But it happens.
What keeps me going back to the effort is something I find hard to argue with. I came across a photograph once of a busy pavement in New York City, taken at a time when women wore skirts and men wore suits or at least a proper shirt and slacks. Not a single overweight person visible among the crowd. Then alongside it a photograph of the same city, the same sort of busy pavement full of people, taken recently. Roughly eighty to ninety percent of the people in it appeared overweight. The difference was not subtle and it was not easy to dismiss.
That first photograph was taken before breakfast cereals were marketed as health food. Before seed oils were in everything. Before food was engineered to sit on a shelf for months without changing. We tend to assume that advances in technology make things better. In food, I think we have made things considerably worse and called it progress.
There is something in all of this that connects, for us, to a broader question we have been asking. If the answers to health were better understood before modern food processing, it seemed worth asking what else was better understood before. What did people know, in faith and in life, that we have slowly replaced with something shinier and less nourishing. That question has taken us somewhere we did not entirely expect, but that is another essay.
For now, the kitchen is a good place to start.
— Kate
Kate Alderwick 