Since we moved in together, Sara and I have really made an effort to cook most of our meals at home. The thing is, we both love spicy, flavorful, and complex food but we don’t want to spent an exorbitant amount of time or money on dinner every night. Inspired by a recipe we saw on Pinterest, last night’s main dish was barbecue pulled pork over sweet potatoes and of the meals we’ve made so far, this very well may be my favorite. It’s definitely a hurry-up-and-wait dish, but with no more than ten minutes of active prep time, I’m more than happy to toss the meat into the slow cooker, the potatoes in the oven and go on with my evening until it’s time to eat.

I’ve reprinted the recipe below including the tweaks we made and the smaller portion sizes. Neither Sara or I eat much, so we make adjustments of large recipes that make lots of servings to fit our little family.

Pulled Pork Stuffed Sweet Potatoes

serves 2

Ingredients

• 1/2 lb pork loin
  We found that 1/4 pound of pork per person works for us, so we just chose the smallest pork loin we could find at the grocery store and cut it in half. You can easily adjust this to fit your appetite.
• chipotle chile powder
• garlic powder
• salt
• olive oil
• 4 mini cans Coca-Cola®, or enough to cover pork
• 3/4 to 1 cup Jack Daniel’s® Spicy Original Recipe barbecue sauce
• 2 large sweet potatoes

Directions

1. Season entire pork loin with garlic powder, salt, and chipotle chile powder.  Feel free to use what you have in the cupboard—cayenne, red pepper flakes, black pepper, whatever. Let the rub rest on the meat for a half hour or so in the fridge. We found that putting it directly in the slow cooker yielded a final product that wasn’t spicy nor salty enough.
2. Pour a little Coca-Cola™ in the bottom of the slow cooker and add the pork. Add enough Coca-Cola™ just to cover. Cook on low for 3.5–4 hours.
3. Toward the end of the pork cook time, bake your sweet potatoes:
4. Preheat oven to 400°. Scrub potatoes. Coat each in a little olive oil and salt, wrap in foil. Bake in oven for about 1 hour. Remove from oven and set aside.
5. Remove pork from slow cooker and use two large forks to shred the meat. Add barbecue sauce to taste and combine. Leave slow cooker on low, or warm, to keep things hot until you are ready to serve.
6. When ready to serve, cut a a slit in the sweet potato, lengthwise. Fill each sweet potato with a generous helping of pulled pork and top with an extra drizzle of barbecue sauce. Serve immediately.

It’s gorgeous, a perfect 72 degrees, and the sun spills over the already warmly-hued rocks and sparkles across the ocean’s calm surface. The small fishing boats splashed with an array of sun-washed color in the harbour are well-used, the result of years of their owners using them to make a living.

Sara is in her light fleece pullover, her hair glinting with red flecks less often evident now than when she was a little girl. I can’t help but think how beautiful she looks like this—not because of the light as much as because she’s happy. We can’t stop smiling at one another, pointing out fancy houses in neighborhoods that overlook the sea. Lately, I try to imagine us living everywhere. I see our name printed neatly in the list of tenants in an upper floor of a high-rent apartment building and hear her keys click the pins in the lock of our tiny, suburban bungalow. This place too feels perfect, but so does every place I’ve pictured with her. We forget about the stresses that we carried here, the ones we dragged thousands of miles; we left them on the docks at the edge of the water.

We walk up through a little cemetery with rows of headstones in uneven rows sprinkled up the hillside. She leans down, brushes off the dust, and hands me a small tile from a disintegrating shrine to someone well-loved and I tuck it into my pocket in hopes that it will later serve as a concrete reminder of this feeling.

I stand under the yellow awning of the bakery printed with unintelligible, Chinese characters as Sara takes a pineapple bun out of the case for us to share—a sort of makeshift birthday cake. It’s sweet and buttery and its crust flakes onto my fingers as I break it into pieces. It’s a surprise to my tongue—just as she’d intended when she’d told me its misleading name—when I’d expected the tart flavor of an actual pineapple fruit. I smile to myself at the flavor, half knowing even then that no bun I have after this one will be quite as close to perfection. We eat our pastry as we walk back to the ferry, walking past shops filled with various trinkets, up at cluttered balconies draped with rows of clean laundry, and peeking into a yogurt store whose patrons are a gaggle of teenagers chattering in Mandarin.

A few hours later, it’s dark. I always forget how quickly the sun goes down here. One minute we’re walking down a hill, past a tiny temple, breathing in the air that can only come off the sea, past vendors selling every kind of dried fish imaginable, the very next, we’re back in the heart of the city, glittering and rushing, loud, and fast. It feels so long ago already, like a foreign world or another lifetime. I know there will be other occasions but I want so badly to bottle this day’s worth of moments so they don’t slip out of my grasp.

The instep of my right foot is being held together by tape, gauze, and bandages and is throbbing something awful.

Said injury happened within twenty four hours of moving in to my first real apartment.

Not only did it injure me, but it also managed to injure my brand, new beige carpet—now slightly less beige after my girlfriend carefully scrubbed each stain on her hands and knees to remove the crimson hue.

On top of all of the crazy emotions I’d been having, the anxiety about moving, the way that my relationships will change in this new stage, slicing my foot open was exactly the last possible thing I needed and I devolved into a puddle of tears. Sara, who has been an absolute saint since I first stepped on that stupid, glass lamp in the middle of the living room floor in the dark, on the other hand was completely collected, made sure I was okay on my own before heading out to get bandages of all kinds to piece me back together, and put me to bed. It’s killing me not to be able to help very much in getting things put away or doing laundry or making dinner or driving myself to work in the morning because I’m currently a crippled mess and she has been nothing but endlessly patient.

When I told my boss the whole story this morning, she told me that perhaps that accident was just the thing I needed. In the middle of everything, it was a difficult situation that we could handle and a chance for me to practice trusting her to watch out for me.

And you know, she’s right. After cutting one’s foot and having to rely on someone else to help you for the next several days, agonizing over picking out the perfect kitchen table seems so much easier. I woke up this morning to find the woman I love still in bed—in our bed—beside me. Making French toast for dinner and eating on the floor because our couch and kitchen table haven’t been delivered yet, listening to the rain beat against the windows of our gorgeous (if mostly empty) apartment, and the novelty of kissing her before I go to sleep at night and when I wake up make all the other little annoyances just a little less important.

I went to a funeral yesterday. I didn’t know him very well, my great uncle, although lots of people asked me did I remember this and did I remember that about interacting with him when I was in elementary school. I don’t really except I know that he looked a lot like my grandmother. It was really more like a gathering of strangers that my immediate family assured were related to me than anything else. The church was Catholic but had stained glass that looked more like Mondrian than Tiffany. I was uncomfortable but I don’t know if it because it was because of the ritual or the lack of it. His children and grandchildren cried at the remembrance. I cried too. Not because Uncle Don’s departure—which hadn’t even been sudden as my own grandfather’s had—had a very great impact but because death forces you to remember that things change. This too shall pass. This too shall pass. I think if I were ever to get words marked permanently into my flesh, clichéd as they may be, those four would be among the top contenders. It’s a meditation for me in lieu of my old beliefs. This too. The good things. The not-so-good things. The person whose scent is so intoxicating and comforting that you could breathe her in until kingdom come and the person whose voice is so annoying that you cannot stand to listen to her for one more minute. It will all fade into few dusty memories inscribed on the title page of a dog-eared book in a box at an estate sale.

Cheng Yen, a Buddhist nun of great eminence, said, “Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.” She might be right, you know. They all might, the Buddhists. Maybe the best way is never to love anything nor to hate it because nothing ever hurts if you don’t care about letting it go. But I spent too long wondering whether I’d ever be happy to back off on those good feelings now, even if I’ll be sorry when they tarnish.

I am moving tomorrow. Out of my mom and dad’s house and in to a new apartment with my girlfriend. Two big steps all together. I rarely take one big step, let alone two, but even in all of the overwhelming emotions, I’m not feeling confusion or uncertainty. I know this is the right thing and I’m excited about paint colors and side tables and martini glasses and space for my Kitchen-Aid mixer. I’m thrilled that I can wake up next to her every morning because I’ve been waiting a long time for that. Since September for sure and you know, when I think about it, since my heart was broken the first time and that certain future seemed much less certain.

I don’t know everything yet. Sometimes I feel like I don’t know anything. I walk through furniture stores wondering if the salesman sees me as an adult or as my five-year-old self whom I still feel like sometimes and whom I’m desperately trying to hide when I thank him, by his first name, for his offer to help me find the perfect armchair. I try to do it in the most responsible way I know how. I make lists and spreadsheets and I Google things like how to keep a drain clear. But mostly I’m making it up as I go along. Does everyone? I’ve been tired and headachey for a week now. She’s better at it than I am, letting go and being excited. When I’m alone or at work it’s harder but she’s quick to pull me close and remind me that it’s okay to feel a little bit anxious sometimes. I just hope her enthusiasm rubs off too. I’m not good at being unabashedly thrilled—my self-consciousness usually gets in the way—but I want to get better about it. I’m just trying to remember that this is a chance to practice.

It too will pass.

I cannot forget that.

I resolve again to try to drop the fear and the anxiety and the self-doubt for even just another hour and feel what it’s like to be happy, to be growing, to be making a little step toward making sure there are a few tears at my own eulogy. If it too will fade away, why am I so afraid to fall into the feeling entirely?

As you get older, some things happen more frequently—like paying bills and spending hours on the phone with insurance companies—and some things happen less—like classroom parties for every minor holiday of the year and three months of summer vacation. One of the hardest things for me to adjust to as an adult was the lack of clear markers that the year was progressing. As a kid I knew I could count on the number of days until the the school assembly that meant classes were cut short all day or the number of “sleeps” until Santa Claus arrived. Even in college I spent particularly tedious classes thinking about how many hours remained until I could meet my friends for drinks. But when you’re a grown-up, all that flies right out the window. You get up, go to work, come home, make dinner, go to bed, and do it again. While there are tiny interruptions by weekends, it’s largely personal responsibility to break the monotony and establish things to look forward to. Sometimes it can feel like you’re going absolutely nowhere.

While I’ve shed most of my recognition of holidays established during my religious upbringing, I find it helpful to observe quarter and cross-quarter days as a way of marking time. Sometimes I borrow established cultural elements to help mark these days, other times I simply let the day pass normally but with a small mental nod that, for example, autumn is halfway through. We’ve just now passed the fourth cross-quarter day of the year, which Western European humans from whom I learned my traditions have variously recognized as Samhain, Halloween, All Saints Eve, and Winternacht. I build fires, incorporate squash and cinnamon into every meal I can possibly wedge them inside, snuggle with my cats, and hang lights on my house because it’s comforting and cozy—compensating for the rising dark. We tell ourselves that in 2012 we’re far too sophisticated to honor those old rituals but we do, just hidden in the guise of Starbucks’ pumpkin spice lattes.

I’ve actually been trying to write this post for weeks now and I’m not even genuinely sure if it now encompasses everything I wanted to express but it seems fitting anyway to publish it on this American feast day celebrating the harvest, our labor, and the good health of our friends and family (but of course, we’re too civilized for that Pagan nonsense—right?). If you, my dear reader, see this today between your helpings of mashed potatoes or while you’ve snuck away from the inevitable family drama, keep in mind that this too shall pass. Just a month now until the winter solstice and before you know it, there will be buds appearing on the trees. Acknowledge the things that are troubling, cherish the things worth holding on to, celebrate them in the best ways you know how—with food and games and song—and move forward.