Academy to the Kitchen

K, so here's the thing.

The intention was to create this space, and somewhat nurture this space, before I was in the midst of the chaos, the muck if you will. And yet here I am at the end of my first week of pastry school feeling, as I haphazardly slap a blog together, that I am running down the street trying to pull my pants up and dragging a bag which exhales fluttering papers with each garbled step. That's a visual. I think George Constanza may have performed something to this effect. I am familiar with this feeling. And this visual.

The ground has moved beneath my feet. In the past six months, everything from the trajectory for my husband and I to the breakdown of our everyday has changed.

This is a step, a step off what feels like a cliff. After a life lived for writing, and three years of post-secondary education in Creative Writing at some of the finest universities in the country, I realized my heart wasn't in my education. I know that until my end I will be a writer and passionately immerse myself in that love but in the midst of my first years of university, and the first few years of my marriage, I realized my passions were leading me in a different direction. My husband stepped out of his Master's in Theology in the same direction. We have both stepped from the academy to the kitchen.

For the next six months, my husband will be working in a culinary program and I will be working in a baking and pastry arts program. I scuttle to school at 630 every morning and stagger home at two, briefly high five my husband in the narrow corridor that separates the training kitchens as he arrives for his class time, and then hold my eyes open with my fingers until he gets home. We are on opposite schedules. I finish a seven hour day just as he arriving to begin his.

This is simply a place to track our progress. It will get better, I promise. Right now, it's just stretching out. As the clustering web in my brain begins to slacken, this place will come to look more like a preconceived idea and less like a one-off.

B