and breathtakingly close to home
By EMMA CAMPBELL WEBSTER
I WANTED TO TELL YOU THAT I’d made another soup, but then war broke out. I was going to tell you that I’d made it from a recipe in a book I found when renting a house in Laurel Canyon the year I first got pregnant, but then babies and children we killed and taken hostage. I was going to say it was from Alice Waters’s classic, The Art of Simple Food, her distillation of all that she’d learned from living and cooking in France, a country and culture with which I, too, feel a deep kinship, but then three hundred thousand people were displaced from their homes. I might have gone on to tell you about my attempts to go dancing with my friends last weekend, and how we learned it’s not really possible to dance before 10pm in Los Angeles which is a shame when you’re mothers in your forties, how every place we’d planned to go was closed for a private party, how we ended up dancing to Toto at legendary East side gay bar, Akbar, but this was the same weekend that two hundred and sixty people who also wanted to dance were slaughtered at a music festival. Perhaps I would have mentioned the changing light, the subtle shift of the smell in the air, the strange, alien-like beauty of goosenecked gourds, if I hadn’t seen the warning to over a million civilians to evacuate. What point could there possibly be in me telling you about the unexpected affection I’ve developed for the spider I once feared who lives in the sash pocket of my kitchen window, when Ukraine is begging to be remembered as the world’s eyes are turned elsewhere?
I would give anything to talk to you of my longing to light the fire if the heart of the world wasn’t burning.
Emma Campbell Webster writes Letters from Los Angeles, notes from an Oxford-educated English writer on the uncommon, peculiar, and occasionally magical experience of life in the City of Angels. It appears weekly at substack.com.
