It feels good to have my own space again. My belongings are finally unpacked (well, most of them, anyway) and put away in closets, cabinets and atop shelves—a sure sign of permanence in a housing situation.

There’s a supreme comfort in having your possessions accessible to you, isn’t there? As soon as I unpacked my cookbooks, which had remained sealed in storage since Virginia, I couldn’t stop tearing them from the bookshelves and rifling through their photos and recipes. I was ravenous not for the food, but for the return of a sense of ownership. Even if I wasn’t planning on making anything—and for awhile, the fridge and pantry were too barren to raid—it was still nice to know that Ina Garten’s Tuscan Lemon Chicken was there, just in case my eyes (or my soul) got hungry.

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There’s a lot that changes when you move from one part of the country to another: geographical features, regional chain stores, and your neighbors’ accents (though we haven’t run into any of Bill Swerski’s Superfans quite yet). One thing I didn’t expect to change so drastically? The contents of the grocery stores.

Recently, over tea and Girl Scout cookies with a friend, I mentioned that I had been surprised to learn—at age eighteen—that Jews make up less than 2% of the U.S. population. Growing up next to Skokie, Illinois, which held the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel, I always assumed that at least half of America was Jewish. The same proportion of my middle-school classmates had thrown bar or bat mitzvahs, after all. He just laughed at me, but after stepping foot in the Skokie Jewel-Osco last weekend, it was obvious why I’d made that assumption. Huge posters hung from the ceiling near the entrance, wishing shoppers a happy Passover. An entire corner of the store had been set aside for Passover foods, and a permanent section held a kosher deli, bakery and dairy case. Growing up on the North Shore, it seemed as normal to anticipate Chanukah as it was Christmas.

It was a far cry from the grocery stores in the D.C. suburbs, which catered to a Salvadorean population; there was no type of dried chile you couldn’t find there. And there was no short supply of neighborhood Vietnamese markets, either. (On a related note, here’s a little public service announcement: if you’re into pho and you’ve never been to the Eden Center, you haven’t lived.)

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Somehow, enough time has crept up on me that I’ve been able to establish two fall traditions as a resident of Virginia. They include, for one, a pre-Halloween trip with Ted’s family to a haunted forest, one that’s about an hour outside of Richmond and squarely in the middle of nowhere. After sunset, we take back roads to a huge cornfield framed by dark forest and, probably, serial killers. We board a hayride bound for the middle of that cornfield, where we’re dropped off and left to fend for ourselves. Stumbling our way through a corn maze, we pass a roaring bonfire that marks the entrance to the haunted forest.

It’s a setup that poises you to react like a high-strung Thoroughbred before a big race, ready to shy away at the drop of a feather. So we trot and high-step our way through barely-lit abadoned houses, accompanied by soft but pulse-quickening horror-movie music, accosted and pursued by entirely too many deranged-looking men with chainsaws. Both years, Ted’s family has laughed at me for screaming so loudly. And that’s all I have to say about that.

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My friend Emily throws the very best theme parties. In college, she dreamed up ideas and organized them miraculously into being, such as when her urge to throw a Chanukah-themed golf party led us to making latkes for twenty. Always a stick in the mud, I groused about how annoying all that damn potato-grating would be, but Emily saw the big picture: that after nine rounds of holiday drinks at nine different campus locations (including Jello shots at the library—oh, college!) nobody, not even yours truly, would care that the apartment would smell like hot oil for weeks. And you know what? I didn’t.

In fact, it’s times like those that I look back on fondly, especially now that Emily’s packed her boxes and moved to a tiny New York City apartment. Right up until her departure this summer, she was planning get-togethers for everybody still in town, always with a creative twist. Case in point: to commemorate the arrival of Top Chef in D.C., she invited us over for a series of potlucks, with the stipulation that our contributions would be (in true Top Chef fashion) part of a challenge. The first night, we made foods that somehow represented our home cities; I explained my salted butter caramel ice cream as being a dessert-ified version of the classic Chicago caramel corn from Garrett’s. At the height of World Cup fever, we brought over dishes inspired by the countries that made it to the final four. I chose Germany.

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Hello, my name is Maddie, and I haven’t been on a vacation in two. years.

It all started so innocently, with the wrapping-up of two delicious weeks in Hawaii in 2008, where I devoured tuna steaks and soaked in the ocean air like it was my job. But the next May brought with it a supposedly wonderful thing called “college graduation,” in which you leave the all-expenses-deferred student lifestyle only to stumble upon a rude awakening called “student loan payments.” Hello, full-time job. Hello, entire post-graduate summer spent running through the D.C. humidity in a pantsuit trying to secure said full-time job.

And now we are here, two years later. Recession be damned, I secured that full-time job, and the ten precious, precious vacation days it offered. I also secured a rather alarming amount of real life-induced, vacation-starved burnout along the way. So starting tomorrow, I’ll be using half of my vacation days (and my entire tax refund) to fly to Croatia, sun myself on its beaches, and gorge myself on its seafood risotto. I will stay in a cozy little apartment, and take day trips to Bosnia, offshore islands, and national parks. The whole time, I will also be cursing myself for not living in Europe, where giving someone only ten vacation days would probably be considered a criminal offense.

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We all cook for different reasons: to experiment with something new, to perform a political act, or simply to alleviate the growling of our stomachs. Lately, I’ve been cooking for the feeling that I’ve created something: for the tactile pleasure of working with my hands, and for the tangible results. When you follow a recipe from start to finish, you can rest assured that something real and material will be borne of your labors. (And it doesn’t even matter if the resulting food is any good!)

Here’s the thing: I sit in a swivel chair all day, staring at a computer. Behind the computer is a white wall. I enter data into Excel spreadsheets, I scan and file documents, and I sift through legal bills, but I don’t encounter natural light and I don’t ever finish the day having created something. Nowadays, cooking is how I stretch my boundaries, and how I exalt in my own ability to do something worth writing home about. Someday, I’ll make a living out of my creative powers. For now, I have my kitchen.

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No matter how many candles accumulate atop my birthday cake, I still find that nothing captures my imagination better than a really well-written, well-illustrated children’s book. A properly-told story captures the freedom and whimsy that came naturally to us as finger-painting, play-acting toddlers.

There were seasonal favorites in our little-one library; I still get the urge to read Happy Winter (as a 23-year-old!) every time Christmas rolls around. But for summer, there was Blueberries for Sal, in which a little girl spends most of her time among the berry bushes plunking fruit into her mouth, not her pail. Despite never having picked blueberries myself, I could almost feel the warm sun on my back whenever I opened that book.

Recently, I got to recreate Sal’s plotline when Ted and I headed to his hometown blueberry patch outside of Richmond. Now, overshooting on hand-picked berries seems like it’d be hard to do, right? It’s not like picking apples or peaches; bead-sized objects are slower to fill a bucket than fist-sized ones. The concentration it takes to find and reach the ripest fruit is intense, and by the time the early-morning clouds parted to reveal a hot midday sun, sweat was pouring down our faces.

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When asked what you love about summer, there’s a vast repository of stock answers to choose from. And it’s not hard to appreciate the joys of extended sunlight, the feeling of warm sand between your toes, or the fact that tomatoes now taste exactly as they were meant to taste. But there are times when I revel, just a little bit, in feeling like a seasonal Grinch.

I’m ghostly pale, and require excessive amounts of sunscreen to make it alive through August. I hate to say it, but temperatures over 70 make me feel sluggish and grouchy, and I sweat rather easily. Worst of all is the office: the Arctic blast of the air conditioning, yes, but also the fact that most of the staff is vacation-bound and the workload light. There, I said it: I’d rather be kept busy at work, multitasking and problem-solving and all that good stuff. When you’re the resident Entry-Level Employee at Company X, your work is by definition less difficult and less time-sensitive, which is all fine and good until things get deathly quiet right around, oh, July or August. Don’t get me wrong! I really do enjoy catching up on New York Times articles and blog posts between the occasional paper-filing jobs. Just not until my eyes cross and I realize I’m barely halfway through the workday.

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I’m not usually one to miss important milestones. But it seems that I graduated from college one year ago last May, and the entire month swept by without my recognizing the anniversary.

In the grand scheme of things, how meaningful is this milestone, really? It’s not a day that we’re socially conditioned to remember, like we recognize a close friend’s birthday with a restaurant dinner, or our wedding anniversaries with gifts that riff on paper, silver, or lace. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since my college graduation ceremony, it’s that life no longer hands you obvious deadlines, and the rest of your life’s “universal” rites of passage can be counted on two measly fingers (marriage, and babies—if you even choose to dabble in either). For twenty-two years, my classmates and I were shuttled in lockstep through various life stages with astounding predictability, mostly thanks to our highly-structured educational system. And then? We reached the last page of our guidebook the day we donned one-size-fits-all gowns and threw our tasseled caps in the air. In the wide-open plains of post-graduate life, we’ve had to find our own meaning and order. You know, construct our own roads and fences, if you’ll beat that metaphor to death with me.

So I chose to celebrate this belated anniversary, arbitrary though it may be, and I celebrated with cake. That’s how all milestones should be marked, right? It was banana chocolate walnut cake, extraordinarily light but equally flavorful, and yet simple enough for the made-up occasion. There was ice cream too, of course.

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My friends, it’s Friday, and I’m headed up to New York City. Three of my friends (Monica, Kim, and Anna, blogstresses all of them!) are conveniently running the same half-marathon in Brooklyn, which makes it pretty easy to see them all in one weekend. And with round-trip bus fare priced at $24, I had no reason to stay in Washington. In just a few hours, I’ll be snuggled up in my bus seat, concerned mostly with staring out the window and flipping through a stack of glossy magazines.

I’ll be sleeping on the futon of my dear friend Anna, who visited Washington last fall and stayed with me then. I’d just moved into my current apartment, which was, er, sparsely furnished, and cardboard boxes still adorned the living room. Thankfully, she didn’t seem to mind, and we had a great time sitting cross-legged on the floor with plates of lasagna after a full day of vineyard-hopping. And she brought dessert that lasted the whole weekend: monstrous slices of red velvet cake from her favorite Brooklyn bakery, Cake Man Raven (that’s the nickname of charismatic owner Raven Dennis). Word on the street is that Cake Man Raven counts Oprah, Robert De Niro, Patti LaBelle and P. Diddy as fans, and it was easy to understand why after taking my first bite of cake.

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