high-bar baking

It’s been raining recently. Literally, not metaphorically, although I suppose the latter is true too. 

I take immense comfort from the rain. I wasn’t born to the desert, and I doubt I’ll ever adapt. I feel like Adam in East of Eden when he moves to the Salinas Valley. Born and raised in Connecticut, he gets restless in the long rainless summer. Even if it’s not meant to rain then, in California. Back east, three days without rain was cause for alarm. That’s how my bones feel. I can’t put my finger on it until the sky darkens. Then it all comes (pardon the expression) flooding back. 

I discovered it when I visited Ireland last year. Once upon a time my ancestors left there, but my DNA never did. My pasty skin craves the barest trickles of sunlight through misty clouds, and my blood longs for highs of 73 degrees in the dead of August. That was the climate my body was meant for. 

So when it does rain out here, what I could consider true rain, it is a blessing. A full two hours, we had tonight. Lightning, thunder, wind, the works. None of that desert flash-shower stuff, here and gone in an instant of downpour. Rain that lingers. Whose petrichor smell blows through the house and makes the air new again. 

That has nothing to do with White Chocolate Apricot Cookies, of course. But what topic, pray tell, could possibly transition into White Chocolate Apricot Cookies? What am I, a top shelf podcast host? 

I bought dried apricots last year to make this recipe the first time, and I’m only now realizing that I still have half-bags of all sorts of scattered recipe ingredients on the top shelf of my cupboard. So I’m starting to work through them. These are meant for a team board games session at work in a couple of days. Fingers crossed it goes well. 

And that we get more rain. 

As I will hear echo in my head until I die, as my father always replied whenever anyone said, “It’s going to rain” : 

“We need it.”