LEMON-ZESTED SINGLE SERVING BLUEBERRY PANCAKES.

I’ve known this fact for decades, knew it even before I read Plath’s poetry, before I stumbled into the wash and fire of Plath’s words as a teen. But somehow, now that I am older—older than Plath was when she finally, successfully, ended her own life—the reality is gutting. She had so little time to do the work that she did. She gave us an anger (and a black humor) unlike any we knew. From her, we inherited a new earth of literature, and to her, we gave nothing except an overpowering will to leave.

Karen plays us recordings of Plath chatting warmly about poetry, Plath’s voice resonant with an elegant, trans-atlantic accent that no longer exists amongst Americans. In portraits, she holds her chubby-limbed children, Frieda and Nicholas. She glows at Ted Hughes in their living room. She is sunny, ruddy-cheeked, twinkle-eyed. She terrifies me, her ability to be so ebullient and so capable of ending her own life, all at once. This is Freud’s uncanny, made manifest in the beautiful body of a brilliant woman.

I look back at the bust of Virginia Woolf that sits at the entrance to the library’s special collections room, and the tears come. These two women taught me what it was to be a writer. Reading Mrs. Dalloway, I discovered language. Reading Ariel, I saw honesty fresh as a newly bled cut. These women showed me how words could be strung together to break hearts, fatal pearls adorning the throat.

But now, now. I sit with their drafts, their edits, the way they thought, the granular contents of their hearts and minds. Karen passes around Plath’s journal and the edits Woolf made prior to publishing the U.S. version of To The Lighthouse. Plath writes about trips to the beach and warm summer love. Woolf softens the language of her novel for us tender-tongued Americans. Being in this room is like being inside their minds, an obsessive intoxication. None of us wants to leave.

We reluctantly shuffle out, already missing this intimacy, the monolithic electricity that runs through their work. My eye catches on a passage from Plath’s journal:

July 1950: I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool, sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. Now I know how people can live without books, without college. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I’d call myself a fool to ask for more…

She was 18. It was the summer before her freshman year at Smith College. She planted strawberries, ate blueberries, drank milk. She was, if we can believe her, content.

These quick, small-batch blueberry pancakes, then, are for Sylvia. For that spark of a moment where she thought perhaps she could, “[go] on living, near the earth”.

And they are for you, for those sweet, lazy moments when you don’t want to make a giant batch of pancakes. For a mellow weekend on your own or with your partner. They are absolutely fluffy, dotted with lemon zest, and robust with juicy, fresh blueberries. Eat them with generous amounts of butter, warm maple syrup, and perhaps a tang of yogurt. Double (or even triple) the recipe, depending on how many you’re feeding.

(Those of you jonesing for pictures—they’re coming! As soon as I get home and can edit them, you’ll get to see all I write about above in living color. Promise.)