sarah in nyc

 Anyone who knows me knows that I am a  material girl. No, not like Madonna, but I am a girl of material culture. The other day I used this napkin at breakfast. This napkin was sewn by my friend Esther. using this napkin isn't quite as much fun as spending an afternoon with Esther but using this napkin reminds me of many meals eaten together, long conversations and rummaging through thrift stores together. This object holds decades of memories for me. This cracked teapot  matches my parents' dairy set from my childhood. I loved that set of dishes which is no more. I had found this particular teapot at my local thrift and used it until it was too cracked to use. My husband purchased a replacement and I have used it for several years. Last week my bottle of rosewater jumped from the pantry shelf and murdered the teapot. I was pretty sad. eBay found the answer to my despair. Not it isn't another of the teapot pictured above. I went back to another childhood memory. This is a...

 The other day I made a dinner that ended up being all orange. It was an accident. But it is better than the times I have made dinners where everything is white.  I was rearranging some of the vintage linens in my stash and I noticed that a centerpiece wasn't just ecru/brownish but had yellow stripes. I soaked it for a day in Oxy-clean and now it looks the way it was meant to. This piece will probably be in the center of our Shabbat table this week. ( Oh, and the color goes with our orange dinner) My friend Nini came to town and we spent the day together. We went to the exhibit at the NYPL celebrating a century of the New Yorker. You  can visit the exhibit virtually.  It's a delight to go to an exhibit that was clearly so much fun to put together.  I just loved this photo of James Baldwin. Below are Harold and Lillian Ross's typewriters. And here is the besotted couple. The curators created a frieze of New Yorker covers.  I loved seeing the originals of the...