Quinces, and time, and refuge

Slow-cooking preserves during a particularly bad few weeks

Last year’s quince haul

This has been another good year for quinces, and everyone I know with trees has had excess fruit to give away. For the past month, my kitchen counter has been covered in bumpy golden quinces fragrantly waiting for me to find the time to cook them.

That's because quinces, grainy and acrid when raw, demand time. This year, I've pushed the boundaries of my own patience by making Turkish- and Persian-style preserves: Peeling the fruit and cutting it into thick slices, then loading the fruit into a pot with a little water, a little lemon juice, and a mountain of sugar. Slipping in a cheesecloth packet of quince seeds. Then covering the pot with a towel and a tight lid, and simmering the quinces for three hours.

The longer you cook quinces with sugar and acid, the more the cooking breaks down the astringent compounds, transforming tannins into anthocyanins. With time and patience, the color of the fruit transforms from pale yellow, to peach, and finally to a hue somewhere between magenta and blood. The slices of fruit disintegrate a bit, of course, and the pectin-rich syrup grows velvety and thick. Yet the flavor, rather than oxidizing and darkening, holds true: apple and lychee and guava.

I've only been able to cook one batch of quince a week. But I’ve found, during the aftermath of this shitty election, that the time spent patiently tending quinces is even more meaningful than the results.

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The weekend after the election, I did my first day-long zazen retreat in more than five years: eight hours total of sitting, broken up by short walks, meals, and chanting. One of the thoughts that kept coming up for me during those hours on the cushion was how slowly time was moving.

Now that I'm in my 50s, time whooshes by, and I often get into bed wondering why it’s already time to sleep again. I fill every spare moment with stimulation, slipping in 15 minutes of Instagram Reels between tasks. So to count out the long hours of a zazenkai in breaths — breath after breath, thought after thought — was, if not a pleasure, a way of experiencing time that had grown unfamiliar to me.

Even on good days, zazen is far from a restorative experience. Going into this retreat, four days after the election, I half-expected that I would spend the entire day swept up in dread and sadness. But the flow of the light around my vision as the sun rose captured more of my attention. So did the bottoms of my feet as we walked kinhin, lifting each foot up and setting it back down on the wood floor. Even the burn radiating up my oblique muscles felt more present than politics. The slowness of time, as grueling as it sometimes was, became a refuge. I drove home achy and content. I slept hard for the first time that week.

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My husband and I spend our days right now managing our anxiety over the targets that MAGA has painted on LGBTQ+ folks, particularly trans children and the families who want to keep them alive. In truth, we are worried about so many people MAGA targets, but our fears for our own community are the most immediate and corporeal.

As a gay man who came out during the deadliest years of the U.S. AIDS epidemic and fled to San Francisco, I feel more resentful than shocked by the return of these attacks. Folks my age have been through this before. We know how to survive them, or at least we hope we do. I am more worried for young LGBTQ+ folks who grown up in a world where they have seen positive futures for their lives on the Internet, TV, books, and movies. I fear they will have to scramble to armor up or else they won't make it. It grinds at me to think that they will grow so accustomed to wearing a shell of defiance and wariness that they will never be able to take it off again.

My wish for all these young people is that, just as my generation did, they seek out refuge—a house, a gay bar, a city like Portland—and discover the protective sweetness and connection that blooms inside. And my wish for Portland is that we recognize the importance of being a refuge and make our city more welcoming for all the people who will need to flee here to survive.

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I have spent time this past week avoiding politics. News fasts. The Great British Baking Show. Seeking refuge in the slowness of time though, has not been an escape. It has been a reminder.

It reminds me that the world is greater and more interconnected than politics. That this moment is big enough to contain fear and anger and sweetness all at once. That in every anxious minute, my body is still breathing breath after breath. That, outside my window, the asshole squirrels are digging up my carrots and tiny orange mushrooms are sprouting up from the wood chips. And that, every so often, it is time to stir the quinces, which are bubbling aromatically on the stove, turning a deep and improbable red.