Gather is, among other things, an homage to our many muses. Some are those we have had the pleasure to learn from personally (our mothers, grandmothers, sisters, mentors). And others have opened our eyes to their slices of the wide world from afar, forever cementing themselves in our inspiration banks. One such muse is the great southern food and hospitality writer, Julia Reed.  She is the reason we started reading Garden & Gun (one of the world’s most pleasurable digests) and thus, the unsuspecting patron saint of our recent sojourn to Charleston, South Carolina. It seems perfectly natural that she would also be the source of the thread that ties it all together.

In her delightfully anecdotal tome But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!, she references a John Prine song about the precarious nature of the daily grind and more importantly, about the lens through which we view life’s tendency towards the mercurial: “You’re up one day, the next you’re down; It’s half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown; That’s the way the world goes round.” We went to Charleston under circumstances that were a bit uncertain, tossing our Type-A natures overboard to embrace what the heart wanted. What met us on the other side did that rare thing and outshone our mind’s eye.

We arrived, whipping past the reed-dotted wetland as a blazing sun dipped low into the Atlantic. Presumably this is the same sun that sets in our Pacific ocean, but here, it’s somehow bigger and brighter and closer. The air is different. People go out of their way for us without thinking they’re going out of their way at all. The first time we meet someone, we are drawn into their casual mastery of the art of conversation and by the second time, we are old friends. Meal after meal is quintessentially southern but also fresh, unexpected and fundamentally delicious. The cobblestone streets invite us to meander down their pathways suffused in history, encourage us to linger and wander and explore. It is as hard to explain as it is easy to overstate: our days in the city feel dusted with an exotically familiar magic.

And so Charleston is the happy day – the day you’re up – the half an inch of water that’s so beautiful you can’t believe it’s real. Certainly the world goes ‘round the same way in Charleston as it does elsewhere. But nearly every memory of the Lowcountry still has us walking on air.

With love from the Holy City,
Katie