Unfinished business

and a hummingbird cake for Vera’s birthday

I swear the books are breeding behind my back.

The piles on either side of the sofa have been quietly multiplying for months, staring down the stalwarts on the coffee table. A few rogue volumes have claimed the living room speaker as their new perch. Meanwhile, a box beneath the office desk is overflowing with strays, all biding their time until a new bookshelf—promised but not yet real—finally materializes in the bedroom.

I haven’t read most of them. Maybe I never will.

There’s a word for this: tsundoku. It’s the Japanese term for acquiring books and letting them pile up, unread. It carries no inherent judgment—just the gentle acknowledgment that sometimes we accumulate more than we can handle.

A kind of gravity clings to what we gather, whether or not we can bear the burden. That in itself is a kind of story.

It’s not the weight you carry 

but how you carry it – 
books, bricks, grief – 
it’s all in the way 
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not, 
put it down.

—Heavy, Mary Oliver

A collection of half-processed feelings and unfinished chapters—what I’ve gathered, held, and let go—feels as real as those burgeoning books.

The kitchen I once called home still visits me in memory: its scents, its echoes, the way the light spilled across the pale yellow cabinets in the morning, an ever-changing palette of colours as the day progressed.

Parting with a space might seem like a small grief, but in that kitchen, I measured my life in moments far richer than a span of time. The warmth of shared meals, the sharp tang of citrus on my fingertips, the hum of a kettle signaling a moment of pause. It was my refuge when the world outside frayed too thin.

That room holds one of the hardest goodbyes of my life.

There have been larger losses, of course. Profound ones. The kind that split time in two. They mark you not with scars, but with seams of light and shadow—the chiaroscuro vein of grief. A streak of darkness woven so thoroughly into your being that it becomes indistinguishable from the light. Yet its beautiful darkness casts joy in sharp relief even more fully, with a deeper glow that shines bright.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

—The Divine Afflatus, H.L. Mencken

There’s a temptation to want to solve things. To organize the grief, flatten the ache. To believe that if we just do the right thing, buy the right book, say the right goodbye, it will all make sense.

But not everything can be fixed. Not every book must be read. Not every ending is clean.

Life resists neatness. It is layered and unfinished. It’s a cake that didn’t rise and unopened books. A goodbye said too soon, or never quite right. It is walking away from what you love because you must. It is carrying that love anyway, always.

And so, the piles remain. Not as failure, but as a testament to longing, to curiosity. To the things we hope to understand, someday. We carry more than we say. We grieve in chapters. Each day, we slip into our lives with what we’ve carried, and what we’re still learning to hold.

Maybe that’s enough: the light and the dark, together. The shadowed grace of becoming.

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Hummingbird cake

serves 10-12

To my mind, hummingbird cake, lush with banana, pineapple, and spice, is the ultimate birthday cake. This latest is for my dear friend Vera, who, like me, is an April baby.

Hummingbird cake has its roots in Jamaica, where it was originally known as Doctor Bird Cake, named after the island’s national bird. The recipe made its way to the U.S. in the late 1960s as part of a tourism promotion, but it found real traction in 1978 when Southern Living published a version submitted by Mrs. L.H. Wiggins of North Carolina.

That version became iconic, though the magazine didn’t mention the cake’s Caribbean origins, a detail quietly lost as it was absorbed into the Southern baking canon. Like many beloved recipes, its path is layered: passed along, adapted, and reimagined, often without attribution.

Still, the flavours carry something true — sweet, spiced, sun-soaked — a reminder that what we gather, in kitchens or in life, carries weight. And sometimes, what we pass down is more than a recipe — it’s a story still unfolding.

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups granulated sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3 large eggs, beaten

1½ cups vegetable oil

1½ teaspoons vanilla extract

¾ cup crushed pineapple in juice, undrained

2 cups chopped ripe bananas (about 3 bananas)

1 cup chopped pecans, toasted

Cream Cheese Frosting

2 (8-oz.) packages cream cheese, softened

1 cup salted butter, softened

2 (16-oz.) packages powdered sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

To finish the cake

¾ cup pecan halves, toasted (you can also finely chop the pecans for the cake topping, as I have done here)

1. Heat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease and flour three 9-inch round cake pans and set aside.

2. Combine flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, and cinnamon in a large bowl; whisk to incorporate all the ingredients together.

3. Add eggs and oil, stirring just until dry ingredients are moistened. Stir in vanilla, pineapple, bananas, and toasted pecans until evenly incorporated through batter.

4. Divide batter evenly among the cake pans.

5. Bake until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes. Cool in pans on wire racks 10 minutes. Remove from pans to wire racks, and cool completely, about 1 hour.

Prepare the Cream Cheese Frosting:

1. Beat cream cheese and butter together with an electric mixer on medium-low speed until smooth.

2. Gradually add powdered sugar, about a cup at a time, beating at low speed until blended after each addition. Stir in vanilla. Increase speed to medium-high, and beat until fluffy, 1 to 2 minutes.

Assemble Cake:

Place one cake layer on a serving platter; spread top with one cup of the frosting. Top with second layer, and spread with 1 cup frosting. Top with third layer, and spread remaining frosting over top and sides of cake. Arrange pecan halves on top of cake.