When I want to channel the feeling of ease, I’m on a dock on Lake Wylie in York, South Carolina.

The dock extends from my friend Cate’s family summer house, built by her grandparents, where Cate has invited the same group of women to gather every September for 20 years.

Ease tastes like pimento cheese, pickled okra, Triscuits, and Cape Cod potato chips, the staple foods of our ladies’ weekend, washed down with a case of rosé dosed in baby-food-jar glasses. It smells like morning coffee the earliest riser brews for the rest of us, darker than I usually drink, perfect in a mismatched mug sipped in the cushioned kitchen window nook. It sounds, oddly, like the hum of the nuclear generator you can see from the nook, built on what was once Catawba land, now owned by Duke Energy – this is no unspoilt paradise. It’s as real as the women who show up for each other, year after year, through engagements, births, promotions, political victories, marathon completions, divorce and marital challenges, career transitions, injury, pandemic, and hurricanes. (We drink slightly more red wine than rosé during hurricanes.) We come as we are, our joy and our blemishes. After the outpouring of catching up we are content to sit in silence in each others’ presence for hours, punctuated by the occasional lake dip or dance party.

We intersperse our pimento cheese intake with nourishing, beautiful dishes we make alone or together as the feeling moves us. Some are preplanned: Alison Roman’s shallot pasta, veggie friends that we invented here, Tatjana’s magic salads, my Niçoise, always a different variation (this year’s had beets instead of tomatoes). Others are improvised effortlessly from what’s left in the fridge and pantry: soups, frittatas, and this year, squash and wheatberries. Skin-on butternut I sliced into half moons, tossed in olive oil and sea salt, and roasted with thick-sliced red onions and garden rosemary. The wheatberries I brought from my home farmers’ market, thinking they would be a soup but happy to use them with the squash for our dockside lunch.

The more I align the elements of my life with what I care about, the more my daily life resembles ladies’ weekend (at least on good days). Less effort. More delight. I go for a walk, and the woman I’ve been meaning to meet with from the farmers’ market is walking her dog in my direction. Another woman who has volunteered to do social media outreach for the Hastings Food Pantry walks by my house as I’m packing my car with neighbors’ contributions to drop off, saving us the trouble of scheduling an introduction. My friend invites me to his wedding and when I see the invitation, I know in my bones that the person who designed it is the person to design the logos I’ve been dreaming of. Less searching. More receiving.

Of course, life often doesn’t feel like ease. Some days even the smallest things, like folding laundry or paying bills or writing back to a friend, feel like too much effort. Squash and wheatberries is a recipe I make when I feel a sense of ease, and also to invite that feeling when I don’t have it.

In Lake Wylie, we take care of each other without much communication. Someone unloads the dishwasher. Someone (usually Cate) changes the playlist to suit the mood. Someone brings down to the dock a fresh bottle of rosé or gin and tonics and ice when they emerge from the house. We know each other. We all lead different lives, and care about the same things. Being here, with each other. Art, and pop culture. Pimento cheese, and squash and wheatberries. Tatjana ate hers right out of the serving bowl once we’d all had our fill. The sensuality of being in our flesh, the pleasure of hunger sated in the presence of friends. The ease of showing up as our selves, with no judgment – only love – for each other.