“It’s the last of the summer corn,” Sam at the Wright’s Farm booth said. “I’m surprised it’s even here right now.”

I bought three ears, a delicata squash, and an acorn and honeynut squash from Stoneberry Farm next door. Harlem Valley Homestead’s peppers beckoned in their twisted red skins. Transition time at the farmers’ market, remnants of summer at the threshold of fall.

I’m in transition too. I feel like “a racecar with the brakes on,” as public speaking coach Bill Hoogterp described me once, almost 10 years ago while I was working at Facebook. I have this vision of where I want to go now – deeper into food and community and my own creative process – and I am the only thing standing in my way. It’s like wanting to cross a street and feeling like I’m dragging my legs under me. Part of me knows that what’s on the other side, and the crossing itself, is perfectly safe. Another part of me is terrified to lose all the space I’ve created for myself.

So, Transition Soup. The way for me to move through the season is to cook it. And eat it.

First, the stock. I had been preparing for this recipe, even if I didn’t know yet what it would be, and had frozen three corn cobs and a bunch of garden celery tops. Those went into the pot, along with the fresh cobs I just bought, kernels shaved off and saved for a later soup step. Two lobes of garlic. Bay leaves (not the ones I used to pick on my hikes in San Carlos, sadly). A piece of kombu, and three dried chiles de árbol I brought back from Sedona. A large pinch of kosher salt. Water to cover all of it.

It bubbled for an hour while I did other things. When I returned, it was medicinally bitter from the celery, and almost too spicy from the chiles. I kept going, some mixture of faith and curiosity urging me forward. I diced an onion, the peppers, sautéed them in half a stick of butter, and added the fresh shucked corn. Now the fun part: My husband had made pumpkin chocolate bars from a NYT Cooking recipe earlier in the week and left half a can of pumpkin in the fridge; I added that too, and suddenly the pot glowed orange like that was the color it was waiting for. In went the delicata and honeynut squash, skins on, already roasted and dusted with cilantro from a lunch I’d made earlier in the week.

I ladled the stock into the soup like I was making risotto or béchamel, letting the vegetables absorb the liquid before I added more. When the consistency looked right, I tasted it. The sweetness of the vegetables had calmed the spicy bitterness of the stock. It wanted salt, and some potatoes, but other than that it was ready.

I topped the soup with more cilantro, scallions, sliced radishes leftover from taco night, tangy farmers’ cheese. I swallowed the alchemy of transition, soup today, another form tomorrow.