Here an editor may share a story, essay, poem, artwork, or a mixture of these. The work in this “enclosed” space may or may not have a connection to the issue’s theme. In this Editors’ Enclosure, Jasmine’s friend, Sarah Raymont, shares two emailed installments of “The Sweet Life,” about COVID-19 quarantining in Brooklyn, New York.
Hello Readers, In this “Editor’s Enclosure,” I’ve decided to write only an introduction to my friend, Sarah Raymont, before letting her writing speak. A brief backstory: I met Sarah in the early 2000s in Norwich, England. We were attending the University of East Anglia to obtain Masters Degrees in Creative Writing. We were two of a handful of foreigners in the program. Right off the bat, everyone in the program peeled off into small writing groups. I’d like to think Sarah and I formed a small group, along with three other lovely ladies, because of our brilliance and popularity, but mostly we’d been left out of the “cooler” groups of “serious” writers. Nonetheless, Sarah and I had many adventures in Norwich that had nothing (and everything) to do with writing, including a surreal night in a pub/nightclub where we waited near the bar for Sarah’s roommate to exit a Bob Geldof concert next door when two Scottish men got into a gregarious fight and soon we were ducking thrown pint glasses. Fast-forward a few years: Sarah is living in New York City and had begun writing emails she titled “The Sweet Life” to a friend in London. The Sweet Life was a candy store where she worked. This was back in 2007, and when the letters ended, Sarah was on #39 of The Sweet Life installments. For the next 13 years, there would be no Sweet Life emails…until Saturday, March 2020, when in my inbox was, “Sweet Life #40: Cornucopia.” To begin it, Sarah wrote: I decided to bring back the newsletter I used to keep back in in 2007, which ended at #39. At that time, I was single, homeschooling kids part time, and working at the Sweet Life, a candy store on the corner of Hester and Ludlow in the Lower East Side of New York. It started out as a letter to a friend in London, who has since died. Much has changed in thirteen years. Namely, that you could go outside. Back then, I would write about the customers, montanamouthful.com
chocolates and licorice, the changing neighborhood, which was Orthodox Jewish, hipsters and Chinese. Back then, I used to see hope in a package of cookies. Once a week after work, I’d go to the bar under my apartment on Canal Street, get a glass of Prosecco and write about something small. I thought it would be a good time to do that again, because things feel so, so big. And we are all forced to see all our truths right now, there’s nowhere for them to go. Montana Mouthful | 81