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description=Food, booze, and fun in France... and wherever else they feed me. Click to read Ciao Down, by Catherine, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.;
author=Catherine;

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ciao down catherine substack ciao down subscribe sign in home notes archive leaderboard about winter superbon catherine may 26 3 a completely normal obsession with seashells or how i got through a very bad winter catherine apr 20 2026 11 6 2 share when despair for the world grows in me i try to wendell berry my way through it and find peace in wild things i didn t really find peace but i did find seashells it was a hard winter my mom was really unwell and i spent more time in the trenches of eldercare than i expected i got really into seashells in kind of a weird way i was dissociating for far too long my brain s favorite and most useless trauma response so i started going on long walks to try to ground myself back in my body in paris that meant my local cemetery in america it meant walking the coastline once sometimes twice a day collecting the most perfect shells i could find as tiny but tangible reminders of all the beauty that still exists one day at the hospital my sister picked up my coat and asked why it was so heavy i replied without thinking my pockets are full of seashells she just said right normal no one really wanted to talk about my seashells in the way no one really wants to touch someone else s sadness but i felt like in the face of everything we could all use a little whimsy so it feels important to share that there is a saltwater clam shell called a kitten paw because it does in fact look like a kitten s paw i was going to a nature preserve in rhode island almost every day usually early in the morning or just before dusk one evening i turned a corner on the beach and saw a man in full camouflage holding a camo covered rifle half hidden in the brush ciao down is a reader supported publication to receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a free or paid subscriber subscribe i froze trying to understand if he was there to kill birds or humans then i realized i was standing there with tears frozen to my cheeks listening to gracie abrams on repeat and thought very calmly that he probably couldn t hurt me more than i was already hurting so i kept walking he gave me a small sheepish wave i kept walking quietly furious because who brings a gun to a public beach why do men have to ruin everything for everyone else in fact why are men at some point i became aware that i am too european for this now i am no longer accustomed to this particular american reality wherein you have the ever present possibility of man with a gun at any place anytime later in the parking lot i saw him again studying a sign when i got closer i realized it was deer hunting season and that i had been walking every day through a hunting preserve at dusk during peak feeding time so it turned out it was less that the men were ruining the landscape and more that i was misunderstanding it entirely i was ruining the hunting preserve for the men sadness has a way of making me self absorbed of narrowing down the world until it feels like everything is happening to you rather than around you every day i tried to mary oliver my way out of it mostly i just wore red ciao down is a reader supported publication to receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a free or paid subscriber subscribe 11 6 2 share previous next january superbon catherine mar 21 4 december superbon catherine jan 14 1 where a food writer eats in verona catherine dec 16 2025 4 1 loading more posts 2026 catherine down privacy terms collection notice start your substack get the app substack is the home for great culture this site requires javascript to run correctly please turn on javascript or unblock scripts