Milkweed and Honey Cake: A Memoir in Ritual Moments, by Wendy A. Horwitz

In Milkweed and Honey Cake: A Memoir in Ritual Moments, Wendy A. Horwitz lays out a constellation of experiences—some fleeting, some recursive—and invites us to connect the dots.

Some essays capture the familiar—putting a child on the school bus for the first time; marking a graduation; mourning a parent. Others limn less-common turf, such as Horwitz’s quandary over what to do with the ketubah (marriage contract) after her first divorce, or the sight of the bloodstained bathroom where her father-in-law died.

Internal and external worlds

While I sometimes wished for a more propulsive through-line—a question, a bundling of energy toward a climactic peak—I felt drawn by Horwitz’s quiet meditations, lyrical prose, and keen attention to both internal and external worlds.

Horwitz describes herself as agnostic, a child who, at 12, “bailed” on her bat mitzvah and positioned herself firmly in a secular world of women’s liberation, civil rights, and the anti-war movement of the 1970s.

Multiple times, she refers to herself as an empiricist, a skeptic who does not believe in an afterlife, God, or the soul. And yet, throughout her life she seeks and cherishes moments of transcendence, often grounding her practices in Jewish tradition or riffing on inherited customs to fashion her own bespoke rituals.

She lights Shabbat candles, aware that the habit is both ridiculous—“Here I am, in the twenty-first century…mumbling to myself over a chunk of bread on Friday nights, wearing a tiny cap that slips off my head”—and transporting, fastening her to a lineage of ancestors and sharpening her awareness of the present moment: the flowers, the flames, the quiet of the house.

She sifts through a manila folder of family recipes, letting food-stained, hand-scrawled pages conjure her grandma Rose’s stuffed cabbage or the cake she attempted to bake, in the shape of a car key, the year her son was ready for his driver’s license.

Literature, loss, and ritual

With her younger child, Chrys, Horwitz learns Lewis Carroll’s poem, “Jabberwocky” by heart, studies Polonius’s “to thine own self be true” soliloquy in Hamlet, and muses on what literature might teach her about the ambivalence, hope, pride, and necessary restraint that come with parenthood.

To attain the quality of ritual, Horwitz realizes, she must visit literary lines again and again because “a good poem perturbs our souls and our memories in new ways over time, meaning changes, and like prayer, the act may change us, too.”

While exploring how ritual can bolster relationships and alter one’s internal landscape, Horwitz also brings a sense of wonder and curiosity to the Northwest Philadelphia neighborhood outside her home, finding solace—especially during the early, isolating days of Covid—in planting a butterfly garden or noting the wink of fireflies on a summer night.

In one of the most resonant essays, “The Heron”, Horwitz tells of receiving an unwanted, belated bouquet from an ex-lover; rather than trashing the arrangement, she decides to fuse two Jewish rituals in an effort to mindfully let it go.

Each day for seven days—the shiva period of intense mourning following a death—Horwitz plucks a few of the blackening flowers and releases them in the river, as Jews do (typically with bread crumbs or bits of lettuce) in the Rosh Hashana practice of tashlich, a ritual casting-off of regrets and mistakes.

“Sometimes I questioned the point of it,” she writes. “The week felt longer than seven days, and some mornings, I felt an old surge of resentment or sadness, wanted another ten minutes of sleep. But I did it anyway. Ritual is like that: you repeat it, and remain open to rare glimpses of transcendence or grace.”

On the final day, she dumps the last of the flowers, then spies, upstream, a great blue heron—a reminder to turn away from the past, the “memento mori of a dead relationship,” and instead fix her gaze toward the future and whatever surprises it might hold.

Wanting more, or less

A few of the pieces felt slight. I wanted more from “Spring Cleaning”, a brief essay that touches on aspects of Passover—purging the house of anything bread-related; counting the weeks between that holiday and the agricultural celebration of Shavuot—but left me asking the “so what?” question at the end.

With others, the memoir-instructor in me would have advised lopping off an ending, resisting the lure to tie up a complicated idea in a tidy bow. “Saltines and Honey Cake”, a piece that describes a Passover trip to Costa Rica at a time when Horwitz was without a partner, unemployed and “rudderless”, would have been more powerful without the final paragraph’s vague cliché that the travel had “refreshed my perspective on life.”

Enjoying ambiguity

I lingered, instead, with essays that gave ambiguity the final word. “Spreading Out” tells how Horwitz and her husband, after separating and maintaining a “nesting custody” arrangement for several years—the children stayed put while the adults traded off living in the family home and a nearby apartment—decided to shift to a more conventional plan in which the kids would go back and forth between “Mom’s place” and their father’s new house nearby.

Chrys, then six, wanted to name the houses. Their father’s would be “Little House on the Prairie” and their mother’s would be “the Castle”. Horwitz muses on the symbolism inherent both those titles, the power of names to clarify transitions and the imaginative resilience of children. And yet, the piece concludes, “…after that day on the blue couch, I never heard those names again.”

Some rituals endure over generations, through time. And some—no less necessary, Horwitz’s book suggests—quench a momentary need, and then are gone.