Easter eggs and other unexpected pleasures

I read. A lot. Maybe not as much as some, but I logged 81 books in GoodReads last year. If I were more organized, I'd be able to tell you the ratio between fiction and non-fiction. But 36 were library books. A bunch were little obsessions:

• 6 of the Mrs. Polifax books by Dorothy Gilman
• the whole of Deborah Harkness's All Souls Trilogy
• 3 Tana French books (two of which I read while watching Dublin Murders and that was probably a bad idea because I was so confused)
• 8 in the British Library's series of reprints of vintage mysteries

Some were books I feel like I should have read a long time ago: I loved Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark and I think of it often. I cracked through nine books in a two week beach vacation - starting, aptly, with Pamela Paul's My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues.

Other notable books read include these that I'd read again:

• The Library Book (Susan Orlean)
• Someone At A Distance (Dorothy Whipple)
• The Nutmeg Tree (Margery Sharp)
• Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret (Craig Brown)
• Uncommon Type (Tom Hanks)

The last book I read in 2019 was The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King. It's the first in a series wherein Mary Russell befriends Sherlock Holmes and becomes his collaborator. My friend Teresa had sent me the first three just before Christmas. Teresa's sent me books before - she sent me all 12 of the Robin Paige mysteries a few years ago.

And what I love about reading the books from Teresa is that she is a die-hard editor: every book that she has passed along to me has at least a few edits (in pencil - only in pencil). She fixes typos. She edits out unnecessary words.

She replaces infelicitous words.

And in A Monstrous Regiment of Women, the 2nd Mary Russell book, which I have just finished, she added page numbers.

It's like finding Easter eggs.

---

Recently, someone created a Facebook group of OG bloggers - people who'd attended one or more BlogHer conferences back in the day. Reading those posts is an exercise in a lovely sort of nostalgia, even though I was so tangentially attached - there, but not "in". Teresa never went to BlogHer, but I'd never have met Teresa but for the blogging community. There are so many people - mostly women - that are good friends to this day, who have made my life immeasurably richer, who I'd never have met otherwise. I am so grateful for that, even though the platform is not what it was and there's far less reading and writing of blogs going on. Nevertheless, I persist.

Cultural Icon

Back in the day, junior high school that is, we had to wear gym suits - at least the girls did. I'd forgotten all about my gym suit, until - of course - it turned up in a box at my mother's house. Of course, I brought it home for the girlie.



She put it right on, and I'll be damned but the thing fits her perfectly which just doesn't make any sense given that she's in third grade and I wore it in seventh, eighth and ninth grades. Great mysteries of life. She then threatened to wear it to school; I dissuaded her. [She also pointed out that it doesn't really fit her; it's got boob darts and she's got no boobs.]

It looks a little like Rosie the Riveter's jumpsuit, it's made out of some unfaded perma-magic everlasting fabric, and my name is tidily embroidered in script - needlework by Moky.

Is there a gym suit museum somewhere?

And There Are So Many

I found a diary, of mine, from ninth grade. Yes, it was kicking around under a bed at my mother's house. (Yes, the house is still on the market. Yes, it is still full of stuff. Yes, it is rather a poignant headache.)

The diary - an inane piece of gobbledygook - was a school assignment, for an English class. It's full of teachers, dreams, grades, boys, sleepovers, band, dances, "I got a desk chair, yellow" for Christmas. My handwriting changes on every page, the ink color changes almost more frequently, and the diary is called Katherine, Kitty, Kati, You, and Kathy. (Yes, my middle name is Catherine.)

In the margins, occasionally, there are notes from the English teacher. Apparently we had to hand it in - to what end, I cannot fathom. It seems like it might have been more appropriate to a psychology teacher or guidance counselor, because it's not creative writing, it's the mundane ramblings of a thirteen year old (a thirteen year old who was not smoking cigarettes or hanging out in cemeteries).

I did, though, like this passage:

Sometimes thoughts
just run [in] my head.
And there's so many
I can't write them
all down. Oh well, too bad.

Funny how not much has changed - today, instead of a diary for Miss Dissin, I'm writing here. And all day long, posts write themselves in my head - walking down the street, waiting for the train, watching the bread rise - and there are so many that I can't write them all down.

I think my grammar is usually better though.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care…

It started with three stockings. One for my mother, one for my father, one for me. Mine was white, with an angel in a blue dress. Yellow yarn hair, a gold halo, stars at her feet, organdy wings. My mother’s was white too, an assortment of pastel ornaments appliqued on. My father’s was red; his was the Christmas tree, complete with tiny real glass ornaments, the size of a marble. She’d made them all, my mother did. Crafted of love and felt, they had stars and paillettes sewn on with tiny glass beads at the center, bits of lace and ribbon, an occasional jingle bell.

When my brother was born, she made him a stocking: red felt with a snowman. The snowman was gently padded underneath, and he wore a miniature hand knit blue and white Yale scarf. My sister completed the family, and her stocking was green with a red dressed Santa, fat belly encircled by a tiny vinyl belt.

For years, those five stockings were the ones carefully hung from the mantel each year. One year, I made a tiny inept stocking for a cat, blanket stitched ‘round the perimeter; when my parents divorced, the Christmas tree stocking was put away, not to be spoken of.

Gradually, more stockings were added to the mix – one for my husband, that I made, patchworked from old silk ties. My mother made stockings for my sister’s husband, her two older children, my daughter, my brother’s husband WIFE. We ran out of cup hooks on the mantel and started doubling up. My mother made a stocking for my sister’s youngest child – but didn't realize it was backwards, its toe pointing southwest, until she brought it down to the dining room where it hung in merry opposition to each and every other stocking. A couple of store bought stockings could be rotated in for house guests, like David, our brother from another planet, who came for Christmas Eve one year, and left two days later (and came back every year thereafter).

There were rules about the stockings: nothing was to be put into them until Christmas morning, nothing too heavy, contents were to be gently dumped onto the table and stockings returned immediately to their cuphooks, there must be no handling of the felt with sticky fingers. But, you see, they were worthy of rules, needing of protection. They're art, you see, art shot through with love and magic.

After we’d moved into our house, with our very own mantel, we had stand-in stockings – attractive enough Hable stockings I’d bought on sale – because the “real” stockings still resided at my mother’s house. It was only this year that I brought home the angel, and the ties, and the stars, and hung them with care on our very own cup hooks.



Now, our house is really a home.

Wrapping

My mother loved doing Christmas. Her Christmas was an exuberant but tasteful echt-Victorian tree and ornaments and swags and lights and candles and ribbons and cookies and stockings hung by the chimney with care. She was an expert wrapper, with a deep frugal streak – wrapping paper was carefully recycled (really, you’d never have known), ribbons were put away for use another year, and tags were sorted by name, a shoebox per child. She made the tags, of ends of ribbon, bits cut from Christmas cards, a mylar floof, a flocked holly leaf. Sometimes, even, the tags stayed attached to frilly gold elastic “ribbons”, to be slipped around just the right sized package the next year.

I have a box of her tags. A gold gift box from Lord & Taylor, from the days when department stores put scarves and blouses in real boxes, it’s a jumble of tags, new and old. Some have been around since I was a child (or so it seems). Others are more recent; there are tags that my mother made for my husband and daughter.

My wrapping tends to the more pedestrian. I hate the waste of buying paper, preferring to salvage crinkly brown paper and newsprint and ivory tissue and even a seed catalog with an old-fashioned feel. And I’ve given up on ribbons, in favor of Japanese masking tape, patterns of red and green – loving its duality as both decoration and adhesive.

[A digression: Santa doesn’t use kraft paper and fancy tape. Santa uses real wrapping paper and bows. But, Santa is only responsible for the presents for the one eight year old girl. It is a line in the sand, as it were.]

A couple of weeks ago, I read a book review of a book I just had to have. I mean, I was drooling over the excerpt I downloaded to my Kindle (well, the Kindle app on my iPad if you want to split hairs), but it was the kind of book that I wanted to have and to hold, to dog-ear and splatter-stain. So in a little fit of I-deserve-this, I bought it for myself for Christmas. I figured I’d wrap it up and stuff it under the Christmas tree, to me, love me.

Last night was wrapping night. I sequestered myself in the cellar and set to work. Wrap, wrap, wrap. Check it off the list. Put it in the box. Wrap, wrap, wrap some more. I came to the book I’d bought myself. I wrapped it in Santa paper. My eye fell on the gold box of my mother’s tags. Half wistfully, half mischievously, I fished out a tag and snapped it round the book. Done.

It is truly one of the most peculiar things I’ve ever done, and yet, it was just right. I can’t wait to open it.

Green Grapes and Sour Cream

Working through my drafts folder has meant wading through post ideas that were often nothing but a link, or a link and a sentence, or a headline.

Like one that was headlined:

Green Grapes and Sour Cream

And contained naught but a link:

http://smittenkitchen.com/2010/07/raspberry-brown-sugar-gratin/

Go ahead. Click that link. Or just parse it and note that it's from July 2010 - more than a year ago.

Smitten Deb had published a recipe, for a raspberry brown sugar gratin, a three ingredient dessert. And I'd read it and drooled, but mostly I remembered a recipe my mother used to make, an easy recipe for casual dinner parties.  She'd take some sour cream, stir it up with a few drops of vanilla, blob it over green grapes in a shallow dish, sieve brown sugar over the top, and run the whole thing under the broiler. You'd get the cold juicy grapes, with the tangy unctuous cream, and the toasty caramelized sugar, and it was a joyous mess with shades of crème brûlée.

I haven't made either of them, either Moky's grape version, or Deb's raspberry one. But recipes like that become so much more than just recipes. They're memory prods, Proust's madeleines. They transport you back to a period when people had dinner parties, and women wore perfume, and children were neither seen nor heard. The oven is open, just so, the broiler is going, and just to my right is the big black Garland stove, and there's a marble slab on the counter over the oven, with a waiting cooling rack, even though the grapes never get hot so you don't really need the rack.

What can you taste just by thinking about it? And conversely, what tastes conjure up indelible memories?

As for me, I think I'll make the green grape/sour cream gratin the next time my gluten-free friend comes for dinner.

Things Found In The Front Hall Chest

My siblings and I spent a few hours cleaning out some cabinets on the third floor of our mother's house, as well as a chest in the front lobby. Most of the contents were either Christmas, Easter, or Halloween related.

Dead Sample: small jar containing one Christmas tree light bulb

?Found in this drawer. From What?: screws in a plastic bag

Xmas tree piece - steel cylinder, copper tube: Envelope, with paper clip. Contents not viewed.

An index card with the specifics of the refinishing of that piece of furniture (color of miniwax, number of coats, application of paste wax): Left in the chest, and not photographed.

Becoming My Mother, Part I

I think I'm becoming my mother. All summer long, all she'd ever eat was salad. All winter long, it was soup. Garbage pail soup, she called it. She'd pull odds and ends out of the freezer, throw it all in a stockpot, and cook. Then she'd eat it every day for a week, and start all over again.

The past two weekends, I've done just that, prompted in part by an ongepotchket batch of CSA vegetables cluttering up the fridge. There's a method in my madness, though, and the soup has been excellent, if I may, you know, say so myself.

Let it be known: this isn't a recipe, this is a manifesto. It almost doesn't matter what you put in it, it matters that you do it. What do you have?

Start with an onion. Everything savory always starts with an onion, chopped, and sweated in a few glugs of olive oil. Red onion, white, no matter. While the onion grows translucent and oh so fragrant, chop a carrot and a stalk of celery. Mince a jalapeno, just one, for a tiny tingle of hotness. How about some squash? A small butternut squash, peeled and seeded and diced, that'll work. When the onion is nice and ready, add a quart of stock - beef, chicken, pork - and all the chopped vegetables. Add some tomatoes - puree from a can, fresh chopped, whatever you've got. If you're incapable of tossing the Parmesan rinds and you have some in the freezer, now's the time to stick one in the soup pot, like you always say you're going to do. Simmer gently until all the vegetables are soft. Fish out the Parm rind (and throw it away). Whir the soup a bit with a hand blender, or use a potato masher - you want to get some of the solid chunks broken down to thicken the soup. Toss in a 1/4 cup of uncooked bulgur, or that dried out leftover rice. Finally, cut up some turnip greens, mustard greens, beet tops, anything green - slice them into ribbons and throw them in the pot. Turn off the heat. Cool it down and plan to eat it tomorrow - it'll be better then.

This will make enough for dinner, with leftovers for lunch for a day or two. Gussy it up at the table with a salad and some bread, and maybe grate a little cheese over the top. Garbage pail soup.

Wordless Wednesday: Birthday

Today would have been my mother's 76th birthday. She dearly loved the beach, the ocean, and when we were up at the Cape, I gathered pebbles and wrote her name on an unsullied stretch of smoothly packed sand. I imagine that it pleased her.

Shoe Friday - Vintage

There were always dress-up shoes at Granny's house. Somewhere, there are pictures of me in these very shoes, which came home with us one day. They almost fit the seven year old, though they're a size 7AAA. I've no idea whose they were. My mother? My grandmother? A lady with a delicate, small foot.

Yellow Hair, Yellowed Paper

My mother's house is finally on the market, and my siblings and I have been slowly trying to make some headway with the contents. There is an enormous amount of stuff: furniture, tchotckes, toys, pots, buttons, towels, and endless stacks of paper.

Moky kept files on all manner of things - local history, friends, nuts and cranks. The files are full of letters, ephemera, gritty xeroxes, clippings, and photos.

Later today, I'm having lunch with an old friend of my mother's, the kind of friend who had her own folder. They'd actually gone to college together, but hadn't really known one another until years later when, by coincidence, they ended up living in the same town, and my mother's friend's daughter was my elementary school (and junior high and high school) classmate. After a time, the friend moved away, to California, and they kept up by writing letters back and forth, often with clippings involved.

When I see her, I'm handing over her folder, but I skimmed through it first, I had to. It's full of letters and birthday cards and newspaper clippings about the friend's husband, but it's the letters that fascinate me - for how they reflect upon events in my mother's life, and necessarily mine. In one letter, there's a whole Yeats poem about blonde women typed out, with this comment:

I always think of that poem in pondering Pinky and Magpie and their beautiful flaxen hair, and of course yours too-- when I first knew you, yours was just like theirs.

There's some delicious semi-catty chatter about the guests at my wedding in another letter, but my favorite bit might be this tantalizing post script:

P S 2 A___ tells me that M___ T___ has broken up with the fabled panty-hose woman. She wanted to have a baby so he decided enough was enough. We had a mimeographed account from him of the fabled lawsuit, but no personal word in a long time.

Is that not the makings of a short story?

C and D

Every drawer opened,
every book moved,
every box perused,
every piece of paper overturned,

results in some small moment of

nostalgia,
aimless archeology,
reflection,
bemusement,
amusement,

or regret.



If she'd sketched out an M, I'd frame it in a heartbeat.

Your ring? Said the Piggy, I will.

Finally, we've started cleaning out my mother's house and making it ready for sale. I spent 24 hours there over the weekend, and came back with a carload of oddments and nostalgia, including (but by no means limited to):

• A shilling.
• The blue chenille bathrobe I took to college with me.
• My junior high school, high school and college yearbooks.
• A green glass vase, 5' tall.
• The Mar 3, 1980 cover of the New Yorker, framed, because my mother (rightly) thought it looked just like my college dorm common room.
• A cashmere hat, pale blue, that my mother bought new at a thrift shop.
• A koa wood box that I gave my mother for Christmas once, bought in the town I went to college in (I know this because the tag was in the box).
• An unopened package of 50 envelopes.
• The ticket stub from an inadvertently hysterical concert we attended in 1991, where the audience was instructed to "make the noise you need to make" to "raise the cone of power".
• Three flower arranging devices.
• An army green can of saddle soap, from when my father was in the Marine Corps, labeled

POISON
Do not use as food container

• My Stieff teddy bear, all four paws patched with new felt because the moths had once gotten to him and exposed his excelsior stuffing.
• The birthday cake plate of my youth, flat, Italian.
• A salad spinner, the twin of the one we already have, but not cracked.
• The Karinska book I once gave my mother.
• The gaudy yellow, red, blue and kelly green quilt that my mother and I made in 1975. It lived on my bed in my kelly green room, until my mother redecorated that room in more soothing shades of blue.
• My paternal uncle's French "verb wheel", from prep school?
• A small rake.
• An ancient green glass jar of fuller's earth dusting powder.
• A baseball cap from a Harvard-Yale game, emblazoned "Impale Yale". I've boxed it up to send it to my college boyfriend, who went to Harvard, and whose son now goes to Yale.
• The brass key fob from room 28 of the Hotel d'Albe in Fountainebleau.
• One of THE two copies of Fantastic Mr. Fox - which leads me to wonder, if there were two copies, why have I never read it?
• An autograph book, with signatures dated between 1899 and 1905. I've no idea whose it was. My great-grandmother, perhaps. Maybe I'll send it to the historical society in Athens.
• More index cards.
• Some sedum to tuck into my stone wall, and some bamboo to plant down at the way bottom of my garden (where it can ramble without prejudice). [Digging things out of the garden was not strictly necessary.]
• A jump rope.
• The tassel from my mortarboard.
• A baton (for conducting, not for baton twirling).
• A tidily folded bit of tissue paper, marked "my tooth is in here".

And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

The Table of My Memory

What makes a memory?

When I think about my childhood I remember the beach, the ice-skating, the neighborhood block parties. The day Wally – a grown-up! – dropped the bread peanut-butter side down, and then jumped on it. Sailing. My sixth grade teacher. The children’s librarian at the public library. The annual pig roast, and the day my father brought the suckling pig home on the Long Island Rail Road cradled in his arms and dressed in baby clothes. The long long grass in the backyard of the house we moved into when I was eleven – it hadn’t been mowed in years. Kittens. Our jungle gym. The Christmas party. My fourth grade phonics workbook. Stinky cheese and poison. Going to the ballet, the circus, the Museum of the City of New York.

Trips to the city usually included restaurants – special occasion meals, pre-theater meals, lunch in the city meals - storied places, now largely defunct. Like Sloppy Louie’s and Sweets – fish places down by the Seaport, near my father’s office, where he’d take us to lunch on those rare days when we got to go to work with him. The Auto Pub – a kitschy car-themed restaurant in the basement of the GM building, where the Apple Store now is. Pearl’s – a fancy midtown Chinese restaurant, known for the lemon chicken incongruously flavored with lemon extract. The Xochitl – a cheap Mexican restaurant in the theater district where I remember daring my siblings to dip a toothpick in the little open ramekins of hot sauce that were permanent fixtures on the tables. Luchow’s – the huge German restaurant on 14th Street – we went there for my birthday one year. And Keen’s – the chop house with the clay pipes on the ceiling.

Of them, Keen’s is the only one still around.

Last night, we took the girl to a one-man circus, which she thought was hilarious. We needed to eat beforehand, so in some fit of madness, I suggested Keen’s. It’s on 36th Street, where it’s been forever. We couldn’t get a reservation in the main part of the restaurant, so we took a chance and landed a table in the pub. Dark wood paneling, wood-burning fireplace, framed pictures and handbills tiling the walls – it’s like hasn’t changed in the 125 years since it opened. 125 years! It’s been around since before any of my grandparents were. I had a “mutton” chop with a side of sautéed escarole and it was so good that I picked that bone up and gnawed on it, even though it turns out to be lamb. The girl had a hamburger, most of which came home with us, though she ate the whole bun and drank all of her Shirley Temple and polished off a piece of chocolate cake. Before we left, we traipsed upstairs to the bathroom, through the brass embellished rooms with their oriental rugs, past the portrait of Abraham Lincoln and the entrance to the Lily Langtry room and the display case of novelty pipes. “Look, Mama, that one’s shaped like a lady’s leg!”. And then we left and walked uptown to Times Square, through the crowds, past the lights, under the enormous signs, to the one-man circus in the jewelbox theater.

And I wonder, what will she remember?

Warmth

For some time now, the Times has had a weekly column in which a staff photographer picks an old photo and runs it with a little commentary. Last week, I opened the paper and my jaw dropped. Cats. On manhole cover. There's a framed 8 x 10 glossy of that very same photo in my mother's house. When it had run in the Times back in 1970, she liked it so much that she called up and ordered a print.

Did you know that manhole covers could be warm? The one and only time that I've ever been to the Macy*s Thanksgiving Parade, it was freezing and sort of drizzly. Somehow, I ended up standing on a manhole cover, a nice hot manhole cover. It kept my feet warm, though it kind of flattened the soles of my Keds.

And do you know why the manhole covers are warm? It's the dragon under Manhattan. Well, that's what one tells one's child, but actually it's the steam pipes leaking. Yup, 2010 and there are 105 miles of steam pipes running to buildings throughout Manhattan - for heating, cooling and power. Kind of amazing, huh?

So those cats? They knew what they were doing.

Wordless Wednesday: File Folders

It isn't the best photo, but I needed to memorialize the contents of a file drawer of my mother's. There's a file in there labeled "Nuts and Cranks" and another labeled "Madness". I don't even know what's in them, but it doesn't much matter, does it? Sometimes you can judge the book by its cover.

Wish You Were Here - Photo edition

Dear Moky:

Here are some of the pictures we took on our trip to Maine.

MAINE

Click on the picture; it'll take you to a web album. I hope you like them.

Love,

M.

Wish You Were Here

Dear Moky,

We've just gotten back from a short vacation, up in Maine mostly. We left on Friday, a little worried about the possibility of Tropical Storm Danny getting in the way of our plans - but time and tide wait for no man, and we had a boat to catch. On the drive up from New York to Maine, we stopped for lunch at about the mid-point, at a pizza place in Worcester that I found on Roadfood.com. "Pizza place" doesn't really do it justice - this was the best pizza I've ever had: paper thin crust, perfect toppings. We got two - one with the usual tomato and cheese, which Mir ate almost all of by herself. The second one had sliced potatoes, caramelized onions, bacon, shallots, garlic butter and a sprinkling of grated cheese - no tomato, no mozzarella. I think I have never tasted ANYTHING as good. You'd have loved the place, if for nothing other than the mess of galvanized trays and stands and pitchers.

We stayed in a little hotel (inn? what's the difference) up on Pemaquid Point - the kind of funky, gracious, idiosyncratic hotel that would have appealed to you. It had been built in the late 1800s as a boarding house - and still has the narrow hallways to show for it. I was tickled to find a huge antique nautical chart in our room - of Long Island Sound. Funny to find that up in Maine. After dropping our stuff, we headed out to a lobster place for beer and lobsters and bugs and the sunset. Mir said she wanted a lobster, and she duly ate both claws - even cracked them herself. Of course, she dipped the lobster meat in ketchup, but what are you going to do?

Luckily, the threatened hurricane moved offshore, but did dump a lot of water - it rained all day Saturday, meaning that we had to stick to indoor activities. Luckily, there's a little aquarium on the next peninsula - so we drove over there and spent some time mucking around in their terrific touch tank. Mir picked up sea cucumbers and lobsters and starfish and crabs, and managed to get soaking wet - good thing we were inside, eh? After another lobster lunch, we headed to the mothership: LL Bean. What else to do on a rainy day? Mir got some new clothes for school and we headed back to the hotel, stopping in Wiscasset for a lobster roll at Red's Eats - thanks to a recommendation from Anna. It may indeed have been the best lobster roll ever - even better than the fancy one in Boston a couple of months ago that cost twice as much.

After breakfast on Sunday, we headed to Rockland, to board our boat - the schooner Nathaniel Bowditch. Wow. Again, you'd have loved it. Granted, the accomodations are spartan, at best, and there are ladders to navigate to get down to the bunks and the heads and the galley, but the sailing was splendid, the food was great, the weather was perfect, and the boat had an abundance of character. We were encouraged to help with the sailing, like providing muscle to raise the mainsail and pull up the anchor, but mostly we just stared out at the glorious wild coast of Maine. And people stared at us! There are so few of those big old sailboats left that when one shows up, everyone looks and takes a picture. We sailed from Rockland up to Castine and back, anchoring near Warren Island one night, and in Pulpit Harbor the next. And on that second night, Mir slept up on deck in a lifeboat with the four year old son of the captain - counting 3000 stars in the sky!

After docking again the next day, we moseyed down to Boston - with a stop in Yarmouth for lunch with an old friend of mine. She's got a house on the water with killer views - no beach, too cold to swim, but beautiful none-the-less. I know that you'd rather have a beach and warmer water, but you'd have liked this, I think.

Boston was a great way station - we checked into our swanky hotel and headed straight to the pool/hot tub/sauna/steam room. After all, we hadn't had a shower on board the boat, and hauling up anchors is hard work! We had an early dinner at an old German beer hall, thanks to a recommendation from Erika - the blog friends really came through on the restaurant tips.

Finally, yesterday, we drove home via the scenic and indirect route. One thing led to another and we stopped in Northampton, to show Mir where you'd gone to college. I had an ice cream cone there that knocked my socks off (well, I wasn't wearing socks, but, you know). It was Burnt Sugar 'n' Butter ice cream - sort of caramelly, with a salty kick from the butter. Looks like there's a Herrell's in Huntington - I wonder if you've ever been there?

We put enough miles on the new car to break her in - and she performed beautifully. She's fun to drive, and perfect for our little family of three. And Mir tackled three whole lobsters, though all little one pounders - not like that enormous one you once had on Cape Cod. I think it might have been the perfect vacation, even if it was only five nights away from home. I'm sorry you weren't there.

Love,

-M.

P.S. I'll have some photos to show you, soon.

End of the Year

The school year is winding down. Today, Miss M. brought home her art portfolio, all the best works from the whole year, the ones that hung on the walls of the classroom and outside in the hallway. She was beyond proud - "when we get home, I'm going to spread them out all over and show them to you, but Daddy, one of them has glitter". And when we got home, we spread them out all over and she told us all about them.


I think I'll frame the one of forsythia on a pale blue background. And then I'll pour myself a stiff drink and think about the next twelve years.

Onward, sigh.

Pink Dress

My mother's brother got married, for the first time, when I was just six. I was the flower girl - in a pink dress that my mother made, and a pair of the red Moroccan leather shoes that she bought in series (every size, for party shoes, and they got handed down). The expression on my face slays me - clearly, the wedding will fall to pieces if I fail at walking down the aisle.


Later, that marriage did fail - probably because he is a despicable beast. But, as my mother kept everything, I still have the pink dress, and after the photo resurfaced the other night, I figured I'd better get a picture of the girlie in the dress, before she outgrows it and it's too late.


Please excuse the scab on her forehead; she fell down go boom the other night, smack dab on her forehead and one hip and both knees. She's fine but her father may be scarred for life - he tripped her accidentally and caused the fall.

The dress fits perfectly. Too bad no one we know is getting married.