January 23, 2024 When someone is hurting, or celebrating, or the source of help or hope in your life, don’t you feel the urge to do something about it? Words like “I’m sorry,” “hooray,” or “thanks a ton” float up naturally like bubbles, but as quickly can burst with hollowness, as you push up against their limits. Don’t you ever just feel the...
January 17, 2024 Photo by Curtis Yee, @supercurtisman A friend offered to bring cake to our weekly small group meeting, but held off when she heard I was planning to bake a cake. “My dessert can wait til next week. I can’t say no to a Jeannie Rose cake!” I replied, “It’s mostly an excuse to use up some clementines that had gotten too hard to peel. Cake is like the...
January 16, 2024 You probably know, if you like bread enough to read these, that a boule is a round loaf, and a batard is an oval loaf. You probably also know, but in case you don’t, one step in the bread-making process is called proofing, where the dough rests, ferments and rises, typically in baskets that give the dough shape. These baskets can be boule shaped (round), batard shaped...
January 13, 2024 Ana-Maria entered the house laden with bananas. At least three bunches, but once you’re at a certain volume of bananas, precision becomes difficult. We stashed them on the toaster oven, which surface they were more than sufficient to cover. Her friend had thought she was ordering six bananas. You can guess what she got instead. So she shared with Ana-Maria, who in turn...
February 16, 2023 For the last few weeks, instead of writing I’ve been attempting to discern sheet quality by enlarging photos online, scrubbing toilets (just one toilet, actually), wiping away dust with endless squirts of Lysol, scouring shades of sky blue paint for the one that looks right in our now-bright basement light. (That quest deserves an entire post of its own—hopefully...
December 16, 2022 Part One There’s dirt all over the floor. I suppose there must be a tidy way to pot amaryllis bulbs, but it isn’t the method I’m using. A stack of fresh pots, Costco-grade box of foil for wrapping the pots, a bag of potting soil, a Chopstick for poking drainage holes–I’ve pulled out all the tools of the trade. Half the table is covered in shiny pots of dirt with the bulb tips...
November 10, 2022 The evangelist appears to me in the form of a 70-something man in bright green bike shorts, pausing along the trail and waving frantically in the direction of where I sit below, by the creek. A woman walking a dog passed by–was she the object of his motioning? No, she continues on but he keeps waving, striving, it seems, to make eye contact with me. Do I know him? I do not. In...
October 20, 2022 It’s unfortunately the case that roasting a rotten eggplant does nothing to improve the situation. I love eggplant, enough that I displaced some tomatoes this year to make room to grow it for the first time. I’d call it a success; we harvested a few fruit before leaving for a long summer west coast visit; a handful grew while we were away, and were, I’m assured, contendly...
October 13, 2022 The third contractor came today, taking a peek at exposed beams in the unfinished part of our basement to provide an estimate at the cost to remediate the termite damage we inherited. In a hot urban market, waiving inspection is what it takes to have an offer accepted, and we didn’t know until the first swarm. With old houses there’s always something, I suppose, and new...
October 1, 2022 I’m the only soccer mom this morning. It’s windy and cold, fields wet with the leftovers of the early stages of Hurricane Ian and threatening more rain at any moment. “Yeah, the dads drew the short end of the stick today!” one of the other parents calls out cheerfully, as I join the handful of dads who have accompanied their six year olds to this morning’s game. “And not a lot of...