Kerchoo.

Dear ones. The only excuse I can think of for my delinquency is the fact that my body's every drop of fluid has drained into my sinus cavity. We are a tribe of lame-os, us allergy sufferers. I'm sorry if you didn't already know that about yourself, but it's true. The walking around with a wad of Kleenex clutched in your hand, the fingers pinched around the bridge of your nose, the puffing eye sockets? It's a sign of faulty character.

But my only other excuse is a related one: I cannot tear myself away from our blooming dogwood for long enough to do anything but sneeze! Never in my life have I fallen so hard for a tree. I recommend moving in wintertime, simply so that you can have this kind of spring amazement.

Other things. . . I checked this book out of the library: food porn, rated triple x. I don't exactly cook out of it, but Ben and I do lie around in bed together looking droolingly at the photos and exclaiming. "Ooh," he says. "We should hollow out grapes and fill them with cheesecloth-molded goat cheese!" And I say, "Yeah!" And then we turn the page and he says, "Ooh! Deep-fried wild-mushroom risotto balls!"

I also just finished this book, by my new friend Katherine Center, and it was so compulsively readable that I kept saying to Michael, "One more chapter. One more, and that's it. I swear this time." Until I had devoured every last one. There's one of those hunkily perfect fictional men in it that you think about leaving your own actual real-life partner for, until you remember the impracticality of having a print boyfriend.

Also, allow me to recommend the Godspell soundtrack, on the offchance you haven't listened to it since the mid-70s, when you recorded yourself singing "Day by Day" into the microphone of your tape player. It is just as good as it ever was. The song "By My Side"? Mm. When we took the kids to see it the other week, I couldn't help noticing that all of us who spent our teenaged years singing angsty versions of "Prepare Ye"? All Jews. Go figure.

Speaking of music: thank you, as always, for your advice. I was amazed by how many of you had such fresh, original suggestions for me on the piano lessons front. It was incredibly helpful. On that front, I will take any and all allergy suggestions. . .

New wondertime columns are here, here, and here.

And, finally, a picture of my own hunkily perfect nonfictional partner performing his version of marathon-as-walk-in-the-park.

Ode to Dr. Seuss and Powdered Buttermilk

I don't mean to brag and I don't mean to boast, said Peter T. Hooper, but speaking of toast. . .

Okay, so maybe you don't know this book by heart? Oh, you should. It's a good one. Take my word for it. But what I was boasting about was this recipe, on wondertime, that was an appendage to a feature I wrote for the magazine on healthy snacking. Really, I can't sing my own praises enough here, because this popcorn represents the culmination of my lifelong quest to create a made-at-home snack that has that kind of tangy, addictive thing that turns your face and fingers a joyful, powdery orange if you know what I'm saying, even though this particular snack is actually white. But I mean, I practically had to buy myself an extruder so that I could make Cheetohs at home--and now I fantasize about that only very occasionally. Plus, and I'm not kidding, it's healthy. It really is super-dee-dooper-dee-booper. And it takes nothing like the air in the holes of Swiss cheese.

Do I sound a little tired? I feel a little tired.

There are new wondertime columns here, here, and here.

Happy spring, dear ones.

Edited to add: Uh oh! Not everyone shares my eggy joy, apparently. S. Spaihts-Mohns, for example, feels that "This book is mostly an excuse for Dr. Seuss to list off a variety of wild and fanciful sorts of birds." Which really does force one to consider that Seuss was maybe some kind of deranged pervert. And coolmom titles her review, "scrambled eggs definitely NOT super!" (!) Luckily "A Customer," while not quite approaching my own enthusiasm, offers some nice, tepid redemption: "This is a good book if you like made up birds and their egg [sic]."

Cusp Season

Here's how I know it's the season between seasons: I wrote about posole just a mere couple of weeks ago, but by the time I saw it up on wondertime, I thought: Posole? How freakishly wintery! However, the recipe is now up--it's the middle link, below--and if you're somewhere like here, well then a grey spring day might be the perfect time to make just such a warming red stew as this. Because really--the asparagus are not exactly Pinocchio-ing out of the ground yet now, are they; you might as well go ahead and boil some pork all day.

Also linked below is the column about my five year old. You know. Who's five and everything.

I have new columns over at wondertime: here, here, and here.

2 more things

I was kidding, about 19 years. It's still only 18. That was my little joke about how long it had been since I last wrote. Har har har. Sorry.

And also this:


lest you imagined he was about to win some kind of short hair prize or anything.

xo

19

Michael and I celebrated our 19th anniversary. 19! I can't believe it's been a whole year since I wrote!

The subtitle for the last few weeks could be: Birdy coughs; Catherine gets up with her; Catherine stays up after Birdy falls asleep with a lollipop in her mouth and lollipop juice pooling into her hair, long into the night, starting and finishing many novels. And the sub-subtitle could be: Lynda Barry's novel Cruddy, I wish I knew how to quit you. It's like a cross between Catcher in the Rye and a David Cronenberg movie, and it so gruesomely absorbing that I'm miserable.

Michael's subtitle could be: What? I can't hear you! I'm still in the basement, vacuuming water! (Shop vac, I wish I knew how to quit you.)

And Ben's could be: Package of stick-on mustaches, I wish I knew how to quit you. (FYI, the sheriff no longer has long hair. But more on that another time.)


I have new columns here, here, and here.

Miss you guys.

xo

18

Michael and I celebrated our 18th anniversary yesterday. 18 years! As you know, or don't know and have perhaps wondered about, or revoltedly suspected, we were not married for most of them. I wrote about this particular stubbornness of ours in an esssay in the anthology The Bitch in the House. But then I took a job at Amherst College for the famously excellent benefits, balked over the insurance forms, and checked off "same-sex partner" for Michael, with "same-sex" crossed out. Doh! They called me back in immediately ("If we insured Michael, then we'd have to insure all your boyfriends, wouldn't we now?" they said, which made me feel deliciously trampy, if still underinsured). I called home in tears. "We have to get married!" I cried into the phone. "Otherwise they won't insure you." And Michael said cheerfully, "Honey--are you proposing to me?" And, in my own broke, Blue Cross way, I suppose I was. And so we were married by the town clerk, and suffice it to say, I didn't so much appreciate needing to complete a little safe-sex lecture and be tested for STDs, given that we'd skipped already through that particular leafy glade, having conceived penis-vagina type babies and all. But whatever. All that is a long way of saying that when people ask us what event it is we're celebrating on our anniversary, I hesitate. Should I mention that we used to call it our "bone-iversary"? Probably not.

New wondertime columns are here and here and because I'm so delinquent about posting, there will be yet another one up tomorrow!

xo

Pizza

That's what I'm doing. Making pizza for a wondertime food piece I'm working on. And oh it is good pizza. But oh there is flour everywhere. And also dough in my fingernails. Plus, if I don't get a yeast infection with all the spores floating around my kitchen I will drop to the tiles and kiss them.

Anyways, I am wanting to address some questions from the comments section. One about an old column--and I knew just the one you meant. The one about how you are constantly losing the very people you love most as your children grow up and change. . . And, embarrassingly, the way I tried to find it was by Googling. And all I could find was this, which I don't think is the one you meant. But then I had to stop, because I read something about Birdy's chubby white underchin and it made me cry. Oh how I miss my babies.

Have you made that caramel cake yet? What about Ann Patchett's new book, Run? Did you read it? And finally, who recommended Half Magic to me? We are reading and loving it--thank you so much.

New wondertime columns are here and here.

Take care of yourselves!

xo

A Whole Lot of Nothing

Hey, thanks for the excellent armchair holiday gorging. It was fabulous and fat-free! Except for all the bourbon-pecan-pie, which gave my cellulite a pang just to read about it.

It all seems so long ago now. . . what with the snow, and the snow, and the wart removing and the snow. I'm going to end up dreaming that I'm shoveling the wart off of Birdy's foot. Or else that I'm sticking one of those Dr. Scholl's pads to our driveway. But thank you for your advice, as always. We've duct-taped a banana peel over my eyes, and it's really helping me see the wart less.

A few recommendations: the caramel cake in this month's Gourmet magazine; the book The Austins for second-grade-type kids; the book Happy Little Family for 5-year-old-type kids; the CD "Firecracker" by the Wailin' Jennys.

Also this month's O Magazine, because there's a piece I wrote about Michael in it. Luckily, he read it and declared it "a total love letter." So, um, phew. Also, my friend Sam took the excellent picture of us. And by "excellent" I mean, of course, "turkey wattle neck." But it's really not his fault.

New columns are here, here, and here.

xo