ChopChop Winner and Morning Song

Dear Ones,

I know I don't need to tell you how that flood of ChopChop subscriptions made me feel. You've got my back is all I can say. Thank you--for your faith and your gladness and your investment and also your delicious feistiness. "Some of your readers already wrote to me," my new editor told me, and I had to laugh. "I know," I said. "They're like that." I love that. I'm going to start writing some Cooking with Ben columns over there soon, and I'll post links here. I'll still be doing Monday food here too. But blah-blah, you're thinking, did I win or what? And if you're craftsister, well then, yes, yes you did. (I did random number generator, which is always fun.) But, dear craftsister, what is it that you would like to win? Email me your address and your wish, and I will get right to it. Thank you all so much for subscribing. ChopChop was seriously impressed by the ferocity of subscription orders.

Now, Morning Song.

This is my friend Susan's book, and it's a poetry anthology for new parents, and it came out just this week. It is such a heartbreaking, breathtaking collection--you will just die, even if "new" does not best describe your relationship to parenting. (God, what was it, a million years ago that Ben was born?) It's got Billy Collins and Emily Dickinson, Sharon Olds and Kevin Young, William Blake and Patti Smith, among scores of other old favorites and new-to-me wonders. I loved it--as I mentioned exceedingly effusively in my blurb, which runs {modest shrug} among blurbs by Richard Wilbur, Tracy Kidder, and Mary Oliver. Seriously. I kind of think that consistutes my ten minutes of fame, even if it's just the teensliest bit vicarious. Susan's daughter is one of my best friends from college, and I have quite robustly insinuated myself into their family in the way of wannabe children everywhere, so when I saw Susan last night, and gushed not about her incredibe new book but instead about my own fame-by-blurb-association joy, her eyes crinkled up with maternal love, in just the way you'd want the eyes of an editor of poetry for new parents to crinkle up.

Mother's Day. Baby Showers. I'm telling you. We've got our new perfect gift. There are so many poems in the book that kill me, and maybe it's because Birdy is 8, but this one is especially killing me right now.

To a Daughter Leaving Home
by Linda Pastan

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

Enjoy your weekend, darlings.

xo