It wasn’t much of a day for celebrating, this rainy Wednesday. In years past we’ve marked my husband’s June birthday with lobster dinners in Maine, or hiking with our boys and our friends on Monhegan Island. There have been poems written, surprise parties thrown, memorable gatherings around our porch table, cards and presents and cakes and people. But yesterday I could offer none of those things. I’d spent the day before having surgery on my face for a small skin cancer that required excision and some careful reconstruction, and as of yesterday morning I was still loopy from the anesthesia….
We were in the throes of change: selling a house, moving in with my parents, buying a house, fixing up a house, moving into that house, giving up on fixing up the house, deciding to tear the whole thing down instead, moving back in with my parents, building a house. In the midst of these prolonged real estate dramas, we suffered the strain of pulling up roots in a place that we loved and trying to sink roots down into another that we barely knew. I lost my job. My husband started a business. Meanwhile, we were also trying to…
A few months ago my friend Margaret Roach gave away a cookbook on her site A Way to Garden. I read her description of Heidi Swanson’s beautiful recipes, considered the lush photo on the book jacket, and gave in — as I rarely do — to an impulsive on-line purchase. (Apologies to my much-loved and frequented local bookstore!) I wasn’t going to wait an entire week to see if I might win a copy of Super Natural Every Day; I ordered the book that very moment and two days later I had it in my hands. Which is how this…
