I'm not a good shopper, be it online or at an actual physical store like Annie Sez; I always seem to be returning things. "Return to" Sender, my friend Rona calls me, when I persist in this vein. I'm on the phone grumbling to her about my latest return, a Kitchen Orange winter coat, purchased online and now being sent to the hinterlands of Ontario (USPS $27.00). "It's the lack of definition," I complain. "It's meant for a gorilla, or, in this case, an orangutan." Much of the problem is that I don't assess material with a critical enough eye; the nuance of shininess, the ply of cashmere, …
The 32-pound turkey fit into the upper wall oven, no minor feat considering I had to heave it up there myself along with the weighted Calphalon pan. Now that my husband Rob is working, and has a three-hour round-trip commute, it just doesn't seem fair to ask for his help. Domesticity has become my realm, squarely, so when he arrives home after 8 p.m., all rumpled clothes and cheerful facade, the dinner dishes are cleaned, the pots done, and I rouse to his entrance with the energy of a full-out catatonic. We had 26 people, 28 counting two who came just for dessert. It was a real mix, twins and…
The days were all false, warm-gray. I love this line. Too bad I didn't write it. Lorrie Moore did. It does seem that all the good lines are taken. My version, my attempted rendition, would be that the days were all drab-gray, uneventful. It's the difference between my tomato sauce from yesterday, which my husband, Rob, said needed something extra, maybe some pecorino Romano, and my gravy two weeks ago that he thought was "great, your best yet." I guess it's about depth. Nuance. Subtlety. I'm working on it. Not easy in middle age, decades submerged in mothering. Such a distance from English…
