Once in a while, an idea takes hold of me and sets me off on a hamster wheel of adventure—always scrambling, but not quite arriving anywhere. My singular mission the past few weeks has been finding a recipe for pumpkin pie. Not any pie, mind you, but the ice cream pumpkin pie my mother made for Thanksgiving sometime back in the late 1970s. It was the first...
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Recently, I dreamt that I wore a high-necked lacey blouse, hair done in a Gibson-girl bun, and had discovered a way to preserve lemons while standing in a farmhouse kitchen that was part of a farm and not a kitchen remodeling trend. Lemons were hard to get in dreamland, and in my current reality they seem to go bad within two days. They have become worse...
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I always thought I was going to be an astronomer. But failing physics and trigonometry in high school put me on a different path. It’s good I found an astronomer to marry, I thought again as I packed our car with chairs and blankets. It was the second night of the Perseid meteor shower, and Marc knew a perfect place to observe the meteors. Although the...
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I am up late, fighting with strangers on the internet. The feelings of my seemingly justifiable rage wash over me in an adrenaline-fueled mission to find the most accurate words to prove my point. The message has to be just so, my tone both biting and funny. My aim is true: I must prove to myself that I am smarter than my unknown nemesis. Or at least feel...
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I wake and pad out to my makeshift garden. I had cleared a small area in the yard to grow three lettuces, two cucumbers and five tomato plants. You might call me a COVID cliché with my gluten-free sourdough starter and a half-assed victory garden. But there is no sense of victory as I notice another leaf gone from the small bunch of romaine that had seemed...
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