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I'm baking bread today. There were a few weeks where I got out of the habit of baking, and I forgot how exemplary and satisfying it is. I really can't think of anything more so. I would drop everything and start a bakery this moment if it didn't mean I would have to wake up early every morning. Isn't it a wonder that flour can be so magical? There is deep sensory pleasure in its texture and habits of floating and slipping and collecting and puffing quite apart from the glory which appears out of the oven. Bread is the most divine medium for eating butter. Most things in life can be valued by their relationship to helping you eat butter.

Every so often, somewhere evenly in the middle between weekly and blue moons, I feel like my mind wakes up. Not that it is asleep the rest of the time, but at these moments it is much more awake. Too awake, too energized, too like a puppy tearing around and tripping you with the reef knot it just tied around your legs with the leash. I am delighted to have such energetic thoughts, but the rest of me panics, grieving for my inability to organize each thought as it arises, name it, catalog it, and rest easy with every seed of brilliance residing in a filing cabinet. Instead they are poured pell-mell through my head, dancing around together and running in and out of about a dozen doors. I run frazzled, trying to shut the doors, but they are opened faster than I can shut them and I don't really get to sit down with my guests and enjoy the party. This hasn't happened to me for a while, but I took enough notes last time during my observation of the phenomenon to contemplate it and present it to you in a pretty analogy bedecked with colored balloons.

Thad has a head cold of monumental proportions and has no snarky remarks with which he wishes to endow you.

It will be still several decades before the temperate weather is here and we will be safe in planting a garden, but the herbs growing on the window sill have begun a race to see who can be the healthiest and biggest, since a few warm days have come and we've opened all the windows as wide as we can. It hasn't really been warm enough to warrant such actions, but we have gotten to the place in early spring where we really, really do not care.

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Thad and I started reading Eric Sloane's Weather Book again. You've read it, haven't you? If you have, you know, of course, what affection thrives within that sentence. 


Everyone dwells on weather constantly, in the most boring and annoying way possible. Small talk and constant television forecasts, but not once does anyone really care about Weather. Isn't it irrational? And confusing. Such pervasive inconsistency. I am afraid that people never saw me as dwelling fiercely in the other camp, where I ignored it unless I was going to adore it. I never knew what the weather would be and I only said anything about it if it was a paean. Here the weather actually matters, to the people we meet, when we meet anyone. Thad and I are intent upon acknowledging Weather as a very important character in the narrative of our lives. We look up at the sky as much as we can. Eric Sloane is helping.

I think I figured out why rain is such a comforting thing. It is comforting, isn't it? Or is that just to me? Can you think of anything more comfortable and cozy than to snuggle up on the couch and read all of a Sunday afternoon, while the rain beats against the window? It's not comforting at all, of course, when you are in it, so I am ignoring such scenarios and listing my reasons to support my theory. There is the steady rhythm, like a heartbeat, which is soothing. But mostly, it's a matter of contrast. You are warm and dry and safe, and the confidence of the impossibility of the threat reaching you intensifies the comfort. You have to have evil to show how shining and pure the good is. You have to have to have bad guys to make it a story. You have to have the rain to make the blanket and the novel so delightful.

These are my experiences with rain. Pathetic British television on rainy Sunday afternoons with my brothers. Falling asleep in the backseat of the car, watching the raindrops chase each other at the end of family vacations. That endlessly raining spring when Thad and I were married and read an unprecedented number of books. I have blocked all memories of camping.

So you see, I've just been thinking and remembering again, and doing nothing interesting at all. Thad sends his love and has been talking about that cheesecake you used to make. I would ask you to send the recipe, but we wouldn't be able to get the ingredients, and I don't have your magic touch. So we are idealizing it in our memory and will come back to be disappointed some day. Except that I don't think your cheesecake possesses the power of disappointing.

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It's been ages since I have talked to you, hasn't it? I am sorry. I would say that my silence does not mean I haven't been thinking of you, but it does, in part. I always had more honesty than tact, didn't I?

Thad came back and when my enthusiasm of being with him again had settled down to its usual level, we had a dramatic rain storm which washed out the lower half of our drive way and felled a rotten, elderly tree which we should have felled ourselves last fall. So we have been a bit distracted by manual labor and instead of spending our evenings thinking or reading or writing, we loll on the couch with our socks all slouchy and eat as much toasted cheese and garlic bread as we can fit inside before we pass out with complete disregard for the fact that we'd be more comfortable sleeping in pajamas in bed. So that's my excuse, in case you missed us. Nothing as dramatic as bear attacks or appendicitis or alien abductions. Although, if you would prefer that, I am sure we can manage staging such an event instead next time.

One thing I miss the most, I realize, is opportunities for people watching. Would Observations of Humanity be a more posh way of putting it? I can go into the village if I so choose, and do once a week for shopping excursions, but the population is small enough that my observations are now entering more the realm of watching neighbors or acquaintances at a party than of regular People Watching. There isn't the drama of the transients of seeing this one person and knowing you'll never see them again. That is what I miss. 

I have been thinking about vulnerability, and have found my definition is a shade different from the accepted one. A shade nicer. (Remind me to discuss the nicety of the word nice, too.) Observing my shade of vulnerability in others makes me feel very tender and motherly. I think it is a matter of a person being unaware of their own self, unconscious, preoccupied with something else. There's more to it than that, but I am much better with examples than definitions, so perhaps I should give them to you first and trust you to gather my meaning. It takes me a bit off guard when I watch a person writing and realize they are left handed. So you see, this left handed person isn't thinking about being left handed, yet it feels so vulnerable, because it is a surprise, and they, if self conscious at all at that moment, are thinking of something else, like their handwriting or being watched or the stupid cowlick. (My words are all gobbing up, gummed up on the point of my pen, in a sense. Thick and cloudy and clingy and persistently inelequent.) Or a person who is unbearably smart and good at everything doing something and being hopelessly inadequate. I can remember several examples. Remember the time the Bartholomew boy read the greeting cards at his birthday party? How you could hear the ends of every line. And he knew everything and could solve every scientific, mathematical, or mechanical problem you could pose. And then, when we were all in awe of him, he started reading out loud and the glass museum case shattered down to the ground and all of the sudden he was this huggable little teddy-bear.

I think it is moments of unconsciousness that I seek out by this. I call it vulnerability, but it isn't, because the object doesn't sense it at all. It's really the exact opposite, right? It's not emotional or mental or conscious. More physical, but not entirely. It is letting the guard down, but not in a way I can presently clearly define. It's forgetting to be aware. Thinking so much about this, here, and what others think of it, that you forget about that. If they were aware of it there wouldn't be that fragility, because there would be a guard even in the awareness and insecurity. So vague, I know, but it makes me feel so tenderly.

Thad read this all over my shoulder and I am now very self conscious and embarrassed and he says I need an editor, which I admit, and also maybe that I don't know what I'm talking about. But I do! I just don't know how to bridge this gigantic gap between what I know and feel and my vocabulary. How my vocabulary lets me down. There is no nicety in my vocabulary, so I throw all the words I possess out here in the hopes that you will understand what I mean. Listen to what I mean, not what I say, and love me in spite of my verbosity. And pretension. Many thanks.