F & I

Top o the Monday to all of you good folk!

Today I must: write a letter to a man in Colorado about a guidebook he wrote about fifty years ago; interview the priest; buy more milk. And take a shower. I smell like maple syrup and I'm not sure how it happened. All last night I exuded the scent; while it seemed pleasant at first, it grew increasingly cloying, and now I can hardly wait to rid myself of it and go on with my day without thinking of pancakes every time I inhale.

It's deeply gray today, so gray in fact that I feel I could plunge my arm into the sky up to the elbow, grope around, and still not touch the hot orb of the sun. If I could I'd pull it out and bounce it across the county, sending sparks over us all and clearing our stuffy heads.

FIRE AND ICE

Merry held a late-birthday sleepover on Friday night. Two things of note happened: one, Martin, while mixing up some last minute enchiladas (Merry's choice) for about twenty people, leaned over to taste the sauce and realized he had put in two tablespoons of cayenne instead of chili powder; two, the sky decided to dump great quantities of ice upon us, so that everything looked like a set for the Nutcracker, charming until we almost killed four people on our front steps which looked as they had been dusted with a wee bit of snow but were coated underneath with an inch of ice. And the handrail was coated with ice as well, which translated to a lot of slipping and sliding and near calamity. Martin worked for about an hour to get to the rock salt I'd left in the Subaru. The car was also encased in an inch of ice which shattered like glass. Needless to say, our little guests got to stay for a while longer than planned, since nobody could get in their cars, let alone drive them along the roads. But the girls got some swift sledding in on our icy hill and we could hear the sleds swooping down even inside over the roar of the vacuum cleaner, where I was cleaning up the clods of cheese on the floor from the SECOND batch of enchiladas, sans cayenne.