last night

I would count this as a tough day, posting wise. It’s not that I stayed home and had no occasion to use the camera. From early on, the camera was out and clicking.




And we did go out – my daughters and I. To lunch, to shop, to the movies – conventional mother-daughter events, no?

Sure. But it’s always a wrenching day, that last day of their winter visit. How can it be otherwise?

The air is brisk, cold now. The sun appears for a minute at a time, no more than that.





Eh. Not interested in photographing anything really. Until a daughter nudges me – see that? Buried cart?





Yes, that one feels right. Buried. With only one wheel poking through.


One last dinner of favorites (never cook new things for daughters returning home; they only want the old things, again and again), one last night together, one last night of them passing through...

And then there will be the tough days. Not yet, not until after the Christmas tree comes down. Tomorrow.

many happy returns?

I was prepared, at the shop, for a day of refunds. Of disappointed recipients who wanted anything but what they got. The miscalculated present. I was expecting those.

But I got none of it. You could posit that the returns came before my shift, or that maybe I was sleeping on the job. You’d be wrong.

In the alternative, you could suggest that we, at the shop, listened well to buyers' queries and gave good counsel in return, or that the shop product is so excellent that only a fool would want to return it.

Better. That’s better.


I was thinking today how life is so often a guessing game and how we are forced to predict outcomes with very little information.



rosé at Brasserie V

It’s the day after Christmas. What I really need is for a big clean-up truck to roll in and pick up the debris after yesterday’s celebration. One that could sweep up and put things away and one that maybe would be capable of erasing thoughts of anticipation and replace them with thoughts of reentry into the real world.


Very late in the day, I had a holiday relapse: I baked another four dozen cinnamon rolls, in case daughters, in the last day and a half of their visit here developed an insatiable yearning for the smell of yeasty dough and cinnamon breads baking.


It’s well into the next calendar day before I make it to bed.