Friday

Ed pulled an all nighter, working through the dark hours on his epoxy experiments and measurements until he was satisfied. Normal people would be up drinking their first cup of coffee of the day by the time he dragged himself upstairs to bed. This put me in a quandary: wake the guy up for breakfast? Cruel. Let him sleep? That'll blow the day to smithereens. 

In the end the ever ringing phones did the trick. (Ed has four phone-like devices ringing simultaneously at the farmhouse; one can only be grateful that most of his calls happen in normal business hours.) I'm up, gorgeous! He shouts. Breakfast, not solo.

Sometime after the noon hour, I take a short brisk stroll, during which I realize that the wind is biting and the pleasant-ish 16F (-9C) reading doesn't tell the full picture. Still, the sun is out and so I pack athletic gear into the car and drive out to pick up Snowdrop at school.

She does not want to go skiing.

She does not want to go skating.

She tells me she had an okay day at school (usually it's 10/10, today it's an 8).

She tells me she is tired and wants so much only to go to the farmhouse.

 

 

And I realize something -- the daily skating worked splendidly when she was isolated, when school was closed to her, when she was bursting to step outside. It's a little more tricky when the school day started at 7:40 a.m., when the teacher was unfair, when the recess games were intense and when the vision of less effort and few demands is just too tempting. 

So we go to the farmhouse. And she loses herself in her stories and in our books about goofy and brave cats...

These are her most sacred tools that she uses again and again to make sense of this very complicated and demanding world.

 

At her home -- the brothers.

 

And at the farmhouse, later, much later, I sautee some Vietnamese Shrimp (last week's Wash Po Cooking Voraciously recipe drop), and steam some rice and pour a white wine from the Jura region of Eastern France. I'm not surprised to see Ed doze off early. No, not all.

With love...