My dear Sophia,

Just like your arrival, your first birthday comes like a joyful shout in the night that wakes me from my dreaming state. “Hooray!” it yells, and laughs so sweet my ears can barely hold the sound. It makes me feel older, just like you, and reminds me to cram as much life as will fit into each passing year—so long for you, so short for me—until they overflow with vision and flight and rage and ache and love.

You are the gorgeous gift of genes and generations. Happy Birthday, baby girl.

Love,
Aunty M.

I know I’m getting a little lonely when I prowl the Pets section on Craigslist looking for a furry creature to scatter hair into every corner of my apartment, wake me up at 6 a.m. by stabbing me in the skull with its claws and mraaawring in my ear, and destroy the fantasy I harbor that at any moment, I could just up and leave on a holiday to Zanzibar.

We’ll see.

1) Drizzle fresh pita with olive oil.
2) Crumble feta onto the pita.
3) Spread thinly sliced red capsicum on top of that.
4) Add some thinly sliced red onion.
5) Stick a couple of small squares of pepper jack on, too. What the heck.
6) Top with more crumbled feta.
7) Broil, uncovered, for eight minutes, until the cheese is starting to melt and the pita is slightly browned.
8) Finish with torn pieces of fresh basil.

Optional: Enjoy with glasses of Half e Weizen, lemon, and a healthy dose of self-congratulation.

It was a cold day, but a productive one, and at the end there was this sunlight on the wooden deck; you should have seen it.

Walking to the store to get some things for dinner there was also a crisp, bright full moon, with cookie-cutter-sharp edges.

A good day.

A drummer can look like he is boxing, fierce and quick and cruel, when he plays. Astonishingly, so can a bassist, his shoulders ducking now left, now right, around the luxurious wooden curves of his bass. In both cases the musicians appear to be locked in beautiful, immensely satisfying battle, not with each other, but with their own instruments.

A pianist can look like he is hardly doing anything at all, and yet his languid jabs and darts create a bridge of notes upon which you can, if you close your eyes, ascend.

The face of a tenor saxophonist can contort into such a mask, such a gloriously twisted grimace, that you would swear—if his lips were not pursed about a reed—he must be screaming.

Even if you can hear every step your neighbor makes, even if her laughter is clearly audible to you when she is on the phone, and even if she has on previous occasions mentioned the inability of the walls in this building to dampen the sounds of the lives of others, you do not remember to catch your own voice and hold it down when you are declaring great emotional truths to your husband or wailing about something or other, it’s always something or other, isn’t it. You simply speak, and then—catching the squeak of a footstep from above—wonder what you sound like.

You can love, quite dearly, people you have never met.

…how did I become a person who bakes cookies* on a Sunday afternoon and already has plans for what to make for dinner (tomato-sausage risotto)? For heaven’s sake. I feel like I need a shot of bourbon or something to make myself feel more manly.

*Now I understand the need for a mixer. It’s for creaming the damn butter. Damn butter.

Tonight I acquired a beautiful Phalaenopsis orchid from someone who currently lives across the street from me in Chicago, but is moving to Yale to start a post-doc position and can’t take his beloved plant along, for some reason. We’ve been trying to coordinate an exchange time for a couple of days, and tonight he brought the orchid over and we knelt on the front steps for ten minutes or so while he schooled me on its care. Even now, when it’s not in bloom, it’s an incredibly beautiful plant; it has a forest of green aerial roots draping themselves languidly over one side of the pot like locks of hair, and reaching out of the pot in the other direction are two dried bloom spikes from this year’s blossoms, spiky and thin like the long horns of a Chinese dragon. It has large, deep green leaves that grow in layers like a fan, and is altogether a remarkable thing to hold and touch and look at. I have all kinds of information about how to keep it beautiful from its previous owner, who when he dropped it off kept putting out an affectionate hand to show me what he was talking about, and sent me an email minutes after leaving my apartment with more instructions on watering and exposure. His love for this orchid both moved me and intimidated me; it was hard to close the door on him with the plant in my arms like a pet he had to leave behind.

Here is a photograph he sent me of the orchid in bloom this past year.

It won’t be hard to get through the winter now, knowing that this will be waiting for me on the other side.