Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I...do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bathe them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry,…
Noon dominated sea and sky--even the white line of Cannes, five miles off, had faded to a mirage of what was fresh and cool; a robin-breasted sailing boat pulled in behind it a strand from the outer, darker sea. It seemed that there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast except under…
She worked briskly and efficiently, taking her brush and pan from the drawing-room to the top of the stairs and making her way back down, a step at a time; after that she filled a bucket with water, fetched her kneeling-mat, and began to wash the hall floor. Vinegar was all she used. Soap left…
I woke up today to a crash downstairs and the sound of breaking glass. At first, I thought I must have been dreaming, but something told me that my dreams had been full of pleasant things, like cake and bunnies, and not of a beagle who, as I discovered when my racing heart and I…
This place, supposedly still our home, feels very alien to me: boxes are everywhere, dust bunnies are forming and the available floor space is rapidly disappearing. There is, somewhere in this mess, sadness and a feeling of loss, but I suddenly feel rather numb to it all. Or maybe it's just gotten lost in the…
For portions of every day, she manages to lose herself in realms of memory: the faint impressions of the visual world before she was six, when Paris was like a vast kitchen, pyramids of cabbages and carrots everywhere, bakers' stalls overflowing with pastries; fish stacked like cordwood in the fishmongers' booths, the runnels awash in…
"Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic," Fogg said expansively. "It doesn't really make sense. It's a little too perfect, don't you think? If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so. Words and thoughts don't change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly…
Here we are, yet again, in the Emerald Month; it crept up on me this year rather unexpectedly. Truth be told, my sense of time isn't so impressive these days. In part, I blame California and its lack of seasons. It's very disconcerting for a person to live in what essentially amounts to "season-less" time--one…
Happy Easter, Passover and soon-to-be Easter (Balkans and Slavs, I'm talking to you)! There are so many things to love right now about spring: sunshine and flowers, all the strawberries and asparagus (that is, if you're currently in California) that you could ever want and, most wonderful of all, that hopeful and energetic feeling that…
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about recipes, cookbooks and food blogging. Who am I kidding? Whenever I come to this space, this is what I inevitably think about. But, this time at least, it goes a little deeper than my usual interest in these issues. In part, this is because of the Piglet, Food52's…
Dining with Dostoevsky 