To-do list:
Follow us on Twitter, email us classified ad requests (it’s literally free), follow the Washington Review of Books on Twitter and subscribe to their newsletter, and go for a walk to look at the daffodils and tulips and flowering fruit trees.
Links:
This is a cool video.
Great video
Culinary woulds:
Clare went to Amish country with her mother and had all kinds of delightful treats, including but not limited to whoopie pie, shoofly pie, espresso peanut butter, ice cream (chocolate chip cookie dough supremacy), eggs, apple maple sausage, and pickled garlic. She trusts that such feasting did not make her any thinner, but come on, it’s Easter: why would she fast while the bridegroom is still with her? Also, this weekend she enjoyed one Old Fashioned with some church friends and it made her a little fun and punchy. One guy said to the table, “Whoever gave this woman a drink is going to prison.”
Amy heard about espresso tonics recently and has had three since Saturday morning. Very good!
Sarah made this for dinner when her friends came over. Lamb, tzatziki sauce, flatbread, hummus, and a lemon kale salad. It “went.”
She also baked some apple blondies which really did hit and made some ice cream with cinnamon, vanilla, and candied orange.
Hot/Crazy Matrix Scores:
Sarah
Zoe
Amy
Clare
Gaby
Music:
Clare’s audio fast is over, so she’s back to listening to Jeff Buckley when she wants to be blue, and bluegrass when she wants to be sunny. They both give her ample opportunity to sing the word “hallelujah.”
Poem:
A Live Dog Being Better Than a Dead Lion
Rain. Rain from Baltimore. The ballroom floor
Is lit. See the gold sheen on the over-
Whelmed grasses? See the starched ruff of the hedgerow?
And the dancers are dressing. They tease
Their toes into shoes. Tease their breath into stays:
Stay the moment. Stay the luck. Stay, stay, the fields
Are full of rain and baby’s breath. These will
Fashion the heart, and the heart fastened to the sleeve
Will break fire as the redbird did this morning
Bursting his small buttons against the glass. The glass
Was not black-hearted. It was an innocent pretender.
It took to itself the idea of sky and the bird bought
It, played his brave swan dive into our palms.
So let us wear it. Let us wear the bird like
A boutonniere to remind us that caution snares
Nothing. O the cautious are caught in the net
Of their cares: Stop, No Turn, Leave Your Shoes
At the Door. Please Don’t Spit on the Statue and
Tokens Go Here. But the bird rode his cheer up.
Rode the high wire of his cheer up. Left
Without counting the cost his spittle-bright snail
Trail for the rain to erase, for the wind to wash
Out. Booted his small body beyond the Beyond.
Now the wrecked grace of the morning trails
Its tattered clouds. But they are flowers.
The pink flowers of Maryland turn softly above us.
—
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from Song, 1995
What we’re reading:
Sarah is reading Middlemarch. She loves it but she does feel like George Eliot is negging her. She’s not going to enumerate her similarities to Dorothea but assumes our readership is aware of them.
Amy read C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet this week. It’s an absolutely delightful read. She’s looking forward to the next installment of the Space Trilogy series, but she might listen to the audio book. She’s also reading a memoir her co worker lent her called Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. It’s a fascinating look into the life of a college professor during and after the Iranian Revolution. Nafisi forms a study of Western classics in her home with seven female former students. Her commentary on the chosen books is colored by the unique experiences of each woman.
Clare is marching onward with her lonely little Bible study but otherwise hasn’t been reading that much this week. She really needs to be WRITING! [Smae. – Sarah] She told an editor of a magazine that she’d get an essay done about John Huston’s film adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling story The Man Who Would Be King and Robin Hardy’s 1975 film The Wicker Man. It’s an exciting essay to write. She asked her editor friend to come and burn her house down if she didn’t get it done by Sunday. Spoiler: this one ends in fire.
Exhortations:
Ask us out on a date! We’re so bored and so pretty!
Request for approval:
Is this okay?