Marie Gauthier

One missing letter, and suddenly what you’ve typed is “housefly” (musca domestica).  Which is how I’ve been feeling, flitting from room to room, restless, useless.  This is not about “nesting”.  What I’d really like to do is curl up with a great book and read for a few hours.  But “curling up” is simply impossible when a body’s this pregnant, dagnabbit.

So yesterday, which was a miserable rainy/icy stuck-inside sort of day, I exercised my atrophying domestic muscles and baked cookies. That’s right.  And not just any cookies, but what I consider the best cookies in creation, oatmeal chocolate chip. I’ve tried many different recipes for this cookie in the past, and it’s hard to really come up with a bad one, but I love this one — and it was right on the bag!  I don’t remember that being true before.  The only aspect of the recipe I would change is the size of the chips — I prefer using mini-semi-sweet chocolate chips, but my local grocer didn’t have them.

Nonetheless:  O so good, a symphony of taste!

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From Pamela Stewart’s The Red Window (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1997):

Blue Winter Light

Last night a mouse was torn from the earth
while three cars crashed on the highway.
Last night I dreamed under my skin
down to where blood sweeps back and forth.
A man I loved still walks there
in disturbing currents. As I watch the forest
fade to darkening cold, an owl prepares.
There is no I for predators to hunt. For me
just the indigo galaxy —
its spirals and exhalations of dust.