a land as green and sweet as the ocean is salt and blue

there is little to eat in the house. we need to shop. i made half and half this morning with heavy whipping cream (leftover from the frosting makings of last week's cake) and milk. the kitchen is a pile of bowls and forks and crumbs and strawberry tops. the house smells of coffee and needs a good airing.

henry sleeps late this morning. he stayed up late acting out the part of the scarecrow as he watched dorothy and company gambol their way to see the wizard (if ever a wever a wizard there was). he falls with the scarecrow, clasping his hands over his heart and pretends to mouth "my heart all full of pain." he's a gem.

jude is beginning to creep through the house with a backwards scooting sort of crawl. he is rather quick at it and i am plotting out the necessary gates and door closings to keep him safe.



and it is cold again. more snow stubbornly sticking to the grass. i want to go barefoot to check the mail. i want to start the day getting muddy in the garden. i want to eat watermelon. when summer comes my mother and i have plans to sell bread and flowers at the farmer's market. we will bake the bread and carry it in baskets and will grow the flowers and carry them in jars. we will pitch our tent at the end of her mini-van and will wave to the brown farmers whose knobby fingers lay out cucumbers, to the young girls wearing jean shorts sitting perched atop piles of sweet corn in the backs of working trucks. and if we don't sell anything we will eat the bread ourselves and wind the flowers through our hair, making crowns for henry and jude, the rest bunched and wilting on the kitchen table.

"i put on my boatlike hat in the morning and enter the marketplace but by noon i am home again, lying down on a slab reading some hieroglyphics." --collins