It’s a curious thing, cooking for people. I love to do it, mostly because I like to cook and I like home-cooked food, but I rarely take the time to do it without the motivation of serving guests. The thing is, it’s hard to tell when you’ve made enough food. If they eat everything, you know they liked whatever it is you made, which is good. But you also don’t know if they got enough to eat because no guest would ever say, “Hey, do you have peanut butter and jelly? I’m still hungry.” On the other hand, if lots is left over then you wonder if people enjoyed the food… and then there’s the problem of dealing with more leftovers than you can eat in a week.

Tonight, the food disappeared. It made for easy clean-up, but I hope people didn’t go home and start rummaging for crackers and cheese.

I’ll know spring is actually coming when…

• My car windows thaw enough to be rolled up and down, relieving me of the need to open the entire door when mailing letters.
• My apartment windows thaw enough to let me see out of them.
• I’m able to stop shielding myself from the draft that lands right on the couch. (A sane person would sit in the loveseat on the other side of the room. But that’s not where I sit, and what would P think?)
• I’m able to grasp door handles without worrying about freezing to them.
• I get the urge to go for walks in the evening again, no longer fearing the Wind that really doesn’t care about hats and scarves and coats and layers (including silk long underwear and wool socks on top of regular socks). These are not actually obstacles for the Wind. They are simply a call to arms. A challenge.
• The sun stays out for longer than my work day.

Things I will miss when this happens, despite the fact that I’m completely tired of being cold:

• Cuddles from chilly kitties. I choose to see them as cuddles and not as a clever scheme to utilize the most accommodating heat-generator in the room. Don’t disabuse me.
• Snow. I like snow.
• My favorite combination of two lap blankets that are permanently waiting for me on the couch. I love sitting under blankets, and these two are so soft and warm when they’re layered on each other.
• Sleeping under heavy blankets. This is my all-time favorite thing about winter. Beds are wonderful places, but they’re doubly wonderful if they’ve been made all nest-ish and warm with layers and layers of blankets.
• Soup. I never seem to make or eat soup as much in the Spring and Summer.

If you should ever find yourself going to a party in the winter, when snow is on the ground, be sure your socks aren’t inside-out. That way, when you arrive and realize that leaving your shoes on and trampling snow and road salt through your friend’s house is not an option, you won’t have to sit around meeting new people and making small talk while wondering all the while if they’re really listening to you or just staring at the telltale seam across your toes that is clearly unaccustomed to being exposed.

Last week, while I was on vacation, I realized that there is a cruel Catch 22 of writing. When I have time and space to let my mind wander, suddenly there’s so much to write about. Every day last week I’d find myself composing little vignettes and wishing I’d brought my paper diary so I could write them down (since I didn’t go online very much while on vacation, so blogging was mostly out of the question).

Now I’m back in the midst of life (and back online), but the little narratives I’d composed have either flown out of my head or seem like more work than they’re worth to write down.

I somewhere in the middle of the six-hour car ride, I thought it’d be interesting to write about what a good image a courtyard would be if I were a poet. It’s such an enclosed space. A private space where pretending wouldn’t be necessary. But an inherently fictional space where everything is a pretence because that little patch of privacy, greenery, and seclusion was built for the express purpose of blocking out life outside of the building. But I’m not a poet.

I could have described the cascade of video cassettes that rained down on the cat after he jumped up on a shelf he shouldn’t have jumped up onto… and how they were still falling when he was half a house away and running at full tilt, and how he hid under the bed for half the day, and shied away from the room that bit him for the rest of the vacation.

But now there’s too much to do and ponder during the day, and somehow writing carefully and thoughtfully feels like work rather than fun.

So there you have it, I can either have the time and space to concoct ideas to write about, or I can have access to writing implements. Unfortunately, unless I miraculously become independently wealthy, rarely the twain shall meet.