The Seated View

It all started with the cherries. Cherry sauce is required for ris a la mande, the special Danish Christmas dessert. It has a French name, which apparently makes no sense at all in actual French. Every couple of years, we freeze 5 pounds of black Bing cherries in the summer and come November, carry them to my mother’s to make cherry sauce. It’s a long, involved process resulting in the most beautiful concentrated dark cherry sauce dotted with whole cherries. You drizzle that over the ris a la mande and… Heaven in a bowl! My mother insists on using a Danish product to thicken the sauce just a little, and followed the usual procedure this year. No need to look at the instructions on the back of the package, right? I know you can hear the foreshadowing. Turns out the product had changed, becoming much more concentrated. With the result that as the cherry sauce was being poured through a sieve, what came out on the other end of the sieve was a jellied cherry-sicle....

Heaven preserve us from really good doctors… What am I going on about, you ask? Isn’t having a good doctor a good thing? Well, most of the time it is. But sometimes meeting a good doctor who doesn’t know you can lead to situations that can best be described as “interesting.” Those of you who’ve read my book know that one of the side effects I’ve experienced from the Biologics is bladder spasms, likely aggravated by fibromyalgia. And if you thought that’s TMI, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Essentially, it feels like I’m brewing a UTI at all times. Not actually the full-fledged version, but that background irritable muttering that is so often the sign that a dose of antibiotics is in your near future. I’ve learned to manage it, most of which means filtering out the persistent whingeing from my nether regions. Much like I suspect mothers of teenage girls learn to filter out 80% of what comes out of their child’s mouth. That is, until the whingeing — of my nether region, not the...

Photo by Janne / TinkMama Four years ago today, The Boy and I finally realized what had been blatantly obvious to everyone else for several months: that we belong together. It was the best decision I've ever made— every day since has been filled with love and laughter. David is everything I've ever dreamed of in a partner and then some.  I am a very lucky woman.   

Today is this handsome man's birthday This quote by modern philosopher Slavoj Žižek in the movie Examined Life  resonates with both of us "Love is not idealization. A true Lover knows that if you really love a woman or a man, that you do not idealize him or her. Loves means that you accept a person, with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points and nonetheless the person is absolute for you, everything that makes life worth living, that you see perfection in imperfection itself. And that is how we should learn to love the world.” There is no such thing as the perfect man or woman. There is, however, a person who is perfect for you. And I'm very lucky to have found the man who's perfect for me (and who luckily thinks I'm perfect for him, too, or things might have gotten uncomfortably stalk-y). He normally prefers to be a bit stealth, but I believe you should be the recipient of much fuss on your Once A Year Day. What better way to ensure fuss than...

    Every year (more or less) on this day, I participate in the Bloggers Silent Poetry Reading on the Feast of St. Brigid. I’ve never been able to find out how it originated, but went with the flow of what I saw around me, posting poems I liked. I’ve posted an ode to nature by the 17 th century poet Thomas Traherne, a poem about grief by Pablo Neruda and one of myown , as well. This year, I found out what this silent poetry reading is all about and it turns out I’ve been doing a sort of amended version. Because seven years ago, this started as a pagan bloggers’ celebration of the goddess Brigid, patron of poets, healers and midwives.  The idea was to post your own poem to Brigid. I like that. A lot. I’m still going to continue my tradition, though, posting a poem I like, rather than one I wrote myself. Still, this year is very much connected to Brigid. It has been two years since we lost out beloved Claire and we are still raw and hurting. Thi...