the busy heart

Remember the friend who made the miraculous quilt ? She's teaching me to quilt, too.  I thought I was just going to learn to use the sewing machine I got for Christmas, that maybe we'd make a skirt or something equally simple, but when we got to fabric store, E had a plan.  "A quilt," she said, "is the best way to learn to sew. All straight lines."  And so we picked out fabric, went back to my house, and while the husbands played guitars and talked about music, and sweet potatoes roasted in the oven, we cut out little squares and spread them out according to a chart that E drew up in about ten seconds.  This is what it looked like, spread out (with cat). (This is the thing about cats: they seem to get quilts.  When you even suggest you might make one, they know we're dealing with a potential blanket right off, and commence utilizing it.) I found something fascinating once I got the hang of putting those rows toget...

In the days leading up to Valentine's Day, I had a sense that I wanted to do something nice for Sam, something a bit sentimental, but I wasn't entirely sure how he'd take it.  He doesn't seem the sort.  And when I asked him casually about it, he confirmed that he indeed was not the sort.  "Valentine's Day," said Sam, "is for girls."  He claimed he didn't expect anything, indeed didn't want anything, that girls invented the holiday  so they could have an extra birthday, etc.  And in his defense, he really came through.  He sent me a beautiful bromeliad, which arrived at work with a gorgeously-written card, and then came and visited me and we went for a spontaneous dinner out (we'd planned to be wise and eat at home, since we'd eaten out in a V-day way over the weekend).  Somewhere in there, I just decided to do it, to do the romantic thing I'd been considering, which was to find a series of short love poems or excerpts from l...