Voice Mail Archives

Every year I make a slightly different version of this soup. It's always got to have black eyed peas, of course, because eating those delightful little babies on New Year's Day brings you prosperity and luck in the whole long year to come.

So I'm a big fan of coddled eggs. I eat them for breakfast all winter long, which means that I occasionally rhapsodize -- at length and out loud -- about how truly spectacular a thing coddled eggs are, which means that my friends can often be found walking around looking deeply confused when they're with me.

It happened sooner than I was expecting. The seedheads and weeds were overtaking the garden faster than the late summer wildflowers could climb up and over them to crowd them on out. And the days were rapidly cooling. And getting shorter.

It's fall. I don't care what the calendar says. And things are dying.

I was sixteen years old when my great aunt's house fell in love with me. Well, technically, fell on me. But I knew what it meant.

The timing was apt. Not because I was at some peculiarly ripe age for handsome old houses to start noticing me. I mean. Is there ever a wrong time for a house to choose you, and mark you as its own?

This is probably not a hypothetical question.

Here is what I remember.

I've been realizing more and more that when people ask me how I'm doing -- just in the course of everyday idle chitchat -- I have less and less of any real dramatic interest to report. I mean, at the risk of calling down every jinxy jinx in the universe upon mine unlucky head, let's be honest. Things are going pretty great around here.

My neighbor has a birch tree in her front yard, and it makes no sense at all.