A certain beauty

J has foregone his 6am bike ride because it's cold and dark and wintery outside. I'm thrilled because it means he gets to stay in bed with me, with our hot cups of tea, our jingling-collared dogs, our dueling macbooks (his is a pro, of course) propped up on our knees, the New Yorker between us, opened to a particularly good cartoon involving a dog. Briar is sniffing at me and wiggling her bum which means either 1) she wants to go out and hunt down her squirrel nemesis or 2) she wants to jump up on the bed and play human. The dreaded colonoscopy came and went and all is well. The demerol had a particularly soothing effect on my nervous type A husband and we giggled together at the nurses when he came to, and I drove him home in his delirium and ministered sausages and cups of tea and Harry Potter. The bloody sausages, which he brought home from Germany or some other frankfurter haven, have been sitting in a jar in the pantry cupboard for a year now and every time the cupboard he stares at them with plaintive and palpable longing. Finally yesterday, emboldened by the demerol no doubt, he said, sheepishly "I think I'm going to have one of those sausages," as if he were about to embark on a feast of the world's most expensive white truffle.

I dreamed of my grandmother's beef stroganoff and tried to recreate it for supper, using a partial recipe from the City cookbook (which uses julienned pickles) but added onions and some tomato paste, which is of course verboten in the hallowed world of Stroganoff connoisseurs. It did taste dreamy though. Each mouthful creamy, sweet with tomato and crisp with pickle. And I overcooked the noodles. Which worked, in this case.

An email arrived yesterday which asked "how is your life of domesticity?" and they all but included the word "dull" in that sentence. There is a beauty to this stuff, to listening to my husband rouse my 17 year old son from his slumbers ("I'm awake, goddammit. I'm UP"), to driving the 12 year old to the orthodontist and having to sit in the waiting room for an hour practicing French vocabulary, to stopping off at susiecakes for red velvet cupcakes for a birthday party at school, to making sure the older one has registered for his SAT 2s, to nursing my smacked-out husband after he's had a camera up his bum, to telling the insurance man who won't pay for my rental car (after his damn client smashed into me) that he's not dealing with an idiot although I do a great imitation of one, of stealing hours here and then to sit at my desk and do some work, to write a Good Poem for my class tomorrow so I don't appear to be a complete dilettante...yes there is certain beauty to all of it. I just don't always see it. That's all.