My dalmatian, the Meth-Head

For the first time I can remember this year, it's so cold in my office that I have to grab an old brown sweater and throw it on over my t-shirt. I'm surrounded by college books and maps and brochures and I'm planning our routes. Quite interestingly, I'm excited to go to NY with N, excited for our road trip. I imagine it like a movie and wonder if I should take a video camera just for a laugh. I've eschewed the 87, to take us from Fordham to Skidmore, for the Taconic State Parkway, so we can do a drive-by of Dutchess and Columbia counties on the way and scout out lovely farms to live in a year or so from now. I think I've wangled it so we can tour Fordham at 10am in the Bronx and make it to Millbrook for lunch at 1pm, but you never know. It IS meant to be an adventure afterall. TZ's parent have very kindly invited us to stay with them in Eagle Bridge, near the Vermont border, and I think they have an old farmhouse, no doubt with a crackling fire.

Dotsie went to the new vet, Dr Richter, to have her teeth cleaned, and has come home looking like meth-head, her two very front teeth missing. It would be so sad if it wasn't so funny, but miraculously she now has Colgate-fresh breath, complete with the ring of confidence.

I am vaguely in love with Phedon Papamichael who has made this little movie look so gosh darn gorgeous that I want to lick the screen or go stand in a river in Maryland surrounded by willow trees. We remain cautiously optimistic but oh me oh my, I screamed and hid my face in my hands in the screening.

J called me on his way to the airport. It's Chicago this time. "I'm outside our old house" he reports. "Nothing has changed, except the door, which has been painted red. The brick path we put in is still there, the old gate, the palm tree which is now twenty feet higher than the house. Do you remember how happy we were there?" he says. "I remember falling asleep in my hammock in that garden one day and feeling so stupidly happy." "We're happier now," I say. But I do remember that little garden with the apricot and lemon trees, and the massive flower borders we planted ourselves and the wild tomato vine that climbed over the garden fence like Jack's beanstalk. And that damn James Taylor playing over and over and over again.