When it’s been grey for days, and cold like the whiteblue tips of icicles, it is best to have people over for soup. Yesterday evening after booking it home from class, I was peeling pumpkins in an awkward way, trying to keep track of all my fingers, thinking, “If Maud were here she would point out that this is an accident waiting to happen.” And then she did arrive, and she took over the knife, and, like magic, none too soon all the pumpkins were peeled and chopped and ready for a soup—and I still had all my fingers.

Later, India came by with an apple tart in a cake carrier with her name and phone number on it; and then Vio, with a mint vase and pink flowers; and then it was time to eat, even without Tom, because when it is time to eat it is time to eat. Especially when time to eat means pumpkin soup with cream swirled into the pot at the last minute; and an arugula–green apple–parmesan–mixed nuts salad; and cheeses; and concord grapes; and sweet, sweet, out-of-season strawberries (does “Driscoll’s has its own Research and Development Department to create and breed its own, unique varieties of strawberries” mean “genetically modified”?); and New Norcia pan chocolatti; and India’s apple incredible with a great big red bowl of cream thick and white like dreams of clouds.



The night was good like discovering the first red leaves of the fall; like wrapping my Swans scarf round my neck on a windy day; like fluffing out and burrowing underneath the down comforter for the first time since the winter past. Gab tried to teach me the finer points of opening a wine bottle; Tom gave expert footrubs to girls with cold feet; Maud opened a bottle of Staud’s raspberry jam because she thought it said “Maud’s.” We bitched with gusto about anyone who wasn’t in attendance; we interrupted Tom’s stories seventeen times; we lay about, oh, there was just so much lying about—upstairs, downstairs, inside, outside, we are just a bunch of layabouts, and that is how we like it.



(The thing about the outside is, Tom wanted to have a smoke, which led to the official delineating of smoking areas in this house, which is as such: If you are Maud, you can smoke by the kitchen window. If you are Gab, you can sit in the downstairs window to smoke, but you really have to fit in the window. If you are Vio, you can stand in the courtyard for a smoke while you shout through the upstairs kitchen window to Astella. Eventually we all proceeded outside, where the boys lay on the ground while others of us spread out on a blanket, on n’est pas des animaux.)

And I guess it’s just like in Totoro when there’s the big storm and Satsuki and Mei are all wide-mouthed and laughing and the soot sprites fly off into the night, because this morning when I rolled over in bed, the sun was back in the sky.