happy mother's day!

Yesterday L and I made brunch for my Mom (and Dad) for Mother's Day. L and I cook well together, especially when our parents aren't around and when we're not in their (parents') kitchen. We made a frittata with asparagus and spinach (both from the farmer's market--hoorah the return of seasonal, local veggies!), and a few strips of roasted red pepper for garnish. We also made cheddar grits, and a soft salad with baby lettuces and baby carrots (both from the farmer's market too), tossed with a lemony dressing. The piece de resistance was the Florida Pie I made...from Dorie Greenspan's *Baking: From My Home to Yours,* which is quickly turning into my favorite baking book. I made two versions of the pie--one following the recipe, with a graham cracker crust, a chewy cocount cream layer, topped with a simple lime custard, and a layer of light meringue. The other version, for Dad and L who don't like various elements of the aforementioned pie, left off the coconut and meringue layers, and included a circle of garnet strawberries, oozing juice onto the yellow custard. It--I should say they--we're delicious, one of the best pies I've ever made. As Mom said, it has the right balance of flavors and textures, which makes it quite a treat. We drank sweet tea (loosely following the recipe in *Two for the Road*), a Trebbiano, and my luscious intelligentsia coffee.

In other news, I've been drawing inward as I read novel after novel in quick succession and spin out my own novel plot. thanks to reading the well-written, fully and complicatedly plotted novels of Susan Elizabeth Phillips, I've thought of several ways to deepen the plot in my *Surprise Developments* novel. The real task now is to move from swirling ideas in my head to words on the page, not always one of my strengths. This week is blessedly open, with the whole week in front of me to work on writing, and I intend to take advantage. I also need to write 2 abstracts, a letter of reference, and work on this mystery piece that I need to submit to a journal by the end of June.

One of the most seductive qualities about the writing I'm doing now, whether literary non-fiction (or I should say with aspirations to be literary) or fiction is how I can share parts of myself that really no one else knows through the stories I create and the words I use to shape those stories. Not that everything I write is ME, especially not in my fiction, but it's an outlet for the way I see the world, or the way I might like to see the world. It's difficult to describe, but there's something about the creative force that feels very authentic even when what I'm creating is totally fanciful.