There are few things I like better than to have a decision made for me by a good newspaper article.

This article offered suggestions for April Fool Jokes.  Naturally, it put me in mind of a whole list of things that used to happen in my family: short-sheeted beds, falling water coming from a pail perched on a door, sewn-up pajamas….

I smiled as I reminisced about reactions to these tricks, and I missed the expert touch my mom put on her pranks.  Then it came to me that my two children have gotten off pretty easily. Sure, I jump out and surprise them to improve their reflexes, substitute salt for sugar, but on this past April Fools I longed to hear the shouts of indignation as my children found their pajamas sewn up.

Or that was my hope. I am usually asleep within moments of my head touching my pillow, but I forced myself to stay awake and to listen for their cries. Nothing. My daughter crept in to say good night, then my son. Sweetness, no outrage.

The next day I found their pajamas, threads hanging, already among the dirty laundry: I guess the joke was on me.
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I have pulled off a Dorian Gray by growing more child-like as the years pass. It comes from coddling. My husband can fix about anything I break and if my husband can’t, our son can.

Even when he was a toddler, I could tell that our son had a gift for spatial reasoning, but the actual fixing of broken objects started when he was about six. I was mowing the backyard and hit a hillock hard. The lawnmower stopped short and a wheel tipped sideways.

I was a woman bent on finishing a task. I called for my husband. He was out. My son came out and looked at the lawn mower.

“Just flip it over, Mama, I’ll fix it.” And he did.

From that point on, I started doing what I had done when I was a little girl with a broken toy, but now, instead of giving a broken toy to my father to repair, I shuffle my feet and hold the broken item, electronic or mechanical, out to my son, or I put it on my husband’s desk, a parking lot of items to be fixed.

Today, weeks after Daylight’s Savings, the car clock was still an hour behind. I matured a bit in a moment, sighed, and pressed the “select/reset” button on the car controls: I successfully brought the clock, and a bit of myself, up to date.
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I was working in Madrid when my boyfriend started consulting for the European Union Intellectual Patent Office in Alicante.

“Great,” I thought, “That will really open him up to different people from all over Europe. His English will really improve!”

I was enthusiastic; until he came back to Madrid and told me that he had started going out after work with a consultant from England. My radar went up.  Everyone knows the Brits are a lovely people but they can also be kinky as heck….

My concerns were confirmed the third week my boyfriend came home and he pulled me up in a bear hug and said, “You are a sexy mother-f……” I turned into a lead weight. Damn Brit! Corrupting my sweet Spaniard. I seethed, but silently, brooding over ways I might protect my darling innocent.

The following Friday my boyfriend announced with delight, “Steve will be coming to Madrid this weekend. He’s a great guy, you’ll love him!”

“I bet.” I said with clenched jaw.

We went to the Atocha train station to pick up Steve, a tall, angular fellow, hardly offensive and actually very pleasant-looking.  We all greeted each other.

“I’ll ride in the back,” I offered, “I’m short.” So I slid into the back seat, figuring I’d also be able to keep an eye on the guys. We pulled out of the train station and Steve tapped his breast pocket, “I have the música!” And he took a cassette out of his pocket and slipped it into the cassette player. Percussion, horns blast, and Prince sings:

“In a word or two, it's you I want to do
No not your body, your mind you fool
Come here baby, yeah
You sexy motherf***er”

I relaxed, relieved that it has been Prince teaching my boyfriend naughty language and not the nice British guy in the front seat.
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Back in college, my best friend and I held a contest. Who could eat least healthfully for a week?
The first day was fun: Fruit Loops for breakfast, jelly on white bread for lunch, macaroni and cheese for dinner – all washed down with Tab.

On the second day, we got more competitive. By Day Three I was eating Sweet Tarts – and just Sweet Tarts. By Day Six I had sugar sores in my mouth. I ate some Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop Tarts in an attempt to balance out my system. My friend tried to best me with chocolate, chocolate frosted Pop Tarts with sprinkles.

The week ended. We tallied our junk food intake. We read ingredients. We had never done so much math in our combined years from middle school through college. We finally had to resort to a panel of judges: our floor-mates.

We presented our food diaries: my friend’s food staple had been Sugar Babies and they contained, “…Sugar, Corn Syrup, Invert Sugar, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Dry Whole Milk, Food Starch-Modified, Whey….”

My main food had been Sweet Tarts, their ingredients being: “Dextrose, Maltodextrin, Malic Acid, and less than 2% of Magnesium Stearate, Artificial Flavors, Blue 1 Lake, Blue 2 Lake, Red 40 Lake, Yellow 5 Lake, Yellow 6 Lake.”

Alas for my friend and her “Dry Whole Milk.” I was declared Unhealthy Champion.
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I have taken at least one hundred pictures of two rotting trees and the space of green moss between them, each, in its own way, more moody than a graveyard on Halloween.

I ran by them yesterday and the trunks were there, weary, gray, and stalwart. But now they were guarding a gap in a new chain link fence.  A culvert near the base of the trees made me think of Wormtongue’s description of the one weakness of Helm’s Deep in Tolkien’s “The Two Towers”.

Today, as I finished my run, I burrowed down into the heat of my clothes and half-closed my eyes against the early morning snow. My foot kicked some little branches and then a fresh wood chip. I stopped. Ent-carnage everywhere.

I turned to my right, the gap was no longer guarded; the culvert was open to attack. The tree trunks had been ground out of their spot.

And then I remembered the chain link fence that had been put up recently on either side of the old tree trunks.

I understand the farmer’s point of view: remains from the careless visitors and their trysts are evident in the trash spread along the fence’s edge.

Still, I will mourn the openness of the view across the fields and I will miss the knotty perfection of the old guards.
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​One of my sisters is an artist, so I have had a privileged life listening to her comments about composition, lighting, and color.

I also have a friend who is an artist. For years we took walks, and she would stop and photograph things that struck her as particularly beautiful, odd, or mysterious.

I started to photograph details of my everyday life, myself. Today, as I stood in the grocery store parking lot to take a picture of the sun and of the bark on some trees, I realized that each of my pictures is a snapshot of gratitude.
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It is a marvelous world – even when seen from the asphalt of the parking lot.

Mama didn’t want us to leave home and miss her good home-cooking, and we didn’t.   All eight of us, though, miss her expert buying of the finest treats.

When we were young there were treats from Sibley’s. When Sibley’s closed, the baked goods were bought at the bakery up the street.

The sweetest era was when my two older sisters and I were in college. During those years the super-supermarket Wegman’s sold a superior chocolate chip cookie. It was just a bit smaller than a tea plate and soft to the tooth. Whatever shortening they used melted immediately upon hitting the back of the mouth. It was a perfect cookie.

Mama would send care packages to us at our colleges and we would dole out the coveted cookies with magnanimity, kind possessors of things desired.

Mama brought some Wegman’s cookies arranged carefully in a round tin container on one trip to pick up my sister from college. My sister’s room-mate was coming home with her for break and another student from Rochester was sharing a ride home.

The collegiates settled in the car.

“I brought some cookies!” Mama encouraged.

“I love these cookies! You make the best cookies – they’re all so perfectly shaped!” enthused my sister’s room-mate.

“If you make round balls out of the dough you get that uniform look…” mama riposted.

“Yeah, but you didn’t make these,” said the cocky kid who was sharing the ride.

“Of course she did,” insisted the room-mate, “They’re in this tin with wax paper the way they always are in the care packages. Right Mrs. B.?”

Mama paused. Then the finky kid said, “No way; these are Wegman's cookies. No way did you make these.”

“Well, no, but I bought them and that’s just as good.”
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Easter Sunday was bright and beautiful; Easter Monday was bleak and drizzly.

“Mama, would you make those little car cakes you used to make when we were little?” asked my teenage daughter sweetly. When a fourteen-year old girl is sweet, it is disarming.  It is even more disarming when her plea is joined by her seventeen year-old brother’s darling addendum, “I loved those cakes! Mama, you are always so good to us – but you worked way too hard yesterday – No. We can’t ask you to make the cakes today.”

I was blown over. Of course I dug out the cake recipe and asked my husband to reach down the car cake pan.

“I even bought cake flour the other day! These are going to be great.”

I sifted and sifted and stirred and mixed and the oven was pre-heated. All I had to do was “grease and coat the molds with Wondra flour”.

I didn’t have a Wondra, but I had something that looked like it. I greased the pan and dusted the molds with the fine powder. The cakes baked. I set a timer for them to cool and released them onto the cooling rack. They were lovely.

I was June Cleaver for a few moments until I remembered why I didn’t make these cakes more often: the pan had to be washed and dried completely before doing the next batch. I washed, and dried carefully so as not to harm the surface of the precious car molds. I greased and floured the pan.

My daughter slunk into the kitchen.

“Is it time?”

Her brother looked up from his computer game, sweetness and anticipation in his eyes.

“Oh, go on! Each of you pick a car to eat!” Gloriously indulgent. Terrifically maternal.

They bit into the fluffy cake.  Then my daughter’s tongue shot out. “Ack! Pepper!! You put PEPPER on my cake! You did it on purpose!”

“Mama! The day after Easter to play a joke on us!”

“What are you two talking about? Those are good cakes.”

“Have you eaten one?” challenged my daughter.

“Noooo, I was saving them for you.”

“See?! It was a practical joke!”

“Geesh, you two are so full of it. They are great.” And I reached over and took a big bite of a cake.

A gentle push of pepper carpeted my tongue and a soupcon of saltiness. Surprising, but not evil.

My husband came in, “Let me see – aha! You used this? It is for pan searing fish and meat. Not for cakes.”
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