Dearest, I wonder how you are doing, what you do for meals. Do you cook for yourself, I wonder. A zillion years ago when I was still single and living by myself in a studio apartment in Boerum Hill, I worked a lot of long hours, into late evenings, and didn't cook for myself much at all, subsisted on cigarettes, popcorn, and diet coke. (I really hope that epidemiologically insalubrious period doesn't come back to haunt me.) I have since very much amended my ways, quit smoking, eat proper meals. The upside of the bad diet? A nice thin figure. Proper meals? Weight gain, over the years. I think I have things in pretty good balance these days though, home-cooked meals with fresh ingredients, vigorous walks every day.

So tonight's dinner is a quartered chicken browned and stewed in a melange of last summer's farmstand vegetables from the freezer - plum tomato puree, mixed peppers - along with homemade chicken stock.

Started out for a walk at the conservation area this morning but it was still unpleasantly slippery so I bagged it and drove around thinking, where should I go. I wound up a few miles from home, at an international arts colony surrounded by sculpture park and miles and miles of pastoral countryside. I parked the car in the lot and set off for a walk, venturing up their driveway to see where the artists, writers, dancers, translators, et al, live when like bees they're in their hive. The place seemed deserted, I guess it's offseason, and I didn't venture very close to the handsome porched farmhouse presiding at the height of a slope, put off by the "Caution - plover nesting area" - no, scratch that, that's at the beach, summers, at Riis Park - but rather - "Beyond this point, residents and guests only." I was definitely a trespasser. But a writer, a blogger, curious to meet perhaps other writers or artists of any kind. But I have no interest in a co-ed arts colony residency. Darling, I'm sure you can imagine how that would go for me. No, much better I sequester myself up in my aerie.

Dearest, I don't have much tonight. Just holding your hand, really, being with you, in your arms, on the couch, your place maybe. Wonder what you're making - oh, surprise me. Either that, or hand me the phone and the box of take-out menus...

C. and usciski,
your Girl from Ypsilanti