A little different.

Yesterday, our friends from Wyoming were in town--the ones we visited a couple of weeks ago--and they came over for dinner. The historian has had a cold/cough/ache thing going on NONE DARE CALL IT FLU and so my preferred conditions* for dealing with my portion of the mess--which, I confess it, is a big portion--were not to be.

*[Conditions for dealing with my portion of the mess: a house empty of all save me and my portion of the mess, the better to wrestle with my demons and call upon deity for aid and comfort and make vows to whatever powers that be that I will never ever no never let it get this bad again.]

No, the historian, ill and in need of rest, needed to be able to lie down. So, the people, my portion of the mess got worse. Or, if not worse, it began to glower at me. To call me names and to insinuate things about my character. In the cold light of day--November light, hence, quite cold--the loomingness of my portion of the mess seemed ever more looming. My character ever more flawed. It was pretty bad. Very bad.

I kept thinking, how can we have people over? There's this mess, and it's looming. And I am a flawed, flawed person! This house! The squalor! Etcetera &c &c.

I had to do it in stages: first, sort my portion of the mess into smaller portions (sweaters, tee shirts, skirts, trousers, fashion magazines, The New Yorker, catalogs, old crossword puzzles, scarves). Then, go through them to see if there are obvious giveaway candidates. Then, on D-Day (dinner day), put things away and throw things away. Meanwhile, I also cooked. Meanwhile, the historian did other cleaning and sorting maneuvers.

And, the people, I felt so much better. About everything.

Our friends came over and of course what they responded to in our home wasn't anyone's portion of the mess. Rather, they loved the colors of our walls, the paintings, the candlelight, the dinner itself. We had a wonderful time and I was able to see again--it is a little surprising to me how long it has been since I've seen it--how lovely and wonderful our home is to live in, how much we've made it our own, how vivid and lively and lovely it is. That's hard to see when all you can see is your own flaws.

There are resultant resolutions and plans aplenty, which I will spare you. But mainly, it was very good to be reminded about how to enjoy our own space--our own lives.

Bitter: some thoughts.

Today while avoiding work, I took a tour around my kitchen and swooped down on some leftover salad from the night before. Touring the chaos of my house is one of my prime work-avoidance techniques, and it's basically how I get my laundry done, clothes put away, kitchen straightened, etc. But I digress: the salad was made of some spring mix, two heads of white endive, and blood oranges. I dressed it with olive oil and salt and pepper--the orange was juicy.

Because the endive is sturdy, the salad was really none the worse for wear for having stood around for a few hours. If this horrifies you, I'm very sorry. In fact, the whole thing tasted just wonderful, and part of what made it wonderful was the acid of the orange juice, the unctuousness of the oil, the salt, and the bitterness of the endive. It was perfection.

My oldest friend who has impeccable and discriminating taste once told me that she found herself, as she got older, craving intense flavors, and she loved bitter flavors especially. I am finding this myself--some sharp taste in the mix of things makes everything more vivid. Even a possibly sorry, leftover salad. Even, possibly, the occasional bitter thoughts I try not to nurture in myself.

Not bitter: we saw Honeydripper tonight, John Sayles's latest. Wonderful. College daughter and I continued our pre-spring break schedule with a viewing of Step Up 2: The Streets (I dared her to say the entire title to the ticket girl, who was completely unfazed by this--why does it seem so funny to me, this title with a number and a colon and a pretty funny subtitle? Oh well, another opportunity for comedy missed, but what else is new?). It was fabulous, in the way that a good dance movie is fabulous--lots of dancing, not much pretense of doing anything other than the required plot moves, and then more dancing. The final sequences were rather electrifying. I thought of you, assertively unhip, and agree: this movie just made me want to step up and dance. And the final unbitter thing? The Jazz beat the Celtics tonight. Yeah yeah yeah!