Walnut Brownies for Breakfast

    

Dear Reader,

Today (Friday; hello from the past) I made brownies and spaghetti.

The brownies were from a box, but I added walnuts. Plenty of them, at Word Raccoon’s insistence. She said that made them “high protein,” and so demanded a couple for breakfast. 

The spaghetti sauce was semi-homemade, which feels like the right level of ambition for easing back into things. I browned the meat, opened a jar but also roasted some cherry tomatoes and garlic, sprinkled in spices, and Word Raccoon called it collaboration. 

While cooking, I began a mental list of things to carry outside for the upcoming spring cleanup: those chairs I found during spring cleanup two years ago and have never used, a box of hangers that maybe no one wants but maybe they do and I hate to put them in a landfill just in case. 

There are things lurking in the garage, surely, though I couldn’t say what just now. Here’s hoping I can get things out before the deadline. 

Besides cooking, I meant to read today. Lonesome Dove was right there. Waiting, politely. I made a connection and did a bit of research, eager to write about it. But lunch took it out of me. 

Instead, I fell into an audiobook set near Nashville because a podcast, What to Read Next, told me to: Grown Women, by Sarai Johnson, and because the description promised a literary ghost who scribbles in an author’s manuscript.

(I almost want to apologize for listening to an audiobook, but it just felt right while I slowly submit poetry. In general, not so much, especially not fiction. This narrator is really good.)

Word Raccoon is beside me as we wait for it. “We’re not leaving,” she said, “until she shows up.” Obviously not, WR!

So now I am moving through my day with the sense that something is approaching. Not here yet. Not visible. It’s a strange feeling, to wait for a ghost, even of the book variety.

I haven’t met her yet.

But I did write a crappy poem this morning, to stay in the stream.

I left it sitting out longer than usual, because it couldn’t turn, not as bad as it already was. Should I be concerned that something/someone might take a red pen to my poem that has cough drops in it? (Yeah, not a great writing day. LOL.) 

Word Raccoon says not to worry. She says if anything gets added in the margins, we’ll know.

I don’t remember writing that last line.