Sometimes the Old Ways Are Best

I have been depressed recently. The reasons are neither important, nor interesting, nor your business. The only reason I mention it is, today I carved out rather a grand victory against said depression, and through a surprisingly well-trodden track.

My husband, you see, is going to run a race tonight in Prospect Park with our friend Paul, who back in the blog days guessed, incorrectly as it turns out, that his future wife was still in middle school. And I decided to make a picnic for after. And I went absolutely apeshit. Six different dishes, most of which I'd never made before, all of them Russian, except for the grapes coated in goat cheese and almonds, which are Spanish. Culminating in a three layer sour cream cherry cake.

Eric came home last night to the age-old, long-forgotten spectacle of me sweating (though not so much as of yore, thanks to central air) angrily pounding things in an inadequate plastic mortar & pestle. And he asked me, in that age-old, long-forgotten tone of his, "Perhaps you're taking on a little too much."

And perhaps I was.

But this morning I squeezing the water out of two pounds of spinach and felt that familiar arthritic ache. And I looked out over the courtyard of PS 1, where hapless architects are frantically trying to get their waterlogged and collapsed party space ready by next week. And I realized I'd reached 11:30 am (dark midnight of the soul for lazy freelancers) with nary a gloomy thought.

It's a start.