16 December 2001 - 12:48 a.m.

As always, plans changed: Ter had hockey tickets, so the BYM and I scrubbed the play-watching date. It's probably just as well - I still haven't shaken my cough, and it occurs to me I shouldn't try to go to tomorrow's early music concert either.

So after albondiga soup and taquitos at Rosepepper with the boys, I went back home and wrote letters, and reread parts of These Happy Golden Years. And nearly fainted when I suddenly realized I was sympathizing with Ma instead of Pa:

"I would like to go West," he told Ma one day. "A fellow doesn't have room to breathe here any more."

"Oh, Charles! No room, with all this great prairie around you?" Ma said. "I was so tired of being dragged from pillar to post, and I thought we were settled here."

On the other hand, I don't think aliens have completely hijacked my grey matter, since I recall there being some other passage in some other Little House volume about proper ladies sleeping in their corsets, and I think I can safely promise you that I will never succumb to that particular form of fashion-induced torture, as sleeping in anything other than a loose gown tends to drive me batshit. (I can nap in full attire, of course, but I'm usually ready to rip off my bra the instant I come home - wearing one 24/7 is simply Out of the Question.)

On a brighter note, I really do like the Christmas vignettes in THGY, and even in the midst of this year's lunacy I've found myself sometimes remembering the end of chapter 25:

"Oh, Laura!" Carrie said, as Laura blew out the lamp in the bedroom. "Isn't this the nicest Christmas! Do Christmases get better all the time?"

"Yes," Laura said. "They do."

I thought I had more to spill out on the pleasures of dusting powder, but you know, sometimes seventeen syllables really does suffice:

sticky summer night:
your body sighs into sleep
soothed with sweeps of talc.

- pld