I Missed You, Too

Sometimes a place can steal your words. Not even from your lips - like a breathtaking sunset - but from your heart: that warm little room whose walls and ceilings you thought you could define with well-arranged, concise sentences. But then suddenly a cathedral or an island or a mountaintop slips in and detonates the whole thing, exploding all that subject-verb chinking you've so meticulously laid into place, as the understanding of place makes new room for itself.

Ireland silenced me for awhile. I hope to be able to share glimpses of that saturated green-and-grey place with you as the words come back.

Then changes set into my life at a pace rivaling puberty - from the moment I stepped off the plane in New York with a four-foot-tall backpack and no home to come home to, or even enough American money to use a pay phone and arrange a hospitable couch.

In those first three weeks we slept on several couches (bless you, dear friends, if you're reading) and the floor of a temporary sublet, inspected nearly forty apartments, found a home that suited us, and J started work - all while still living out of the same backpacks that had sustained us through two months of traipsing through Europe! (It's a good thing his office is generous about their dress code.) Though we promptly moved our possessions out of storage, these consisted mainly of books, clothes, and an appalling assortment of kitchen appliances - we had sold what little furniture we had along with our old three hundred-square-foot apartment in the Village. We spent a week sleeping on a heap of coats while we went about acquiring furnishings and arranging various means of transporting them. (This was no small feat.)

Finally, weeks later, in a place I can call "home" for the first time in awhile, I began to grow things in my garden. Between cultivating my home, my neglected friendships, my connection with a new neighborhood, and my impressive diversity of herbs and flowers - there hasn't been much time to grow my culinary acumen or myself.

And yet (my sitemeter tells me) you've been waiting for me. You continue to visit Pie in the Sky, to leave imploring treatises in the comments. Thank you for caring. Sorry I've been MIA for good long while. I think I'm back now.

Life is pretty good - I'm happy, I love Brooklyn ( more on that later), I'm cooking a lot, and I'm enjoying this stint at homemaking and gardening. But I'm trying not to stagnate. Maybe you folks can help. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I suspect Pie in the Sky will be undergoing some serious renovations in the coming weeks - my paltry offering in exchange for your patience and loyalty. I'm teaching myself web design! We'll see where that goes.

I've also invented the #1 Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe EVER. So don't touch that dial, folks...