Ten.Eight Hundred & Sixty

1. I decide to just get up even though the alarm hasn’t sounded, even though it’s Sunday.

2. But it’s a slow Sunday with no commitments to anyone or anything but myself.

3. I shred the butter into the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt and stir it with a fork until the flour stick to the thin bits of butter. Then I add in the cream. The cream really makes a difference. Anything less than that yields an entirely different result in the finished product.

4. Today is the day they move rooms. I think of last night’s negotiations. She traded him her smaller room with private bathroom which has a tub, plus one bath bomb and a jolly rancher in exchange for his slightly larger room. She needs more space for when her friends come over, she says. He’s just thrilled about the tub and the bath bomb.

5. Laundry.

6. I take myself out to the front porch. I think briefly about eating my lunch in the backyard but then remember the broken fence and how the neighbor feels too close with that open gap. Yeah. I need more space.

7. I water the plants and then move them to the rear of the yard on a semicircle of patio so that they can get more sun. Then I drag the hammock to the middle of the yard, furthest away from the gaping fence and settle in to read.

8. Chicken noodle soup made from bone broth.

9. I shouldn’t have turned on my phone.

10. Yeast rolls. Not as good as my grandmother’s. I wish she had been alive long enough for me to have properly learned her secrets. Someone asks me if my grandmother was like my mother—their grandmother. I don’t know how to answer that. My memory of her is complex. No, not the same. Definitely different. But there are so many reasons for that difference.