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Space Crone and Her Spring Cauldron
With the sky wild and brooding and a chill back in the air, it’s a perfect evening for an Italianate lentil soup: sauteed mushrooms; chicken stock; chopped carrots, fennel bulb, leek, and lacinato; parmesian rind; a hint of tomato paste. With it we’re having a heel of crusty semolina and a wild and brooding red wine that smells of caramel and ash and orange. Perfect, too. Give me a shapeless dark dress and a giant cross bobbing in my cleavage, and I’ll be time-traveling right out of this century tonight.
Rain and Rubies
You know you’re a writer at heart when you’re relieved it’s raining. I’d have complained to the high heavens had it snowed but a sunshiney Saturday would have made me feel just as bad, if also foolish. All I want to do is curl up with another Helena Rubenstein biography and write a section of the larger project gathering dust on my desk. If my city were still the Audrey Hepburn movie it’s been all week long (radiant smiles, radiant sun), I’d have felt too much pressure to carpe diem to actually carpe diem as I wished. Now if I venture out at all, it’ll be to catch that Helena exhibit one more time before it leaves the Jewish Museum March 22. Purples and reds; Polish rubies and art deco ivories; a rainbow of self-portraits and silks. What better weapons to stow in the imagination’s arsenal? Anyway, I am the scion of another enterprising Polish Ruby (my great-grandmother Masha Rubenfire ruled boudoirs rather than vanity tables), and I like to think she and Helena live in the same tree, impatiently shaking fruit at we grown children stumbling through this world without them. Tucking that bounty into my skirts is the only properly grateful thing to do.