To be scrupulously fair…

I do have a bookshelf, and a few book piles.

And this is the pile near my bed:

“All About Braising” is borrowed, and the next-to-top book in the pile isn’t interesting enough to read.  “Parisian Chic” is just fun, and I may never actually read the Eva Zeisel book, but I like having it.

(I hit “publish” when I meant to hit preview just now… oops)

I have other books that are scattered amongst the built-in bookshelves in our house.  When I complain that I don’t have a bookshelf, I mean that I don’t have space on one of the built-in shelves that contains books that only I have put there, that isn’t subject to colonization by the voracious Daniel, whose books are in piles, triple-deep on shelves, threatening to eat the kitchen counter, in totebags in corners, everywhere in our house.  My book space is ad-hoc and overwhelmed — like many of my domestic arrangements.

Thanks yet again to my cheering chorus.  And in reply to sister, and also in the spirit of fairness, Daniel’s choices for Milo’s clothes are beyond reproach.  Perfectly sensible and long-wearing garments from reasonably priced vendors.    And sufficiently well-made and purchased in such quantity (which I begrudge.  Yes, I begrudge abundance, a legacy of a frugal childhood) that they don’t wear out.  So why does Milo need more and more and more and more?   That’s my complaint.

And thanks, too, to Susan for the mantra “I am living my perfect life.”  I may do a later post about that.  When I read that, I thought, “No I’m not.  My perfect life has another child in it,” but that, really is not the point is it?  The point is moving beyond that.  This is very, very valuable, and I’m grateful for it.

I am so very happy to be back here.

Poem for Wednesday

Oh how I adore you my readers.  How I love that you are here, cheering me on, welcoming me back, whether or not I deserve it.  You don’t know that last night I quarreled for an hour with Daniel over three shirts he bought for Milo

(three shirts, on top of four other shirts you also bought, and no room in the drawers, and why do you buy so much and why do we have so much?  I feel like you don’t listen to me.  I am tired of being the only one who puts things away and doesn’t have a bookshelf of my own.  It’s not fair that you get the pleasure of buying and I have the drudgery of managing all of it.  And I hate that if I tell you no I am spoiling everything for you.

It’s three shirts! It gives me pleasure!  What are you talking about “managing” it?  You said he needed shirts.  Fine.  Fine.  I’ll go through his drawers and take out what’s too small.  I’ll take care of it.  I’ll be in charge.  Yes, I will.  I WILL.  You’re the one who’s being a killjoy and dour.)

You don’t know that I have lost my sense, always precarious, of what’s worth fighting about domestically and what I should just give in because harmony is better than disharmony.  You don’t know that I can’t tell whether I need to get over myself and relax and enjoy the messy abundance and inconvenience of Daniel’s impulsive buying — because one day I will regret all the quite and order and minimalism of life all by myself; or whether Daniel’s depression is rising again, and that’s why those three shirts mean everything to him, are his stars in unremitting darkness, and why anything other than wild enthusiasm threatens to capsize him.

You just like me and want to cheer me on.

Today is better than yesterday.  I sent Daniel flowers to apologize after our fight.  Expensive flowers, too.  I decided that I had wigged out over three shirts and I shouldn’t have.  I decided to define the fight as being just about that, rather than the equally true alternative, which is that this is a version of the fight we always have about him refusing to accept limits or respect systems and leaving me to deal with the consequences.  Or, as he might put it, about me trying to tightly control our household for the sake of control and denying him harmless pleasures when he’s had to give up so many things that give him pleasure (because of a medical condition, he can’t drink alcohol, at least not for a long time, and even then not very much at all.  Because of a different medical condition, he is often uncomfortable after meals and can’t eat as freely as he would like to.  I wouldn’t want to live under these strictures for a day.)

I spoke to Daniel’s doctor, secretly, and he assures me that Daniel has a better medicine ahead, one which he is more likely to take  (Daniel doesn’t take anti-depressants, although certainly that sentence suggests it; he takes medicine for yet another medical condition, and when his medicine is working properly, it has the side effect of greatly improving his mood and energy and making him happy again.  I very much like him with his medicine).  His doctor said, “I’m looking out for you,” and it brought tears to my eyes.  You, too, dear readers, are looking out for me, and I am grateful for it.

Y’know, I read those last two paragraphs, and realize a bit what life is like for Daniel, physically, with his conditions and restrictions — none of which are extraordinary or life-threatening — and I understand that I have no empathy for him.  I am too caught up in needs and daily life and his moods and what is happening right this second ever to realize how unpleasant his life in his body must be.  It’s ironic, too, coming after Passover, which makes my life in my body just fractionally less enjoyable than it usually is, and has me worrying over every bite.  For Daniel, every day is that bad or worse.  And I can’t bring myself to forebearance or empathy.   That’s not good.  All I see is what I’m not getting from him because he is preoccupied and uncomfortable.  I would be very, very bad as a the wife of a seriously ill person.  I am not a reliably good wife — in fact, I’m not sure I’d particularly enjoy being married to me.  I’m glad I sent the expensive flowers.

I might be a little too fragile still to go much farther than that on this topic.  It will take a while to unpack all of Passover.   So, now 800 words in, here is Poem for Wednesday:

Writing in the Afterlife

By Billy Collins

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,

shot with pristine light,

not this sulphurous haze,

the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,

but no one mentioned all the boats,

their benches crowded with naked passengers,

each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child

with a model train and a model tunnel,

and I knew I would not live forever,

jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side

and the clink of the final coin

in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,

but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived

we would be asked to describe this place

and to include as much detail as possible—

not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,

not simply the shackles, but the rusty,

iron, ankle-shredding shackles—

and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,

our thoughts and feelings about being dead,

not really an assignment,

the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,

think of writing as a process,

a never-ending, infernal process,

and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,

and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

Source: Poetry (October 2002).

On my way back

I am having my not-unexpected but not-at-all-pleasant post-Passover breakdown.  Food-restricted holidays are very, very hard for me.  And this Passover was very difficult in Bay City, and even for these last few days at home.  I have been very shut down internally, and I am now emerging into tears.  Food restriction, boredom, creeping existential dread and fear of loss of meaning, more boredom, anxiety about the work I’m not doing and have to leap back into tomorrow….  I am a mess.

And that’s all I have to say right now, because I need to turn to a two-day backlog of work emails.  But I needed to come back here so I can start opening up again.  Thanks for sticking with me through this insanely long hiatus.

Blogging as escapism

Two links, for those still interested:

Is my beloved quinoa really Kosher for Passover?

A nice piece on the Haggadah, which is the prayerbook of sorts for the Seder tonight.

Shame

We just arrived in Bay City and I have raced to my nephew’s computer to type this post.  I am sick with shame about my envy of Shanna.  I think I have (ironically, given my circumstances) a truly wicked case of sibling rivalry with her.  I struggle, mightily, with her psychological intensity and even aggression.  I wanted to have the upper hand in some way, so I wished her ill, or less well.  But I was wrong, very morally wrong, to wish for less happiness for her.  I am deeply tempted to erase or edit the previous post, but I’m keeping it because I believe in honesty on the blog.

So a practice for me, this week, is to remain open and big hearted.  And also to practice putting some buffers between myself and Shanna’s huge and overwhelming personality. . I will like her, love her, more if I can recognize her certainty and her overpowering-ness as a coping mechanism, and a quirk.  I’m also jealous that she has lived her whole life doing what I’ve spent so much effort and energy trying NOT to do.  I try so very hard not to be overwhelming, to keep contained, to give everyone else a lot of psychological space, to stay bounded.  To see someone else saying, “To hell with all that, ” — or not even recognizing any other way of being — scrambles me.  Instead of resenting her bigness, I could be big myself.

This is my yoga for the week.   Everytime I see Shanna, I will think, Namaste: The divine that is in me honors the divine that is in you.

Namaste and a chag v’kasher sameach.  (I can’t figure out the links on my nephew’s mac, and the screensize is all funny and of course I can’t ask for help, so you have to take my word for it that I’m wishing you a happy and kosher holiday.)

Taking a deep breath

I should be packing or something, but I wanted to come back here one more time, to my safest space.  I had a small meltdown this morning.  When I finally got to my yoga mat, around noon, I started to cry.  I realized that I was (or am — the feeling is less present now, but that may be temporary) petrified about going to Bay City for Passover.  Bay City is where I feel particularly abandoned by God.  Last year at Passover, I had what I thought was a very hopeful sign about a second pregnancy — this was before we had started our IUI cycles, so I could still be very hopeful about them.   My boss and Daniel grew up in the same neighborhood in Bay City, just a few blocks away from each other.  In his office, my boss has a childhood memento that has his old address.  On the way home from synagogue last Passover, I decided to walk past his old house.  I saw a huge butterfly when I was there.   I’ve described my notion about butterflies as signs that things will be okay, as little pats on the head from heaven.  I got that idea one day when I was feeling hopeless and lonely, before I knew about infertility.  I was outside and saw a butterfly and decided to believe that this butterfly was a sign from God that the things I feared the most were not true, and things would be okay.

I saw the same kind of butterfly outside my boss’s old house, and stared at it for 15 minutes.  The coincidences seemed very promising to me.  And I wasn’t wrong, I see now, I just wasn’t right in the way I wanted to be right.  Things are okay, and they will be okay.  Just not the okay I had hoped for.

And I’m not looking forward to the drama of Bay City.  In my own family, love is like the background refrigerator hum.  In Daniel’s family, it’s opera blaring from every window.  I want a refuge from that intensity, from the child-worship, from the way everything is in BOLD and ITALICS and ALL CAPS.   I should be so much more generous.  Shanna is about to start a new job, her first in 20 years.  She has a boyfriend, who is a truly lovely man.  Her life has been completely revised since last Passover.  She has shown such strength and resourcefulness and steadiness.  I don’t know that I could have done all that she has done in the last year.  And she has been very gracious and dear to me through infertility.  I should admire her.  But honest to goodness, I just don’t want to be in the furnace blast of her intensity and anxiety, her certainty that she knows what’s best for Daniel, her inquiries, her recommendations, her certainty upon certainty, upon certainty.   And, honest to badness, I may be feeling a little bit of nasty, bitchy pique that she’s landed so completely on her feet, with a job that pays as much as mine, with a prosperous boyfriend in the wings.   I want to erase that, but I need to be honest.  It feeds that ugly self pity I have that the blot on my otherwise blotless life is absolutely permanent.  Shanna will have love and money again.  I will never have what I lost.

Oh wouldn’t it be nice if that was the last time I typed that?  I was a little bit bulimic in high school and early in college.  When I stopped being bulimic, I talked about it freely, almost compulsively.  But there came a time when the bulimic self I was describing didn’t exactly feel like the self I was anymore.  I hope that this particular kind of self-pity will become like bulimia — something I was but am not anymore.

I really don’t like this post.  I think I am okay now about going to Bay City.  I did yoga, I read an entire novel this afternoon (Blame, by Michelle Huneven, exactly fit for my purposes).  Daniel was sweet in ways that mattered a lot.  This post feels ugly and irrelevant.  But I was there this morning.  I think the bad feelings are just sleeping, and I need to lay the foundation for the posts I will write when they wake up.

Okay, wish me luck.

Woman walks into a bar

OUCH!  (Get it?  Walks into a bar?  I love this joke).

So today is a better day.  But there have been a couple of, if not sucker punches, at least sucker toe-stubs, sucker thwacks, sucker-hit-my-funny-bone-in-that-really-unpleasant-way-that’s-not-funny-at-all.

As is clear from previous posts, I am not managing stress well.  I don’t think I feel extremely stressed, but see myself doing all the things I do when I am extremely stressed.  I am eating crappy food, indiscriminately, with a heavy emphasis on salt and grease.  I am routinely eating past the point of fullness.  I am drinking with determination.  I am compulsively reviewing shoes on Amazon and my new favorite site, Scarpasa, and hitting “buy now” with awesome frequency (6 pairs bought in the last week, 3 returned, one exchanged, 2 en route and due Saturday.)  (By the way, Scarpasa has excellent customer service and doesn’t adhere strictly to the rather draconian terms of sale described on their website.  I highly recommend.)  I am short tempered.  I spent a lot of time exhaling with puffed cheeks and pursed lips, looking like the depiction of the wind in children’s picture books.  This morning I said, pathetically, “I am messing everything up these days,” because of a miscommunication about carpool.  So I am more vulnerable than usual to the lawn darts fate wafts at the insufficiently fertile.

Dart 1: I had a great session with my career coach today.  I asked her to help me prepare for my upcoming annual review.  At the end, I said that I had spent years trying to get away from doing one particular thing professionally, and yet we’d just spent the last hour talking excitedly about how important that thing is, and how good at it I am, and how I have figured out how to make it really important to what I do over the next year.

My coach said something to the effect of, isn’t it it interesting and crazy how we always end up right where we need to be, and isn’t it amazing how really things that look like they are really difficult and awful end up setting us up for great things later on.  She didn’t say exactly those words.  She talked about how her family just spent a year in Israel, and they had one motivation for going, but it turned out that perhaps the “real reason” they were there was that they were able to get a critical prenatal diagnosis for her newborn daughter; and how her husband had suffered through five months of interviewing for a very important job, and had a start date for the job and then had the rug pulled out from under him, but now something even better in the same organization might be opening up.

Bless her heart, her newborn is scheduled for eye surgery in a week, in another city.  Mother and baby will be alone in this city, without friends or family, for 48 hours, then fly home to rejoin the rest of the family (Dad has to stay with the other kids).  Eye surgery doesn’t sound completely wrenching, compared to the other kinds of surgery a newborn might have (heart, for example)  if you aren’t the child’s mother.  If you are the child’s mother, then “my baby” and “surgery” and “next week” are not words you want strung together in a sentence.  If you are the child’s mother, you are hanging very tightly to the idea that this terrifying thing is happening for some excellent cosmic reason, and there will be some amazing outcome, some unforeseen gift that could only have come through this rough process.

But if you are me (MEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!), and you are listening to a mother of four say these things, in her beautiful house (even more beautiful than your own beautiful house — you should see her downstairs bathroom and its perfect wallpaper), and starting to realize that if your fertility treatments had worked, you yourself might have had a baby on exactly the same day as your coach but they didn’t work  — if you are me, you are not one bit happy to think everything happens for a cosmically beneficial reason.  You are not able imagine the prize in the cracker jack box of your broken heart (oh that’s really bad.  That’s “dark and stormy night” bad).  What is ever going to make up for my baby that’s not here?  A better job?  Professional fulfillment?  All those damn shoes I keep ordering?    What is ever going to show itself as the reason why all this pain and all this loss was exactly the right thing to happen and make me wide-eyed in wonder at the perfection of the working of the universe  revealed?

But I was okay.  I left with the energy of the great session, full of good ideas for work and energy and purpose.

Dart 2: There are two other only children in Milo’s grade at school.  Both of them have parents who are no longer together.  Today Milo announced that the mother of one of these children is pregnant.  This woman, Dina, was Milo’s teacher last year.  She’s not married, and we’ve never met or seen her boyfriend or partner even though we’ve seen her outside of school on a few occasions.   For all I know, this pregnancy was unplanned and unwelcome.  For all I know, Dina lies awake at night, sick with worry about how she will pay the bills with two children (her first child’s father is very involved in the child’s life and presumably shares the costs), particularly since she’s not currently working as a fulltime teacher but as a regular substitute and tutor-for-hire.

But my first thought was something close to awe and envy, thinking that maybe Dina wanted another baby and just made it happen.  For all I know, she didn’t worry about money or time or anything else.  She didn’t let anything mitigate or derail her desire.  She wanted another child, dammit, and she is going to have one.

And I couldn’t.  I couldn’t.  I couldn’t overcome the obstacles of Daniel’s fear and our combined age and bad luck and not enough money.  I couldn’t get him to make a big enough leap, and I couldn’t do it on my own.  Yes, Daniel submitted to tests and fertility treatments, and did stuff that I don’t talk about here and that he deeply despised doing.  And to my mind it will never be quite enough because he did it so reluctantly and so grudgingly and exacted such an enormous emotional tax, and I believe in my bones that if he had truly wanted another child we would have had one.  We would have found the money for the treatments that I foreswore at the outset.  His mind would have healed his physical obstacles and mine, too.  That is my own toxic magical thinking.

So it was the second dart that undid me just a little.  I don’t have time to be more undone.  Tonight I am kashering (that’s the verb form of “kosher.”  To make something kosher is to kasher it) my oven, which means setting it to self-clean and opening the kitchen windows to deal with the fumes.  I also need to finish kashering my sink (I have two sinks in my kitchen, which is a lucky accident and extremely convenient) by pouring boiling water all over it.  I cleaned it thoroughly and let it rest for 24 hours, and a dousing with boiling water is the next step.  I have a load of laundry going.  I was going to kasher the stove burners by letting the flames burn on high for 30 minutes, but can’t spend 30 minutes monitoring the stove tonight, so I’ll do that Saturday night after Shabbat ends.

I have some work to do, as well, since tomorrow is my last day in the office till April 27th.  Except I won’t be in the office.  I’ll be at a meeting offsite till 3pm, and I have to get home by 6, so I am completely jammed.  We leave for Bay City early Sunday morning, and Saturday night will be a complete frenzy of kitchen transformation and packing.   Daniel is still sick and disgruntled, and blogging for an hour tonight was certainly not a good idea but it was necessary.

Poem for Wednesday

(not even rage and Passover unseat Poem for Wednesday)

Bread

By W. S. Merwin b. 1927

for Wendell Berry

Each face in the street is a slice of bread

wandering on

searching

somewhere in the light the true hunger

appears to be passing them by

they clutch

have they forgotten the pale caves

they dreamed of hiding in

their own caves

full of the waiting of their footprints

hung with the hollow marks of their groping

full of their sleep and their hiding

have they forgotten the ragged tunnels

they dreamed of following in out of the light

to hear step after step

the heart of bread

to be sustained by its dark breath

and emerge

to find themselves alone

before a wheat field

raising its radiance to the moon

W. S. Merwin, “Bread” from The Second Four Books of Poems (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993). Copyright © 1993 by W. S. Merwin.

And, if you have a fast enough internet connection, this seems exactly right going into Passover.

 

What I talk about when I talk about observance

Today  I am thankful in a bitter and foul kind of way that not every day is like today.  Not every day is a day in which no one who lives in my house feels interested in being gracious to me.  Not every day is a day in which I am near boiling over with rage at the slightest provocation.   Not everyday is a day in which I print out this lovely picture and give it to Milo, who is having a homework meltdown, only have Milo say, “Mommy, can I tear this up?”  I think we are all knotted up because of Passover.  More on that below.

Neighbor’s kind comment about her understanding of Passover as the abstention from leavened bread calls for an extended response, one I’ve been thinking about for a while.

As I’ve written before, I try not to describe myself as an Orthodox Jew because so much of my behavior is not Orthodox.  I eat in restaurants that aren’t Kosher-certified.  I drink non-Kosher wine (did you know there was such a thing? There is.).  I watch TV on the Sabbath.  I don’t want people to think that my practices are Orthodox practices.

And yet, I also do a lot of Orthodox things.  I don’t drive, shop, or work (or blog!) on the Sabbath or holidays.  I take off all the holidays, even the obscure ones like Shavuot, and the last days of Passover, and Shemini Atzeret.  If you forwarded my posts about Passover cleaning to Jewish friends, they may ask you, “Why are you reading this religious nutcase?”

For many American Jews, I suspect that Passover observance is primarily about not eating bread.  I don’t want to say that I am more observant than they are.  Orthodox Jews aspire to adhere to many more prescriptive rules than, say, Reform Jews or Reconstructionist Jews.  But I will not say that I am “more observant” than a Reform Jew who devotes herself scrupulously to the dictates and precepts of Reform Judaism (such as a tremendous commitment to service, charity, and social justice).  It’s like saying I am more orange than she is musical — the categories aren’t comparable.  I don’t even like saying I’m more “traditionally observant” or “traditional” than a Reform, Reconstructionist, or Conservative Jew.  Those are traditions, too, just newer than Orthodoxy — which actually only came into being as a category when the Reform movement emerged to set it in relief.  All Jews used to be just Jews, some more attentive to traditional Jewish practice and law than others.  Now we can be attentive or unattentive to different strands of traditional practices.

(Notice I’m not linking — I’m not finding links to sources I really trust, or know enough to evaluate, and I don’t have a huge amount of time to devote to this post.)

Perhaps the description that combines accuracy with brevity is that I am more halakhically observant than most other American Jews, halakhah being, roughly, commonly recognized traditional Jewish law, continuous with that which developed before the schism of Reform and Conservative Judaism.   But then no one who isn’t halakhically Jewish themselves, or well-steeped in the history of Judaism generally, knows what that means.

So when I eventually post the photo of my kitchen counters covered in foil and looking like the set of a very low-rent 1950s B movie about outerspace or life in the future, all that means is that’s how I do Passover.  Your friends with uncovered counters observe differently.  Your friends who believe that the custom of not eating rice, beans and peanuts is bollocks are using good judgment and observing differently.

It comes down to this for me: I don’t believe that God cares about foil on my counters or whether I eat rice on Passover (or even oatmeal or a big puffy croissant — which I can’t even imagine doing, even as I break other rules when it’s not Passover without a second thought).  But the Jews I hang out with care, and out of respect for them and old practices and traditions, I follow most of the rule.  I want Milo to care because I think this more-Orthodox-than-not way I am is a valuable way of being in the world, and I am not confident that he or anyone can maintain all of the value without maintaining a lot of the practices.  This makes me mildly hypocritical, which makes me like most religious people of all varieties.  We are trying.  We are hoping.  We are getting through the days.  We have a “better” we’d like to be, but can’t always muster the effort required to get us there.

This post usefully drained off a lot of hostile energy I was sitting on.  I’m sure I’ll get it back, but until then…

from http://www.explodingdog.com/title/tomorrowwillbeaverygoodday.html

Closet Archive 2

Today I am thankful that I am less busy than I thought I would be.  Some space cleared up at work, and it’s too early to pack and too early to continue the kitchen overhaul, and I did laundry last night (and will again Thursday), so I can blog.

Today was closet archive day 2:

The challenging item is the black stretch silk shirt.  I also wore the shoes infrequently after I bought them last year.  The skirt is my new verrryyy expensive skirt.

Why I don’t wear it: I sweat, a lot.  I am hell on silk.  So when I buy something that’s silk, I wash it even though the label says dryclean only, and the garment gets a little faded and saggy.  And while I loved this blouse in the dressing room, the shape is boxy, and my torso itself is boxy (and short), so the proportions never quite looked right.  It’s also rather short, too short to tuck in, which exacerbates the boxiness problem.

Why I still have it: Oh because I really did love it when I bought it.  I bought it in September 2008, when I was a fairly new reader of style blogs and still trying to figure out how to shop to get the results I hoped for.  Daniel and I had gone away for a weekend by ourselves (a rarity for us).  It was just before my birthday and we were feeling splurgey.  I put on this blouse and just loved it.  It seemed to be everything I was looking for, everything I was learning to buy and admire.  So I paid full price for it without a second thought because I thought I looked so great in it.  I haven’t sent it to the consignment store because I don’t think I would get much money for it, and it seemed like I should just keep trying to make it work, although I didn’t.  I may have worn it twice before today, or maybe only once.

What might save it: I decided this is my new black t-shirt.  I stopped shopping before I bought a replacement for my cotton, crewneck black t-shirt, and I’m trying to buy and wear less black anyway, and I’ve decided I hate crewnecks on me.  I thought that the sheen on the shirt might counteract the draining effect of black near my face.  Although one can’t tell from the photos, the skirt is very fitted at the waist, and that helped counteract the boxiness.  Somehow I (eye?) could tell that there was something of a figure underneath the last 3 inches of the top.   I wore a black camisole to make it work appropriate — the v neck is pretty deep.   The necklace helped, too.  It was a birthday gift from Daniel.   I had a delicate/sporty contrast happening, and I like that.

I also was more comfortable in those heels than I remember being last year.  I think I’m stronger now in my legs, back, and stomach, so it’s easier for me to wear heels.  Those are a bit more than 3 inches.  They’ll be worn frequently this spring and summer.

I am enjoying paying more attention to my closet and looking there before shopping — for clothes, anyway (I bought two pairs of shoes online on Saturday night after the 2.5 hour cleaning frenzy.  Small consolation for scrubbing ancient spilled rootbeer and goodness knows what else from underneath the vegetable drawer.  Free return shipping, so no harm need be done. ).  I’ve been thinking I need to give in to the long swoopy skirt trend, and I realized I have a long black summer dress in my closet, which I love.  It’s just different enough from most maxi-dresses that I didn’t recognize it as such.  But that’s what it is, and I love that it’s different.  And that I already have it!