Babies, Fiction and French Food.

This morning, my husband and I were milling about in the kitchen - he brewing his Irish Breakfast tea, me trying to get my brain percolating. I was just surprised we'd beaten the 3 sprouts out of bed (oh, how horrible does THAT sound? but you know what I mean. That is, until I heard the cooing of The Littlest, through the monitor. I had a thought. "Hey, Nick. Wouldn't it be great if, like, when we heard her through the monitor she was always belting out an aria or something?"...."Yeah! aaah-aaaaah-aah-haaa!"...(especially amusing, the sound of a grown man attempting to simulate what a little girl baby would sound like, doing operatics). (me again) - "Yeah, and then every time we tried to catch her in the act, rush up there, she'd just look at us like we were crazy." We're both giggling sleepily at this point...I continue..."but there'd always be clues, right, that we'd never get. Like she'd have the sheet music under the crib mattress or something...". Just call her Stewie's G-rated half-sister.



This is what we do.



So today I began "Anne of Green Gables" again - just twenty pages or so, but quite enough to fall in love with L.M. Montgomery all over again. It was a sad day in my (elementary-aged) life when I finished her last book and knew there would be nothing new to discover from this author, because she was gone.



The plot is SO fanciful, ya know? Clumsy yet emotionally undamaged orphan (is there such a thing?) melts the heart of legalistic, type A, take-no-prisoners Marilla Cuthbert, thus finding her place in the world.



I was quite delighted with this Prince Edward Island world of Anne's as a ten year-old, however. While my appetite was much more satiated by descriptions of orchard and furrowed brows and kittens in the woods than by, say, a journal of my own real-life experiences at the time, things have changed. And somewhere along the way I think I decided that I was too good for fiction. That Real Life, with it's jagged edges and pretty imperfections, was much more worthy of my attention than Silly Stories someone just made up in their mind. Truth is, I think maybe, that I'd be terrible at writing fiction myself.



So in moments I've stolen away for myself, peaceful hours painstakingly squeezed from days filled with diapers and bottles and sippy cups and dinners, I've turned my attention to food memoirs, true accounts of substance abuse, books on psychological disorders. And I've been enthralled, mesmerized to the point of losing hours of precious sleep just to get to the bottom of things.

I think it just might be getting to me.

I'm going to give good old ragged Anne a go again. I think I deserve it. Besides, I'm sick of salivating over French recipes, each of which would quite possibly take a couple weeks of my grocery budget at Whole Foods to prepare.

(I promise, though, if I ever make money off of this very-much-for-fun writing gig, I'll make a delicious buttery duck confit that will be out of this world. And I'll totally write about it).