Leslie Levine

I haven’t been posting here for a while, but when someone names a cake after you and one of your books, well, it’s clearly time to blog. And speaking of cake, I’ve been doing a lot of baking lately. I love having fresh cookies around, so what I do is make the dough, form it into as many little balls as I can and then I freeze those. I’m a hero around here when I pop some in the oven and voila, you’ve got fresh, homemade cookies. I also bake when I’m stressed and who isn’t. Why bake? Because I wield immense control in the kitchen. I am boss in the kitchen and I am boss of the ingredients. What do I mean? I mean that when the recipe calls for white flour I substitute whole wheat. When it calls for semi-sweet chips I add those and M&Ms, too. The point is this: baking is cathartic for me and no one ever says, “No thank you.” And have I mentioned that my cookies have no calories . . . ?

I have a really dear friend who seems to be worried about growing old. Since I’m eight years her senior her worries seem a bit frivolous to me, so sometimes I humor her, but mostly I do try to take her seriously because she is, as I mentioned, a very good friend. Today, she left me a message. “I need to ask you something,” she said. Usually, it’s me asking her questions (I know; I’m the older, wiser of the two, right? Not always. Well, always older but certainly not always wiser . . . ), so I was rather curious and called her right away. “As you age,” she began and right there I started to grit my teeth. Yes, we’re all growing older, but clearly in my dear friend’s eyes, I am growing older sooner. Anyway, I let her finish and my curiosity grew. She wanted to know if dark circles began to be more prominent as we age. I told her that I’ve had circles under my eyes for years and haven’t really done anything about it. But all that is about to change! We are conducting an experiment this weekend. I’m going to place cooled tea bags under my eyes (green tea) and she is going to rub some vitamin E under her eyes. I’m hoping to report two miracles. More on Monday, February 9th.

Like many parents across the country I recently dropped a child off at college for the first time. As a writer, I’ve composed some of the mixed emotions I’ve experienced into paragraphs that might have made an interesting essay, but that would’ve taken time away from some of the other work I’m trying to complete. But that didn’t prevent me from feeling the gratitude I experienced yesterday after reading not just one but two pieces by fathers who are missing their freshman kids as well. Indeed, reading the letter from a dad who recently deposited his son at the University of Illinois in Champagne was a tremendous relief. First, I realized, of course, that I am not alone in these strange and raw emotions. Oh, I’m sharing a lot of this with my husband, too, believe me. But reading about it from a distance has its comforts, too. What struck me most about what this particular parent wrote was his surprise by the sudden realization, once he returned to a differently-inhabited home, that life really was going to be different. In the same way, the other writer, an editor of our local weekly paper, exposed my naivete that this brown-out I’m undergoing (sometimes I don’t make sense presumably because I’m trying to imagine the life of my daughter in a new place far away) is rather commonplace. This is when I am particularly grateful for other people’s words, especially when the language of their lives seems to so easily intersect with my own.

One of the buildings at my alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan University

I started a blog about two or three years ago and didn’t post much, because I didn’t have a lot of time. I still don’t have much of that, but something’s pulling me along to get back to it, so here I am. Perhaps it is the promise from my trusty web designer, Lee, that I’ll be able to post pictures. I am headed to Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, Mexico in a few weeks to teach and it’s one of the prettiest places I’ve been, so hopefully I’ll be able to post a few photographs from my trip. If I’m lucky, I might even be able to give you a preview. It’ll be my fifth trip to Tecate, Mexico and like the four times before I am really excited to be going. Hey, I think I just added a photo after all. I’ll be back again soon. Thanks for stopping by.

A view of the mountains from Rancho La Puerta