I love Elizabeth Crane

I just finished her newest collection of short stories, You Must Be This Happy to Enter, and was feeling sorry for myself because I had to return it to the library and I hadn't made a photocopy of the last story, "Promise," like I'd been planning. But lo and behold, it was published online, so now I can read it whenever I want.

How can you not love a letter to her un-adopted child (meaning "not yet adopted," not "denied adoption") that begins "I will feed you sugar"? Or perhaps you have to have been raised in an anti-sugar household to truly appreciate that line, although I now am pretty firmly anti-sugar (or at least anti high-fructose corn syrup; thanks, Michael Pollan) myself and will probably make my own children appreciate that line as well.

I think my favorite sentence in the whole thing, however, was this one:

You will need to let me read a book at some point, or I will completely freak.

I may get that embroidered and hang it in my kid's room, if I ever have one.

Today was one of those 60-degree, pseudo-spring days that make all the middle-school kids wear shorts to school and the rest of us spend uncharacteristic amounts of time outside, since it's supposed to snow on Saturday. So I walked Le Chien to the neighborhood park. We checked out the kids on the playground and I tried to imagine myself as one of the moms on the park benches, as I do occasionally as part of my periodic ambivalence checks.

Still ambivalent. Maybe next time.