Thoughtful friends bring doughnuts to your house. These are all from Emma’s Country Kitchen, on St. Claire, and are of the best I’ve had in the city, which is to say they are of the best I’ve had anywhere.
Tulips and doughnuts. You cannot find more happiness than this.
My best friend had her second child three weeks ago. Somewhere out there must be someone who can tell me how to sustain all the relationships in our lives once we are no longer in our twenties or living on the same continent as most of those whom we love, because I am spent agonising over this issue. So, my best friend had her second child three weeks ago, and I wasn’t around, like I was not around for the birth of the first. My best friend is now the mother of two children, and between her major corporate job, her two children, and my PhD, we’ve decided that anything more than 10 minutes of uninterrupted conversation is something we won’t be doing for a while. I’m not sure how we all got to this point, but we’re here. This is where we are. Yesterday we were 12 years old and talking about how when we’re adults, we want to be like Bono, because unlike all the adults we knew, Bono’s life isn’t in a rut, and, well, now we’re in our thirties and, thank fuck, nothing like Bono. (I have no idea what we really meant by the type of life that was in a rut, except that we maybe thought it made us sound clever walking around the dusty neighbourhood streets and using it amongst the two of us, and being so sure that we would not be that. That we chose Bono as an example of this also kind of breaks my heart.)
Since she’s had baby number two, we text in the middle of the South African night, when she’s nursing and I’m drinking wine. We talk about her children, I tell her what we had for dinner, we send around embarrassing pictures of ourselves from when we were younger. We talk about sex, a little bit about work, about things our husbands have done to annoy or delight us. I know I can only say this because it’s not me who’s losing sleep or dealing with cracked nipples, but I love this baby for giving us this time every night.
What also crops up in these nocturnal conversations is comments on things we feel like eating. This is not a new conversation. We’ve been having it for twenty years, and it often centers on Kentucky Fried Chicken. But last night I was thinking, I suspect she’s never had any of these salted brown butter Rice Crispie bars, and if I was not in another country this is what she would be snacking on right now. They are exactly like regular Rice Crispie bars except that you brown the butter, which gives them flavour beyond just being sweet, and add a little bit of salt, to cut the cloyingness that often comes with these types of cookies. In my limited first hand experience of having a child on the breast they are perfect for eating in that situation since you won’t have crumbs falling onto the face of the suckling baby. I realise they’re nothing compared to a glass of wine, but sometimes we take what we can get.
CAKE AND DECAY 