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FOR SUMITA, 16 MONTHS WIDOWED: THE CLUB NO ONE WANTS TO JOIN

1. Welcome. It looks like no one is here nor ever has been. How did you get dropped into desolation thorny rocky pathless dry You are not sure what country you are in nor what language is spoken not that there is anyone with whom to speak alone, slight word for so vast an isolation […]

COMPLICATED; OR, WHAT BOX AM I SUPPOSED TO CHECK?

By Crescent Dragonwagon 2 Comments

Though we spent our first anniversary in Paris, we’d honeymooned in the Ozarks, in Ponca, Arkansas, not far from where we lived. When we drove home after our days in that rustic, rubble-wall hotel on the Buffalo River, we stopped in Berryville. For some reason I can’t recall, he needed to pick something up at […]

IT FEELS LIKE INSANITY. BUT IS IT?

By Crescent Dragonwagon 1 Comment

I call it, “the club no one wants to join.” I look back, seventeen years as I write this since I joined, absolutely against my will… so much against my will that when the local paper, reporting on Ned’s death, referred to me as his widow a few days after his death (a bicycle accident), […]

COOL HAND CUKE: THAT CUCUMBER-YOGURT SOUP, THE ONE WITH MINT, AND GRAPES, AGAIN…

By Crescent Dragonwagon 6 Comments

It’s supposed to get up to to 92 degrees today. Time to make this soup again, and share it with new readers. I semi-vacation when Alpha Dude is up here in Vermont visiting (he lives in New York). So, I tend to work pedal-to-the-metal when solo. I eat more simply, too: I’m the one cooking, […]

“EXPANDING LIFE, NOT SHRINKING BODIES”: WORKING OUT WITH ME, AMY TAN, & YOU AS YOU ARE RIGHT NOW

By Crescent Dragonwagon 19 Comments

GETTING RE-PSYCHED: A TAKE-TWO POST I knew I shouldn’t have been doing those overhead presses with weights, even scaling it down to little bitty weights, in the BodyPump classes at the YMCA in Nashville, this last winter — I just knew I shouldn’t. But I love that class, and I get caught up in the […]

Motherless Mother’s Day, Again

By Crescent Dragonwagon 2 Comments

Everyone who doesn’t die young will someday have a motherless Mother’s Day. This will be my fourth. Two years ago, at the get-together after poet Miller William’s memorial, his daughter, singer/songwriter/musician Lucinda Williams, said to me, “You know what’s strange? I cried the day my father told me he was through writing poetry. Could no longer do it. […]

BISCUITS AND GRAVY, A SIDE OF OVER EASY: LOVE, BREAKFAST, MEMORY

By Crescent Dragonwagon 3 Comments

I’m in New York at the moment, with my boyfriend. I woke up early, suddenly and fully this morning, filled with reasonless happiness. He was asleep, warm beside me. I started thinking about what to make for breakfast. Out of nowhere, in that funny discursive way memory has, biscuits and gravy came to mind. THE […]

THE WHOLE ENCHILADA: LOOKING BACK ON WINNING, LOSING, & LIFE’S COMBO PLATE

By Crescent Dragonwagon 4 Comments

FOREWORD: I wrote recently here about traveling to the awards ceremony for the International Association of Culinary Professionals,\ with one of the first-time nominees. Our conversation made me recall a post I’d written immediately after I had won an award for one of my books, Passionate Vegetarian, back in 2003. It was a book which had also […]