I'm going to fix a new pasta dish tonight for the Texas-Ohio races. It seems Hillary intends to reboot her ego and will rise once more like the chupacabra. I am calling it "As Parma goes, so goes the Nation," and I will make it with the ragged elongated pasta called mother-in-law's tongue and sauce it with a gremolada variant. The pasta is lovely striped in beet and spinach and also the lily-related curcuma sometimes called turmeric. This gives it a yellow colour to set off the violet of the beet and the pale leaf-coloured spinach. The tricolour aspect suits the political tone of the evening because it looks like a bright flag. I'll make the gremolada with oranges as well as lemons, and finish the dish with tiny Nicoise olives and the brand new spindly asparagus of early spring.

I grabbed my first cookbook from the table as I was heading in to the hospital tonight. It was a wedding gift for my first marriage, and I was barely eighteen. I read it on my way to the Jersey shoreline with my new husband. I remember hearing Carly Simon singing that song about the couples clawing and clinging and drowning in love's debris and I was stricken. I already knew I had made a very bad choice, and I was sure I would be making pasta and verdura trovata alone. It proved to be just that way. I doubt that anything else has ever pleased me more in life than that first divorce. It was an exhilaration the following two divorces couldn't match, though they too were really very, very nice.

Scattered across the countrysides of England the stonechat is making her nest, a very tidy round nest padded out with moss on the interior. The eggs she will produce are pretty enough to have been laid in heaven itself, a pale bluish-green dotted in russet, the russet of the apple Josephine March was chomping in her attic of dreams in Little Women. The stonechat was named for its song which is scoldy and sounds like two pebbles crashing in midair. I admire this little bird I have never seen, not for the marvelous eggs – but for the exquisitely made nest, a nest where it would be a real pleasure to wake up to life, freshly broken out of one's shell.

Dead brain or not, I can sense spring around me on this early Tuesday morning