December 30, 2008
Two Odd Things
1) It is strange but true that I’ve been craving sweet foods much less since I got pregnant. Which is part of the reason I never really got around to Christmas Baking mania this year. I baked apple pie for Christmas dinner, and gingerbread cookies two weeks ago– but only half a batch. And I kept meaning to bake at least half a batch of sugar cookies too, for though I’ve been craving sweet foods less, usually I can rouse myself enough to eat them. I’d even found the perfect sugar cookie recipe, simple and easy, as the one I’d been using the last couple of years has always caused me trouble. I’m not sure if I found it on the internet or in a magazine, but I do remember the recipe was printed against a blue background, and the recipe below was a chocolate variant of the same.
Except that I actually think I dreamt it, because when I got (nearly) down to getting those cookies baked, I couldn’t find my perfect recipe anywhere. Not in any magazines, or on websites I frequent, and I spent quite a bit of timing just searching, searching, all of it coming up naught. So that was disappointing.
2) Less disappointingly, however, is that I’ve located my grade three teacher. You might recall, as I’ve written about this before, that she wrote me a letter well over a year ago, after reading my story in The Toronto Star. And that she had been that teacher, the one who first encouraged me to write, to want to be a writer. All very good news, except that she’d sent the letter to my dad’s house, where the filing system is a bit dubious, and somehow the envelope had gotten lost, and with it her return address. Efforts to locate her via internet searches came to absolutely nothing, and I wasn’t even sure in what part of the province she lived.
However this summer whilst weekending at our friends’ cottage north of Belleville, the power went out in a gusty storm. Staying out for nearly twenty-fours, which halfway into we decided to alert the Hydro company of. Because perhaps they didn’t know, however unlikely? And then flipping through the phone-book by candlelight (and keep in mind this is a small phone book with a very large font), a name jumps out at me, and I swear it’s my former teacher’s husband’s. An address written beside it, and of course I’m not sure, but I decide to take my chances. The address being not quite right postal-wise, however, and so the note I send takes its time, but it arrives eventually. So my teacher and I are back in touch, I was able to thank her for her lovely note about my story, and all this only because of a terrible storm that knocked out the power last July.
