my husband and i are of an age (50-ish) where we have done enough living–enough entertaining, enough traveling, enough school conferences, enough of enough things, so that when we want to plan a weekend in new york, for example, things usually fall into place. when we plan an extended trip to France, we know how to go about it, and we get there without feeling like raw tourists. but this weekend we are hosting a wine tasting for our visiting french friends, and things are not falling into place. at all. today was filled with avoidable pitfalls and forseeable setbacks. we spent the day trying to fit the beautiful rough-cut facets of our ideas for the event into the perfectly round and unforgiving hole of the event’s actual possibilities. like sitting at the café with let’s go: europe on the table, and a traveler’s phrasebook in front of our noses, trying to sound out the words grand café crème, and deux croque-monsieurs while the impatient server’s pencil hovers above his notepad.

quartz crystal points

from my son’s collection