Susan Dixon

… Lunar New Year, Tet, days getting longer, people complaining about winter …

“It’s Imbolc,” I say, brightly. “The first day of spring. In the Celtic calendar.”

I don’t typically get a cheerful response. February 1st, at this latitude, is not what we typically associate with spring, which is supposed to be pastel flowers and buds and sunshine. We know that from the calendars and gift cards and images of the four seasons. Where I live it is gray and frozen. There are more birds but the sounds are still lonely—the occasional chickadee or a distant crow. And yet …

Dorie Greenspan has a classic recipe for the perfect cookie that she got from Pierre Hermé. It’s basically a French sablé but like an American chocolate chip cookie, it is made with both white and brown sugar. It’s got cocoa and chocolate and butter and salt and that wonderful sandy sablé texture. It’s so perfect it got nicknamed the World Peace Cookie because clearly if everyone ate it, they would be too content to argue.

As soon as we arrived in St. Petersburg, Florida, in the early 60s, my parents went “church shopping,” visiting Methodist churches one after another. Things went awry every time. One church didn’t have a Sunday School. The minister at another told newcomers to stand up and he commented on one woman’s ‘lovely hat.’ The final straw was the church that gave out Green Stamps to those attending. (Who remembers Green Stamps?) My parents, though both had deep ties to the Methodist Church, became Episcopalian.