I did it! I finally made a good pie crust. It was intended for dessert on Mother's Day, but my sister bought a strawberry pie from the grocery store instead. I was quite annoyed with her for upstaging the cherry pie I was going to serve, since I had already made the crust, but things turned out well. The strawberries in her pie were going bad and tasted pretty strange, so I felt a little vindicated there. Then on Tuesday night I made my pie, and for the first time, my piecrust came out beautifully. Better than the storebought one, really. I've been trying for years to make a decent piecrust, and I've finally done it. It shatters into layers when you cut it and everything, just like it's supposed to.

Gosh, now that I've written it down, that looks like some sort of odd Freudian complex. You could write long essays called "Sisterhood and Pie Jealousy" or "The Psychology of Fizzy Strawberries and Shortcrust Pastry." Wow.

My favorite class today was history. Mr. Brown always assigns a project at the end of the year which is completely up to the students: you pick the topic, you pick a way to present it. The only rules are that the topic must be something from American history and that you can't write a formal paper or make a poster. Last year I did a website on Anna Leon-Owens (the chick all those movies were made about - The King and I, Anna and the King of Siam, etc.) Also I painted some cloths to look like African kente cloth, which I didn't know much about. This year I'm doing the project on the Shakers, because I've been interested in them for years and we actually wrote letters for a while. There are only a few of them left, living in Maine.

So we spent the class researching our topics in the school library, but the library, being very small, had no useful books about the Shakers. And anyway, I have all the sources I need at home. So rather than look things up online, I retreated to the back of the room and read love poems in Spanish for the remainder of the class.

We watched Il Postino in Literature class last year, so I was somewhat familiar with Pablo Neruda. But, oh, I didn't realize how that man could write. They're all for his wife, and I think paradise must be awfully close to being married to someone who loves that much, if you also love him. Especially if he can write things like that. He uses lots of metaphors and things, but he keeps this practicality about all his poems that I really love. Like, one moment he's comparing his wife to the sun, and the next to a "messy chestnut."

Oh, bread your forehead, your legs, your mouth,
bread I devour, born with the morning light,
my love, beacon-flag of the bakeries:

fire taught you a lesson of the blood;
you learned your holiness from flour,
from bread your language and aroma.

I love that last stanza. When I read the parts about flowers and moonlight, I wondered how much he really understood her. (I mean, anyone who's in love can write about moonlight.) But it was the fact that he could compare her to wheat that made me believe he knew her as truly as any of us can know a person. When you can look at a person and see bread as well as roses, that's what I call poetry.

May 12
May 24