In the French family, we sleep under quilts. Even when a duvet is
involved, a quilt absolutely must lie atop it. We are used to the
weight of them, and among the five of us, own around three dozen. Each
one of these was handmade, stitch-by-stitch, by my mother. To get an
idea of the scope of this, she quilts daily, and a single quilt takes
over a year to complete. She does not believe in idle hands, or more
precisely, cannot relate to them. Last year I found a melon-sized
rubber band ball sitting on her desk, held it up to my brother and
asked, simply, “Why?” “Because,” he said, “It’s what she does. She
makes things.”
My whole life I have slept under one or another of my mother’s quilts, some of which were blue ribbon winners in the Bishop County fair. I dragged them to boarding school in Canada, college in Scotland, then Boston, and back to California again. During a Laura Ingalls Wilder phase, I began to pretend I was huddled up beneath one on the back of a covered wagon. I still like to imagine this when I can’t fall asleep.
My husband Mike points out that the room goes silent as I watch a quivering gooey strand of icing bridge a hunk of pastry being pried apart by delicate hands in an Entenman's commercial. And when a pool of thick, rich Dove chocolate swirls around and folds itself magically over a brick of vanilla ice cream, my eyes glaze over. Then, when the caramel and chocolate of a Milky Way is fully exposed in delectable close up, my jaw goes slack. He tells me to face it: these commercials are, for me, like watching porn. Yes, I embarrassedly admit that I have fallen prey to the sexualized enticements of sugary things. 
I have a complicated relationship with my Keurig. It was given to us at Christmas by my husband’s children. It was an amazing gift, thoughtful, inventive, and big. It is big. It is also streamlined and beautiful. I’d never seen anything like it before, which made them laugh hysterically (as it did half my friends). Confession: I don’t work in an office and when I do go to offices, they don’t usually invite me into the kitchen. The fact that I’d never seen anything like it before made me feel a little bit like Abe Simpson.
I have yet to go on a date in New York without breaking into a mental
sweat. When
scouting for potential mates, I have learned pretentious is better than
shallow, irritatingly intelligent better than vapid. But every time I
find myself two blocks away from any appointed date destination, panic
ensues.
I remember it like it was yesterday – laying in bed, completely entranced in the fiery excitement of it all. It was nothing I had ever experienced. My senses were heightened, an obsession had begun.