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.
Congratulations, you’re pregnant – and for the first time since you were eight, you can eat whatever you want! Because you’re with child and therefore eating for two! And you are supposed to be a little insane from the hormones! So when you decide you must have half a jar of peanut butter for a snack, you only have to shrug helplessly and say, “I can’t help it – the baby loves peanut butter!” as though the kid were tapping out some kind of Morse Code on the inside of your belly.
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 always know the exact moment love officially strikes me clear and hard. The world actually goes silent. I can’t help but smile. My eyes light up. And most importantly, I shut up. Because in that very moment, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, I’m rendered speechless since there’s only one truth: I’m alive and I love you and I know it and that’s all there is to it.
To be perfectly honest, the only food recipe I have is one for
disaster. My husband and I found that out the hard way. We hadn’t been
married very long, and I wanted to make a delicious home-cooked meal of steak
and potatoes. I put the steak under the broiler, waited a reasonable
amount of time and then opened my oven door to 12-inch flames. I
screamed, what else could I do, but my husband simply strolled over to
the fire and blew it out. In his sweet way he told me it would be fine,
we could eat the potatoes. He also said, don’t worry about cooking
anymore, we could eat out.