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.
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.
In New York for a brief visit, my wife and I wanted to celebrate our
19th wedding anniversary with a special dinner. After a beautiful day
walking around the city, we decided to find a restaurant near where we
were staying at 70th and Amsterdam. For our anniversary dinner, we
wanted a restaurant where we could talk and hold hands. And we wanted a
meal prepared by a chef who cared about making interesting food, but we
didn't want to spend a fortune.
My mother had a way of inventing traditions. “It’s Lizzie’s birthday!” she’d proclaim periodically and everyone in the family would don a party hat and sing happy birthday to one of our English Springer Spaniels. The announcement of the dog’s birth and subsequent celebration of it could occur at any time – on April 5, say, or December 12. It could happen twice a year or once every few years. But however haphazard, it became a tradition. 
Once upon a time, when my future husband and I had just started dating,
he called me one Saturday morning to see what I was up to. I was in the
car with my friend Phoebe and a trunk full of laundry.