I am thinking of my sister’s kitchen cabinet. I hope that someday I have a cabinet that smells like that. Cardamom and chili made the cabinet smell like chai tea and curry. I wouldn’t have been surprised to uncover a small East Indian village in the back of the cabinet. I have no idea why those smells are so attractive to me. The night I arrived there, I was greeted in the kitchen with the strong chai tea smell from the spent tea ball lying in the sink. Funny how something so visually repugnant can make me feel at home with its scent. I think it’s mainly the cardamom. It makes me think of the Albanian guy I crushed on my first year of grad school because he was often sucking on cardamom seeds. I think of that great cardamom crème cake at Spirit Winds that I have never been able to find a recipe for. And, of course, I think of my time in Houston with Maddy and discovery of the pleasures of cardamom coffee and cardamom/pistachio ice cream (otherwise known as sulfi). Mmmmm.

I think that the hard edges of my experiences get rubbed away by time. It’s weird. I just don’t feel angry about much of anything from the past. My sister seemed very angry still about Tim. Her feelings of wanting to protect me were sweet, but it seemed too much like the situation was no longer worthy of such strong emotion. A friend warned me that the wife of a guy who hurt me in subtle ways over the course of a few years would be coming to her party this Saturday and that she is now expecting a baby. I guess something has clicked over because I don’t care at all. It’s just weird how people and things that were once very important become familiar strangers and just things that happened once.

Well, I had better get some work done.

Love to all.