standing at the window
eating still-warm cookies
watching
dark winter sky

I spent a lovely day with my friend Marilyn cooking. Not cookies, but it was a day for cookies, so haiku-etic license, I suppose.

We made dolmades, or dolmas, or stuffed grape leaves. Neither of us had made them before, either, and they turned out terrifically!

It's amazing how brown rice, Italian parsley, mint, celery, onion, and sunflower seeds take on a life of their own in a grape leaf. Of course, we got to the point where we were making lemon sauce and realized... we didn't have a crucial ingredient. Yes, we had lemons, we're not that foolish.

I lie... we are that foolish, but not this time.

So... why did I make it cookies in the poem? They seem to fit a moment of childlike wonder we shared, eating dolmades fresh from the oven, moaning our delight, and looking at the window, wondering if the expected rain was going to come any moment.

...it still hasn't, actually, but is supposed to start tonight and turn to snow.

Which brings me to something else I intend to track on this little blog. The folk wisdom says that the day of the month that it first snows will tell you how many more snowfalls there will be in the winter. The first snowfall here was on the 29th and there was one more snow since then. So... we should be expecting 27 more. 26 if it snows tonight.