1. Chipotle. We eat at Chipotle every Sunday. Most of the staff recognizes us and knows our orders. I always get a salad with rice, black beans, chicken, corn salsa, sour cream, cheese, and dressing. Today, however, I left off the sour cream for an experiment, since the spoon with which they scoop it doles out far too much. The salad did not taste measurably worse without the sour cream, and this time I didn’t have to abandon the last third of the bowl as lost at sea. I might, after almost two years of clockwork regularity, permanently omit the sour cream from my Sunday lunch. If anyone ever says humans are not creatures of habit, reader, you may point to me.
2. Snow. Church was cancelled due to the snow. On the second day of spring, there’s a light dusting of white on the ground and a very bitter wind whistling–genuinely whistling–between the buildings of our apartment complex. It’s about thirty-five degrees outside, with a forecast of seventy on Tuesday. I bought rain boots for the first time in my life, and a calf-length wool coat. I’m no ally of global warming (or even global climate change), but I will observe that there has been of late some unusual weather.
3. Dubliners by James Joyce. Last year during Spring Break–in fact, on St. Patrick’s Day–I finished reading Dubliners for the first time; and a calendar year later, I am reading the same book. It is assigned for my modern British fiction class, a point which my husband finds truly ironic, since Irish nationalism was what drove a large part of Joyce’s writing. Joyce would have hated being classed as British. Nevertheless, I am enjoying the reread, which, as every good book ought to be, is complex enough to reward a second or third or tenth time through. Perhaps my professor has inadvertently helped me start a Read Irish in March tradition. What other Irish authors should I keep an eye out for?
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