I have been cooking since 3:30 and now the house smells like mushrooms sautéed in bacon drippings and thick potato soup. Catie’s chocolate covered face confirms that the scent of brownies will soon emerge from the kitchen, and fresh bread from the next door bakery is waiting to be sliced and slathered in butter.

It’s Thursday night.

The living room is joyfully and completely torn up. My artistically arranged magazines and coffee table books are on the floor and two of the sofa cushions are on top of the big padded footstool. A jar of marbles has been serving as money for an imaginary bakery and are now scattered all over the carpet. Catie has just resorted to sobbing because Eden chose Yellow Submarine and not Cinderella as their Thursday afternoon video splurge. Bruce Cockburn follows James Taylor on the CD changer in the kitchen. The dining room floor is covered with fine white crumbs – the children ate popcorn.

It’s Thursday night.

It’s Thursday night and I am stealing fifteen minutes to write, because I haven’t written in a week and I feel sluggish with metaphors, slow moving and cumbersome like a woman in her thirty-eighth week. The ideas are starting to bump into each other, like once-friendly colleagues in an elevator now becoming an uncomfortable crowd, sick of muizak and scent. .

My much hoped for writing studio is still not finished, and although school has started, a recent automobile accident and some ‘people emergencies’ have absorbed my kid-free time like a soft towel placed adjacent to a bathtub puddle. I read Jen’s article and I think, “Could that essay be more perfect?” Jen doesn’t have a jealous bone in her body, but I do, and her writing makes me long to be a master of my craft. Writing is magic. The alchemy of words is an addiction one cannot long leave behind.

Soon people will arrive at my door – the marbles gone, the popcorn dust removed, the soup steaming at the center of the table. We will read the same bread-and-wine intro that we have been reading all Summer and I will groan inwardly, wishing I had written another – knowing that it will be written in good time, at the right time. Fall is nibbling at the edges of time and our evening creeps up upon us a little sooner than we’re accustomed to, bringing nostalgia and melancholy. We dwell now in an Omer – a time in between. It is a frayed sort of time, where the end of one season weaves into the colors of the next. Tonight we are Omer people, just here, just us, on the edges of time, eating thick soup with laughter.