a beanstalk and an ogre and–

I spend a lot of time feeling different from other people. Not in a bad way, really, but more in a sort of thinky, peculiar, I suspect we are having two very different reactions to this situation kind of way. I’m chattery and nervous. I’d rather be reading a book. I think about that scene at the beginning of Beauty and the Beast, townspeople whispering behind my back: no denying she’s a funny girl, that Belle.

Anyway, having put that out there, it’s always such a treat when I can look around a room and feel like I’m on the same page as the vast majority–if not all–of the women in it with me.  It doesn’t happen often, but it happened at my book club last night–or, as I described it to Tom, “my fancy dinner group where everybody reads the same novel.” Full of food writers and beer connoisseurs and Girls Friday with long Amazon wish lists, this monthly powwow is such an effing treat. Truly. Last night we ate coq au vin and drank cranberry lambic and talked–sort of, kind of, in a wandering circular way–about The Elegance of the Hedgehog, this month’s jumping-off point for a chat that covered, among other topics, the importance of correct comma usage and the crappiness of New Moon. By the time I trotted out into the cold to pick up the T, full of cheese and asparagus and winterberry pie (doesn’t that sound like I made it up?) I felt so refreshed–like here are some people I don’t even know very well yet, but who sure seem to be girls after my own heart.

I wish for everyone to have an awesome book club. And I am so very thankful for mine.