When you go to a restaurant, they serve you food that not only tastes good, but it is aesthetically arranged on the plate. This food styling is important. The above photo is of a gorgeous dinner. As I am writing this, the photo looks a little blurry, but that may be because my cataract surgery isn’t for another month.

The meal above was made and plated by my husband, who follows the directions on the meal subscription box faithfully, right down to making the food on the plates look exactly like the photo on the recipe. Exactly.

We subscribe to three meal boxes per week. This means that three meals are delicious, look just like what Ina Garten would make, and I don’t have to make anything. Unfortunately, the other four meals are my responsibility. I have been making dinners for 54 years. For 48 of those years, the. meals were mostly good. They were always totally edible. But here’s the thing: I have never liked cooking. I took my responsibility for producing meals seriously, as I had two children to keep healthy and growing. We had salad at every dinner.

Once the kids left, what little enthusiasm I had for making supper dwindled to near zero. I began to rely on a few “no brainers.” Spaghetti with Rao’s sauce. Sandwiches. Turkey pot pies. Pizza delivery. After a few years of this, my husband became weary of the same old meals. I became angry at him for this, and so I announced my retirement from the daily grind. We subscribed to the meal boxes and he took over cooking on those nights. Those nights are heavenly, because we get dinners like “Turkish Goulash with Lime Rice,” “Tostadas with Guacamole and Lime Crema,”  “Roasted Garbanzo Beans with Artisanal Salad,” and the like. Many of the recipes include various sorts of beans, but we don’t mind. The fiber helps the meals “move along,” if you catch my drift.

My nights are a totally different kettle of fish. I use that phrase advisedly, since I am not a fish fan, so I don’t make fish. Except tuna salad sandwiches, which are always good. I have no culinary imagination, I resent being in the kitchen, and thus when putting the food on the plates, I just schlep it on there, with no thought to the presentation. Presentation be damned; let’s just eat the food and be done with it.

Night before last, I watched as my husband held a sprig of parsley over his head and dropped it gracefully onto the side of a portion of Poached Chicken Breasts with Lemon Sauce. It was beautiful. He took such care and pride.

The next night, it was my turn.

The change of seasons gives us a jolt that we need. Summer is over, although it is still so damn hot out, but we have to blame climate change for that. Fall is fall, no matter what the temps are. So everybody in the burbs buys mums and pumpkins. We look forward to wearing sweaters (I don’t–since menopause, I wonder how any woman can wear one; they are so HOT). The other things people do in fall:

• Make all sorts of recipes utilizing squash
• Wear socks with their Birkenstocks
• Think about roasting a chicken
• Get one last pedicure
• Consider growing a beard
• Take the kids to get lost in a corn maze
• Ride around looking for “the foliage”
• Try mulled cider one more time, but it’s still awful
• Order an inflatable figure
• Break a tooth on a candy apple
• Sit around a fire pit, even if it’s 70 degrees out there
• Put nuts in a bowl with a nutcracker, yet nobody eats them
• Trip on a root while hiking
• Make chili
• Stock up on lip balm
• Stop shaving their legs
• Visit a “haunted house”

Next up, winter. The season we love until the holidays, and then it just gets depressing…

Old houses. They are full of character, they hold stories in their walls. They have drafts. Bats can get in. But they are built from a time when craftsmen took pride in their work. Walls were thick, floors were beautiful wood. Big, Santa friendly fireplaces. Large rooms.

We lived in an old house for thirty years. The center hall, wide and welcoming, was big enough for actual furniture. The kitchen had a kitchen table, not an island. It had a butler’s pantry. It was such a superb home for raising a family. We loved that house.

It had drawbacks. The laundry was in the gloomy basement. Two flights of stairs down, and then back up again, lugging the heavy basket of clothes. The closets were small, and nobody in 1912 thought that folks needed to “walk in” to a closet. Some of the windows were painted shut. House cleaning was a day long affair; it was a big, old place. Dust. So much dust. But it was homey, lovely, and our family dropped roots there.

Now we, the elder empty nesters, live on the top floor of a brand new apartment building. We had no idea how much easier it would be to live in a modern place. There are no drafts. The laundry room is off my closet–no lugging! For the first time in my life, I have a huge kitchen island, so much counter space. I can walk in to my closet, and dance in there if I want to. The windows in every room are gigantic. The sunsets we see from our living room are spectacular– high above the city–pink, orange, and purple. We never saw a sunset at the old place; there were too many trees.

There is a skyline! I always wanted to look out and see a skyline! We have a big balcony, so I have flowers, but there is no lawn maintenance. We can walk to restaurants. We can watch the Dayton Dragons baseball games from the balcony. Fourth of July fireworks are incredible.

We know lots of people who still live in their family homes. As they age, the prospect of moving to a smaller place seems overwhelming. Too much stuff to get rid of. All of that packing up. Selling a house. So they sigh and hope that their children will be fine doing all of that “when the time comes.” They stay put until perhaps the moving won’t be an adventure, but instead a miserable relocation to a “facility.”

We are so glad we decided to have an “adventure” by moving from the burbs into the city. It was a life refresher. We have new friends, a diverse group of neighbors, and did I mention the sunsets?

Get out of that house, empty nesters! Before it’s too late.

Harriet Busby spent her entire life doing the right thing. As a child, she spit her cherry pits demurely into her napkin, and then placed them at the side of her plate. When her brother let the cherry pits accumulate in his hand, Harriet tattled on him. Harriet was not afraid of reprisal.

When Harriet grew up, she found the habits of her neighbors shocking. Harold Batts left his garbage cans out in the open, and this resulted in a raccoon infestation. Harriet called Critter Control so many times they recognized her voice.  Her backdoor neighbor, Winnie Smales, left the bathroom curtains open. Harriet was forced to inform Winnie that her *ahem* privates were not so private.

Harriet never married. She came close with Robert Dodd, but he had the unfortunate habit of sucking on a toothpick after dinner, and that was a dealbreaker for Harriet. When they dissolved their relationship, Harriet got rid of the jade green ceramic toothpick holder that adorned her kitchen window sill. She never really liked it, and it was not at all valuable. She chucked it, along with the toothpicks, into the trash without a second thought. However, she did miss Robert’s company in the evenings. After dinner especially, when Robert would sing “Are You Lonesome Tonight” in a soothing baritone.

Harriet could never understand why her nieces never sent thank you notes for the ten dollar checks she sent them on their birthdays, so she stopped sending them. Their father, Thomas, who was six years Harriet’s junior (guilty of the cherry pit etiquette breach), left Harriet a huffy message on her land line, declaring thank you notes extinct. He told his sister that “text” thanks are what is done these days, but since Harriet didn’t believe in cell phones, she was the one in the wrong.

Harriet remained steadfast. The world was full of ill mannered, selfish people. Harriet stuck to her guns, judging those in her neighborhood, at church, and especially those churls at Kroger who banged Harriet’s heels with their shopping carts.

Then, one Saturday, after a solitary Friday night in her recliner, Harriet had a Eureka moment. Life was getting shorter and shorter, Harriet was getting older and older, and the lonely days and nights stretching in front of her turned her blood to ice.

Harriet looked at herself in the mirror. Pale, undistinguished. Hair that barely held a curl. The beginnings of under eye bags. Were those jowls? She stifled a sigh, pulled open the hall closet door, and took out her maroon cardigan.

The speed limit was 35 mph, but Harriet floored it on the way to the Goodwill store, where she bought a brass toothpick holder.

The rest is history.

I have two daughters, so it is widely accepted that their parents have had sex twice.

As a novelist, I have considered inserting (poor choice of words) a sex scene or two into my work. I have not done this.

This is because I have actually, like everyone in the world over a certain age, had sex more than twice. So I have experienced enough “things” that would allow me to write a scene about intimacy. I have not done this.

I have not done this in fear that three of my readers might a) vomit after reading one of these scenes, or b) in the case of reader number three, wonder where on earth the activities in said scene originated. I know, fiction writers use their imagination, but would reader three really understand that?

My problems in writing the scene would entail (not an intentional pun)

• Arranging the location for the scene. Would it be inside? A hotel, or maybe someone’s seedy basement? Or would it be somewhere in the glory of the outdoors, say along the banks of a pebble-strewn stream or in a bosky dell?
• Would the participants be young and lithe, or more in my age range, complete with arthritis, cellulite, various sagging parts, etc.?
• Would it be an affair? If so, an air of stealth and anxiety at being discovered  would have to be a part of it. The anxiety could cause erectile dysfunction, and frankly, I don’t want to go down that road.
• What kind of sex would they have? Vanilla (I am a sort of expert in that area of carnal activity), or more kinky? I have read other writer’s sex scenes involving props. Toys. I have to admit that everything in a brown wrapper coming to me has been from Amazon. I would have to do some research into “toys.” Again, I am not sure I am ready for that.
• And the act itself. Arms, legs, faces, buttocks. How does one write about the arrangement? Sex involves a lot of thrashing and sometimes it’s very unruly. Sweat and other liquids. One participant might be into biting. Biting what? Oh, and foreplay. Where should I have them start? In the hallway of the hotel? By the pool, very surrepticiously?
• Who faces in what direction? Arms caressing cheeks or hands exploring inside underwear? How do they get their clothes off? And then what?  Will one of the lovers swoon, or will one pass gas? That stuff happens. The act itself–discuss or leave it up to the reader, to fill in as desired? How explicit is too explicit?
• Do I want to sweep my readers into the scene to the point that they lose themselves and emerge at the end of the chapter sweaty and exhausted, or uplifted and deeply moved?
• And will they reach nirvana simultaneously, as they do in just about all romance novels, or will one partner become delirious and the other resentful?

It’s something that I never have come to grips with (another innuendo I didn’t mean) as a novelist, and thus I write what many classify as “young adult” fiction.

This is a complete cop-out on my part, because who is it that is having all the sex? Yup. The young adults.

I think Colleen Hoover can handle this. I am going to end it with her.

After dinner, we settle down to watch TV. We don’t watch anything that is on network TV. We prefer the mystery series that are on the streaming. You know the ones–they surround a crime, usually murder, and they have at least six episodes.

It requires two people to watch these, because these shows are so crammed with red herrings, a cast of thousands, and so many blind alleys. This is how our evenings in front of the TV go:

HIM: “Wait. Pause it for a minute. Who’s Larry?”

ME: “Larry is Maurice’s brother.”

HIM: “The one with the false eye?”

ME: “No. That is Tony. You know–Tony runs the coffee shop. Larry is Mary’s father.”

HIM: “So they think Larry did it? I thought he had an alibi. He was eating pizza with Don and his wife–what’s her name? Violet?”

ME: “Larry’s alibi may be shaky. He is sleeping with Violet, so she is probably lying for him.”

The show continues, and we watch as some new characters emerge, and a plot detail from the first episode comes up big time. Neither of us remembers it.

ME: “Wait. The mailbox??”

HIM: *rewinding* “See that? She put a letter in the mailbox.”

ME: “Who? The next door neighbor?”

HIM: “Yeah.”

ME: “So she is important to all of this? Is she a suspect? Wasn’t she the one who moved back to London in the first episode? I thought she was just Violet’s roommate from college.”

HIM: “Yes, but she must be important. Maybe the letter has incriminating facts in it.”

ME: “Or maybe not. She could just be mailing a letter.”

HIM: “Is this the show where the girl got raped on roofies?”

ME: “No wonder you are confused. No. That was the last show–the one with the body in the lake beside the boy’s boarding school.”

HIM: “Oh, right. This is about the poisoning.”

ME: “Yeah. So maybe the letter is a flashback. Or, maybe the letter has the poison.”

Why we watch these is the real mystery, because number one: the guilty person is always the one you least suspect, so just pick the most ridiculous cast member, and you will be right ninety percent of the time. Remember Tony, with the false eye? HE did it. The fact that he appears in the first episode for exactly three seconds is the giveaway. Who would guess Tony? We would. But wait, is it Tony??

Number two: The same famous actors, like Olivia Coleman, are in all of these shows, so we get confused. Olivia was the good true woman in the last show we watched, and then she is in a show  sending nasty letters to everyone in the village. We just can’t keep it straight–is she the good one or the bad one?

Of course, there is always the plot twist. Or worse. Tony, whose eye gives us the creeps, turns out to be a former priest. A man of God, who just looks like someone who might be a murderer. The actual murderer is Violet, whom we would have never suspected, because she has such a small role. They elevate her in the last episode, when she tries to push DCI Bradley off the roof, because he is on to her for murdering Ralph with the poison. Ralph, the seemingly innocuous schoolteacher.

After the last episode, we both shrug. We knew it was coming. The person you least suspect.

HIM: “But what was in the letter? It wasn’t poison, because Violet kept the poison in her purse in that little bottle. What was the letter all about?”

ME: “Something unimportant. They wanted us to get confused.”

HIM: *nods wisely* “Of course. Remember the brother in the chicken suit? THAT WAS CONFUSING.”

ME: “That wasn’t in this show.”

HIM: “I know that. But it was still confusing.”

We turn off the TV, shut off the lights, and go to bed. Just before he starts snoring, I sit bolt upright.

ME: “But wait! Violent and Tony were both threatened by the London mafia! Violet murdered  Ralph to protect Tony! Ralph was mafia; remember the black gloves? They were setting us up for Season Two!”

HIM: “The chicken suit was so confusing…”

I have a lot of time on my hands, it’s true. Some days, I look around from the fourth episode of 48 Hours that I have seen without a break, and I think to myself: “Molly, you should do something productive, like Swiffing the hall. I don’t, but I think about it before switching to 20/20.

Today, I turned off the tv and decided to look online for things that people with time on their hands do. Things that I might take inspiration from. Have you heard of Rajiv Surendra? He has a YouTube channel that I love to watch. Rajiv is so adorable. The problem with Rajiv is that what he wants me to do is wash my window wells, clean my baseboards, or make my own silver polish with things I already have in my pantry. I gave my silver to my daughter, and I took one look at my window wells and decided to put off cleaning them until 2030. I simply ignore my baseboards.

But today, I stumbled onto a thing. A thing that people do who have completed all of Rajiv’s projects and long ago surpassed Martha Stewart. This is the truth:  they decorate the inside of their refrigerators. This is so that when the fridge door is opened, the person looking for a cold snack instantly forgets hunger and is transported by the beauty of the interior of the icebox. It’s beautiful. It’s aesthetic. It’s color coordinated. There’s a bouquet in there, on purpose.

Here are my questions:

• Why?
• Is the bouquet real, or can you use plastic flowers?
• Will your husband open the fridge door and after saying “WTF?” immediately want a divorce, because the sock drawer is one thing, but this crosses the line?
• Are you trying to make your friends jealous?
• What do you do with all of the milk jugs, egg cartons, mayonnaise jars, and juice bottles that you replace with decorative containers? Trash them? Who takes out that trash? Oh, right–your husband–the one who wants a divorce.
• How often do you open the fridge door to admire it?
• How do you get your guests to do the same? Or do you throw open the fridge door at every opportunity, saying something like, “Would anyone like a cold drink out of this antique jug I picked up during our last trip to Spain? It’s food safe!”
• Do you need a hobby?
• Did you get this idea from Joanna Gaines?

I guess I should clean my baseboards.

We are all very busy. I am way too busy to read every single news story out there. I rely on the headlines to keep me up to date with things. Especially the Olympics-all I need to see is, for instance, JORDAN CHILES MUST RETURN OLYMPIC BRONZE AFTER COURT RULING to know all I need to know. I feel for her, but I don’t want to soak myself in the whole traumatic story. That is enough.

But  just a few minutes ago, I saw this headline: WOMAN STEALS 1.4 MILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF CHICKEN WINGS FROM SCHOOL DISTRICT. Really? I went to get a quick glass of water, and when I came back to my Google feed, the story had disappeared, to be replaced with other more newsworthy items, like 100 YEAR OLDS SHARE WHAT THEY ALWAYS EAT. I know the answer to that; it’s kale.

But back to the chicken wings. Try as I might, I can’t figure out why anybody would want that many chicken wings. Wouldn’t this woman’s family get sick of them after, say, $100 worth? And my God, how many chicken wings add up to 1.4 million dollars? Chicken wings are inexpensive. I buy two packages whenever I make noodle soup, and they run me about six dollars for a dozen wings. So I can’t wrap my head around fitting 1.4 million dollars worth in the trunk of my car.

So, okay, you are saying. She stole them over time. Of course she did. Again, how many years does it take to steal that many wings? Ten, maybe? And back to her family–still eating the damn wings, for ten long years? How many ways can a woman cook wings, anyway? You say, No. She sold them. Who did she sell them to? How? Door to door? Her neighbors would get suspicious, wondering why Ethel (I made up her name; the headline didn’t identify her) pedaled wings all the time. I mean, I can see it if she decided to become a drug dealer, but to my thinking, there is just not that much demand for chicken wings. But of course, school lunch rooms don’t serve cocaine, so I guess Ethel’s choices of things to purloin and then sell were limited.

Ethel must have had a plan. But what was it? She couldn’t sell them to restaurants–what restaurant would buy wings from some random woman who showed up at the kitchen door with bags full of them? There might be a dive in some shady neighborhood, but again, we are talking 1.4 million dollars worth of wings.Ok, then.  Did Ethel have big parties? Really big parties? I can just see her friends, rolling their eyes and saying, “My God, Ethel just invited us over for the Fourth. But I cannot stomach another chicken wing.”

Could Ethel have an addiction problem? The kind where at first, ten wings a week, nicely barbecued, were enough, but then ten weren’t enough, so Ethel had to increase the amount of wings just to achieve the same wing high? Like from ten a week to twenty, and it went from there? I did the math. If Ethel ate 20 per week, that is 1,042 wings a year. For just Ethel. Now if her family is factored in, as sick of wings as they would get, then maybe Ethel’s fam could ingest four thousand a week? Not possible. Ethel couldn’t cook that many wings a week.

So what is Ethel’s game? Your guess is as good as mine. But her wing spree is over, because as the headline said, Ethel was caught. I can just picture the other lunch ladies sending anonymous emails to the Superintendent of Schools, noting the lumpiness of the pockets in Ethel’s aprons every day on her way out of work, and perhaps seeing an errant wing escaping from her purse. It’s a mystery.

I wonder how many years in jail Ethel will have to serve. Knowing her type, Ethel will become a kingpin in prison, the head of a chicken wing smuggling ring. The food in prisons is terrible, due to most accounts, so hot wings would be a luxury. Those inmates would not mess with Ethel. A good wing is hard to come by in the slammer.

We are like the rest of America. Schlubs. We love to watch the various Olympic events from our comfortable chairs, and man, do we JUDGE.

But here’s the thing: I want to know how coaches find these athletes. Yes, it’s easy for the runners. Your kid runs very fast. So you put him or her in track and field. And skateboarding kids are everywhere, so the good ones stand out. They self-train for the Olympics.

But the high jumpers. Who discovers them, and how? Most kids I have ever known don’t jump over things backwards. So who discovers their talents? I watched the women’s high jump, and besides wondering how these girls figured out that they could do this, I also noted that they were all gorgeous, with lots of makeup, and Eleanor Patterson approached her take off with a very sexy strut. What??? I guess because they don’t get hot and sweaty, they can come out of the locker room looking like models and stay that way throughout the competition.

How do they find pole vaulters? I assume in gym class, the teacher hands out poles? What about Badminton? Who plays Badminton competitively these days? I confess I think of Badminton as something they play on the vast lawns of Downton Abbey. Where are today’s Badminton players found? Do they scout stately homes?

To change the subject slightly, there are sports in the Olympics that are completely confusing. Unless you have taken part in Judo, how does it work? How is a winner decided? All I could see was a lot of grabbing and leg pretzeling, and then all of a sudden, they were on the ground. A split second later, a winner is declared. While they were down there, what did the winner do? The judge did give warnings. What the warnings were for was unclear to the two of us eating popcorn and reclining. My husband thought maybe it was for using the F word while down there among the knots of arms and legs. Made sense to me.

I loved the surfing, but it took so long for them to decide which wave to take. But to me the most boring sport is soccer, where they run back and forth for eons and nobody scores. Golf: forget it. I also am not a fan of the shooting, although that casual guy in street clothes with his hand in his pocket was a refreshing break from all the other shooters. But shooting. We don’t need shooting in today’s gun riddled world, do we?

I can’t wait for the breaking. And the “artistic swimming.” Now these are competitions that call for extra popcorn.

Let’s talk about food. I’ll start with the fact that whenever we eat at friends’ houses, I am stumped with how they all seem to be able to eat about a quarter of what’s on their plates and then stop. As if they are full. Meanwhile, I have finished every morsel of my first helpings, and I need more. For instance, there are more than enough chicken thighs on the serving platter for everybody to have two, but I am the only diner who reaches for a second thigh.

Do people eat sandwiches before they go out, so that they can do this skimpy dining? Or is everyone else on the planet satisfied with one chicken thigh, two slices of roasted potato, and one roasted carrot? And the salad–when the hostess brings out the salad bowl for eight guests with what looks to me like barely enough salad for two people?

Corn. On the cob. Every other person has one ear, and they seem completely satisfied. It’s corn season, folks–as far as I am concerned, every person should have at least three ears for dinner, because come September, there will be no good cobs available.

It’s even worse in restaurants! I can eat a whole calzone by myself. But I know couples who split one. Or worse, they order a single entree to split. Imagine having half of a pork chop and two tablespoon of mashed potatoes. It’s just wrong.

Dessert. Don’t order a piece of pie and four forks, for God’s sake. And yet, everybody seems to think this is just fine. As for me, getting but one bite of Key Lime is gustatory sin. Do we all feel that if we get our own dessert we will be harshly judged for gluttony?

I wonder if the people who can’t seem to finish their dinners in the restaurant take their styrofoam boxes “for lunch tomorrow” finish them the minute they get in the door. I can even imagine them cramming French fries into their mouths in the car as they leave the parking lot. I have never in my life asked for a box. Oh, no.

Does this mean that I am truly alone in all this? Perhaps “everyone” is normal, and I am actually way too hungry? Should I order one dessert and four spoons? What if it’s ME?

Oh, no.