Beginning a New Year with Marilyn

           Tomorrow, Marilyn and I will both return to work.  Having had almost two weeks off—I chose not even to check my work email account until today—I have settled into a kind of expansiveness, a sense that time is elastic, that my body and my mind can relax and follow whatever pace feels right at the time. 

I know that very soon the pace will pick up, that I will be racing past others in the hallways on campus, hurrying to classes, my heavy backpack just adding to my momentum. When I stop to chat with a colleague, I will have one eye on the clock, very aware of where I will need to be next and how many minutes it will take me to walk there.     
           So today, my last day off, I want to record the first few hours of this new year.  As each new year begins, I like to do some of my favorite things as a way to set a good precedent for the rest of the year.  Others might eat right or exercise.  I often make art or write letters.  This year, I walked in the sunshine with Marilyn, baked a cake from a new recipe, and went to a movie on a Monday afternoon.  

On New Year’s Day, after writing cards to friends and family and re-watching episodes of the first season of Downton Abbey, Marilyn and I went for a walk in the prairie.  The light there is different every day.  I loved the sun on the grass yesterday.  The wind blew us sideways a lot of the time; we figured we got a good resistance workout.

I had been wanting to try a recipe for Buttermilk Plum Cake because the picture in the magazine reminded me of European bakeries.  I am not a baker by any means.  I don’t usually like following recipes, so I cook on the stove where I can adjust ingredients as I see fit. But I love the idea of stirring batter and baking from scratch.  And this picture was just so pretty.  So I began to gather ingredients--turbinado sugar, buttermilk—and even looked up blogs to see what to substitute for whole wheat pastry flour.  Then I couldn’t find any plums.  I hadn’t noticed that this May issue of the magazine called for seasonal ingredients.  Ah well.  I was determined to bake this cake, so I used blueberries and strawberries instead; they are clearly seasonal somewhere and were in our grocery store.  What a luxury it was to whisk and stir and bake on a Monday morning, watching the clock only after the cake was in the oven.  This was definitely a delicious start to the New Year.

The title of this film tickled me.  I want to photoshop this to say My Life with Marilyn.  We went to see the film this afternoon—a Monday!—at our wonderful local Art Theater in downtown Champaign while snow flurried down.  In the past ten days, we have seen three very different films, all entertaining in their own ways: The Descendants, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (I laughed at the idea of getting through Mumbai traffic in three minutes; fortunately, I had checked my disbelief at the door), and My Week With Marilyn.