simple girl

I was heartsick this week. I thought that's what I wanted, a good wallow. But I think what I really needed was exactly what I got tonight.

A salsa class had been planned (how I love the passive voice for avoiding responsibility...) for our living room (hardwood floors and no furniture = perfect dance salon) and I would've felt bad canceling, since we all know the show must go on. So on it went. Between heartache and stomachache, I tried to sit it out, but the clave and drums just wouldn't let me. It's a little known fact of modern medicine that Colombian bacteria can be mollified, at least for a time, with some good hip twisting and dipping.

Afterwards people stayed and stayed. We cooked, people left and brought things back, and there was laughing and silly talk and music. I felt slightly apart yet completely at home. Being surrounded by friends, the kind you don't have to explain things to, was exactly what I needed. Life has a funny way of giving you just that, at the very moment you give yourself up to it.

And the ultimate cure lived in a nice banana cake, baked up spur of the moment, half stuck in the pan, covered semi-convincingly with an even nicer rum glaze.