I’m about 3/4 through Animal, Vegetable – it’s currently the end of the growing season and the fam is harvesting potatoes and Lily has launched her egg business.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, the thing I love most about reading books is all the aha moments when things connect. You know how when you buy a new car you suddenly seem to see the same make and model everywhere? Whatever it is I’m reading, it seems the themes of the book are all around me, and that makes me think more deeply and open my eyes a little wider.

I’m home alone tonight not doing much of anything. Been feeling pretty despondent about the world since January 20, try as I might to stay positive and find ways to make myself useful against the forces of evil. Long story short, I thought maybe making something chocolaty might offer some comfort, and then I remembered that we have some orange honey goat cheese, and ooh, yum – lightbulb moment!

A quick Google search turned up these dark chocolate goat cheese brownies with honey. Holy wow, right? I’m definitely making them, but not tonight because the only chocolate I have is cocoa powder. But you guys! The site where I found the recipe, The Copper Table, is everything I could possible want as I figure out my new Kingsolver-inspired shopping/cooking/eating habits. It’s all about cooking with local, seasonal foods, and loving it. I’m super excited!

In the meantime, though, as I sit around praying for checks and balances, thinking about how I might save the world or at least do my part, I’m eating this final frozen bao from Costco, drinking red wine from a jam jar, and baking this simplest snack cake in the world.

I reject all this hate and despise the abuses of power and the diminishing of civil rights, and I want with all my heart to stand up for people in harm’s way. But tonight I’m just home, doing nothing. Reading Animal, Vegetable, perusing The Copper Table, eating microwaved frozen bao while I think about walking a bit more lightly on the earth by minding where my vegetables come from, eating more seasonal fresh produce, and cooking meals at home more often.

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I just took my little snack cake out of the oven. When I poked it in the middle to test whether it was done, I poked a little too hard so now there’s a dent in the middle of it. (Did I mention the wine I’m drinking?) But this cake will never be seen by anyone other than me and Rusty, so who cares? I mixed the aforementioned goat cheese with a wee bit of powdered sugar (it’s pretty sweet on its own), a pinch of salt, and a dram of milk — I’ll drizzle that over the cake once it’s cool.

And that’s about all I’ve got right now. Because while my bao was tasty and I baked a cake and I’m digging Animal, Vegetable (oh, and the Warriors were down 24 but came back to win by 21 in Jimmy Butler’s first game with them), I keep thinking of The Prophet Song, which I read last year. It hit me harder than any book I’ve ever read. This passage was a revelation to me and lodged deep in my bones.

The prophet sings not of the end of the world, but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news…

The truth of it battered my heart. It was a new lens for looking at history and current events; it was through that lens I saw the 15-month bombardment of Gaza. In Prophet Song, you’re intimately acquainted with one family facing the end of their world, in particular one mother, and reading the news every day I knew there were thousands of real life stories that were that fucking devastating. The families of Hamas’s victims on October 7, too, and of course the hostages themselves. And then tens of thousands of Palestinians.

One of the main points of Prophet Song is it can happen anywhere, that local end of the world. As things here in the US get really scary, I keep thinking of that scene in The Handmaid’s Tail (the TV series with Elisabeth Moss) where they flashback to when everything was normal, and Jude orders coffee at a cafe, and the cashier tells her that her bank card won’t work anymore because (sorry!) women’s bank accounts have all been frozen. Everything’s normal until it’s not.