Dear J,

The lasagna was our best meal yet. P and I did a better job splitting up the work. He doesn’t enjoy grating cheese, so I assembled the ricotta/parmesan/egg sauce while he focused on the meat, red sauce and pasta noodles. The recipe we used stipulates a mix of Italian sausage and ground beef; I feel like the Italian sausage adds a bunch of flavor. Ditto for the onions P chopped and the parmesan I grated. Fresh stuff tastes better, in obvious but hard to define ways. P and I agreed: we would not be embarrassed to serve this lasagna to you or any other guests.

The snow is over; in two days, we got more of the white stuff than we’ve gotten in years. I love how the quality of light is transformed as the snow falls, and the muffled quiet that settles over the city. The bushes in front of our building got blobby and amorphous, but – since this is Chicago – the roads stayed open.

Our next door neighbor is your age, but looks twenty years older than you. I blame her cigarette smoking. She’s a day drinker, which makes me smile, but she can be a mean drunk, which… is not amusing. Right now, she’s hollering at a car stuck in the alley next to our building.

Alleys are not the same priority as the streets for Chicago’s road cleaning crew. Which makes sense from a traditional perspective, but wreaks havoc on Uber, Lyft, and a bunch of similar “gig” companies, who regularly direct drivers down the alleys.

I feel badly for the poor schmoes whose GPS directs them into an unplowed alley. My instinct is to ignore the sounds of tires squealing helplessly as treads try and fail to gain traction. I figure if a driver gets stranded, they can call a tow truck and meanwhile everyone else will have a visual cue that the alley is impassable.

But as I wrote this? My neighbor’s profanity-punctuated lessons in the basics of overcoming a snow-induced lack of traction actually worked! The Uber driver listened, and he got his car back onto the street!

Good for her. I think we all need victories these days, even if they’re small ones.

::hugs::

C/