an idea for a teaching book, color proofs to look at again, oogle over again, and basically use as floor art, because I simply can't just put it away in a file (I need to look at it some more), an e-mail I printed out with a list of out-of-print books I want to order (along with the ones I meant to order at Christmas), a file folder (oh, who am I kidding? twenty-two file folders) that need to be sorted through (my target date is 2008), a great article about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and a one-page vignette I tore from Ladies Home Journal that Ashley Judd wrote.

What? you ask. What does Ashley Judd have to do with writing? And why are you saving it? I can answer that. It is a particularly worthy piece of paper. It is a piece of paper that transports me to another time. It holds a page of words which I think of as a reading surprise. In this article (about her visit to Cambodia and Thailand), she offers us an excerpt from her diary, an entry from a day spent with children at an orphanage. After visiting with them, "bawling," after praying, she feels so heartbroken that she just wants to go home, to "be in my yellow kitchen, wearing my Great-Aunt Pauline's apron, baking a cake. I wanted to fiddle with my roses ...". I love that. And along with mourning the hard life of those children, I felt something else. I felt like I knew that yellow kitchen. And it made me think of my own kitchen. But even more so than my white and aqua adult kitchen—gulp—