February Feast

[Note: Publish date was updated to correlate to actual publish date rather than date drafted. Yes, I am anal about these things.]

Friday night festivities, a full house, and fabulous fare made this month’s GBC meeting another fantastic one! (Too much caffeine = too much alliteration.) Everyone seemed to be in high spirits at the end of the week and we were all wondering if Friday would be the night that our youngest member of the book club might join. It was not, which might have been to the good of all attending and he who has not yet been publicly named since none of us have had formal medical training.

One of our newest members, GBC Marcia ushered in the appetizers with homemade pimento cheese and water crackers on the side. It was delicious, flanking hummus and accompanied by a glass of reading water. The old adage “a watched pot never boils” was found to be true for a small while, giving time for conversations to bubble throughout the house on books, life, careers, and a host of other random items. We all had news to share. GBC Susan prepared a lovely dinner of pasta with Beef Bolognese sauce, a mixed green salad with pear, and our locally sourced bread. A key lime pie with whipped cream was the finishing touch.

Hardly anyone managed to make much progress in the book due to timing, the rich language, or various other of life’s distractions which seem to creep in at the beginning of the year. The conversation started with the book and moved into shared stories of our first memories of significant tragedies, perhaps inspired by last week’s news in Austin. We have taken to the habit of having our book discussion post-dinner and sitting in a circle. It seems to work and each person often takes a turn offering an opinion of the read. The warm mood, the interesting talks, and perhaps the reading water caused the evening to run a bit later than normal, and all were happy as we tumbled out of GBC Susan’s home into the cool night.