Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Jun 22, 2011, 8:49 am
I worry, sometimes, that I misrepresent myself in essay form as some kind of thoughtful, benevolent creature concerned only with the satisfaction of aiding my aging parents, providing home-cooked meals to the masses, and saving woodland creatures. I am inordinately fond of the cozy portrait, the tea...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Jun 15, 2011, 10:15 am
“Who am I, anyway? Am I my resume?” -A Chorus Line It has recently come to our attention that in 90 days my husband may, or may not have a job. As the House Writer, I began immediately to work on resumes, cover letters, and all manner of beguiling a lifetime of hard and varied work into an ir...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Jun 8, 2011, 9:16 am
“Man it’s hot. It’s like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of hot.” -Neil Simon, Biloxi Blues People like me are not supposed to live anyplace where it gets to be 90 degrees. I know people, lots of them, who are thrilled when they can live in tank tops and shorts, spend days at t...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - May 18, 2011, 8:39 am
I am trying to watch less television. I’m not the first person to figure out the whole “garbage in, garbage out” thing, or to head up to bed after an evening of sitcoms feeling like I ate Cheetos and Red pop for dinner. Gradually, over the past couple of months I have let go of various “must...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - May 8, 2011, 10:30 pm
The cats were staring fixedly at something underneath one of the Adirondack chairs on the porch. “There’s something under there,” I said to my husband, bending to look. To the left of the chair, near the front door I spied a thick pile of tiny feathers. Too many feathers to leave a bird health...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - May 6, 2011, 10:05 am
 ”Depression is anger without enthusiasm.” -Anon I have always envied people capable of real, honest anger. By “anger” I do not mean the persistent wormholes of bitterness that lead to a grim worldview and the auxiliary need to puncture balloons and rain on parades. What I admire is the c...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - May 2, 2011, 10:19 pm
As a child, I had very curly hair. Although the ringlets disappeared into memory some time around my fourth birthday, the curl returned when it rained, when it was humid, and after I swam in the ocean. I speak not of some beach goddess wave, but of actual ringlets, small, perfect spirals appearing a...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 28, 2011, 9:26 am
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought? -Joan Didion Nearly twenty years ago, I followed my dreams to a better life. Not the pasty pink, bedazzled “dreams” that are aspirations, but the gritty movies that play on the screen of the sleeping brain. Living far fro...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 26, 2011, 7:07 pm
On June 21, 1981 I was home from my first year at The New England Conservatory of Music, and my parents were having a party to celebrate The Royal Wedding. It was, because they were fabulous throwers of parties, quite a “do.” My father wore his kilt, my mother dressed in a Queen Mum outfit with ...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 18, 2011, 9:24 am
Lately I have been thinking about lyrics and music. I posted the two as alternative choice on Facebook, and was surprised to find that the vast majority of commenters believed that music reigned supreme. (My brother, for example, commented “Music. Duh”). I remained unconvinced. It’s best when...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 12, 2011, 8:36 am
Having written previously about being janked, and wishing not to bore you, gentle reader, with anything repetitive or stale, I will tell you today about being bescrewed. It isn’t as much fun as it sounds. My litany for today, a day which has begun as charmlessly as a Miley Cyrus interview, is tha...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 11, 2011, 10:57 pm
I recently read about a study which confirmed that ones’ taste in music is a veritable turducken of emotional intrigue. Criticizing an artist or genre that someone loves is tantamount to a psychic slap, because the music we love is part of our identity. Woe betide the insensitive thug who makes a ...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 11, 2011, 10:57 pm
I recently read about a study which confirmed that ones’ taste in music is a veritable turducken of emotional intrigue. Criticizing an artist or genre that someone loves is tantamount to a psychic slap, because the music we love is part of our identity. Woe betide the insensitive thug who makes a ...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 10, 2011, 8:36 pm
Summer is my least favorite season. I am a ghostly pale person, I sweat easily, and I do not garden successfully. I am allergic to chlorine and can’t spend days by the pool without breaking out in hives, and I am not generally given to hiking, camping, kayaking or doing any of those other things t...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 10, 2011, 8:36 pm
Summer is my least favorite season. I am a ghostly pale person, I sweat easily, and I do not garden successfully. I am allergic to chlorine and can’t spend days by the pool without breaking out in hives, and I am not generally given to hiking, camping, kayaking or doing any of those other things t...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 8, 2011, 12:01 pm
  I have been slogging through hip-deep mud, grateful for something so small as the sight of a sleeping baby in a shopping cart, or so large as a startling moon melting like golden butter into the surrounding cosmic fuzz. I have been looking for signs, things that make my heart jump, and my brain ...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Mar 10, 2011, 1:20 am
Its always there, the black ice. Not the kind that lies beneath the pretty illusion of a fresh, white snowfall, but the kind seen from below, the kind that grows above the unwitting swimmer and traps her beneath its unyielding, opaque weight. I swim for months, in this case for years on the warm, bu...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Mar 4, 2011, 7:41 am
We are walking out of the restaurant into the dark, arctic chill of a Michigan night. My parents, each holding a cane in one hand, join hands to support each other as they step up onto the curb, cross the sidewalk island separating restaurant from parking lot, and then step off onto the lower ground...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Feb 23, 2011, 7:41 am
Of course I bought an iPhone. I have been waiting forever, from the time the rumors began to swirl about an Apple/Verizon partnership. For years I have carried both an iPod and a cell phone which is not exactly apocalyptic, but also not exactly convenient. There is only one dedicated spot for a rect...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Feb 23, 2011, 7:38 am
“Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Abraham Lincoln While my admiration of Lincoln as a President and a human being is abundant and sincere, I have hated this quote since the first time I read it. It often appears in the midst of some brightly-colored cartoon con...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Feb 23, 2011, 7:34 am
Although I grew up in Michigan, I was not one of those people who went Up North at every opportunity; I spent my summers in Maine or in Europe, and never crossed the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula until I was 30. I knew about pasties, though, the hearty meat-filled pockets that are the State...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Feb 9, 2011, 8:53 am
This morning I was trying to explain to my husband how difficult I found it to get over the giant ice ridge plowed into the end of our driveway. “It’s like driving over a railroad tie” I explained. “No, a track.” Then my brain did that thing that it does. “Like if the tie was a bow-tie, ...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Feb 1, 2011, 8:52 am
The forecast in these parts is for a blizzard commencing some time tonight. The number of inches varies, but suffice it to say that if this weather pattern (which makes it sound much prettier than it actually is) continues, we will be buried by this time tomorrow under about a foot of snow. The near...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Jan 19, 2011, 9:13 am
This morning I was pretty mellow at school drop-off time. The Cloud of Jankdom seems to have lifted, at least momentarily, and I was feeling a little hopeful, a little energetic, like maybe I could make something of this day. My son, who sat beside me blasting Eminem at a decibel level that threaten...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Jan 14, 2011, 12:10 pm
Definition of janked :. (jăngkt) 1. (v.) The state of being beaten up, drunk, or in any way not of sound mind. Often describing something with a decisively negative connotation. 2. (adj.) Describing something as stupid or dumb. Often with a decisively negative connotation. “Janked” is, an...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Jan 12, 2011, 9:49 am
Happy families lose their keys; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but can undoubtedly locate a front door key with little difficulty. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Chapter 1, first line   Last Friday night, we needed a key to our house. Most, if not all of you, probably have such a ...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Jan 5, 2011, 10:05 am
When I wrote a month or so ago about “not writing a book,” I got  such good advice. The most useful, I think, was the notion that if one does not have a passionate and burning desire to write a book, if one is not literallypossessed by an idea, it isn’t the right time. I’m sure there are ex...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Dec 9, 2010, 9:50 am
I try to fight the urge to be hip and non-conformist merely for the sake of refusing to follow fashion. If I needed a reminder, I found it the other day on Cracked.com, in a piece that elegantly and hilariously laid out for me the inherent ridiculousness of making choices solely on the basis that t...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Dec 2, 2010, 12:50 pm
I could be wholesome I could be loathsome I guess I’m a little bit shy Why don’t you like me? Why don’t you like me without making me try? -Mika, “Grace Kelly” She is a tall, slender, imperiously elegant member of the Congregation, and she hates me. Well, at the very least she doesn’t...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Dec 2, 2010, 12:48 pm
Just before Thanksgiving, the cooking questions started. Two extremely intelligent, competent women of my acquaintance were traumatized by culinary red alert situations -in one case, cooking a turkey, in the other, making roux. Both friends had, I believe, been placed on high alert by what I like to...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Dec 2, 2010, 12:48 pm
I never write about writing; my aversion to discussing inspiration, mechanics, process, rules and editing is nearly pathological. I have never taken a creative writing course, belonged to a writing group or read much about writing aside from “Bird by Bird,” which terrified me so much that it sat...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Dec 2, 2010, 12:47 pm
Sometimes I wish I wrote under an alias. Sometimes, no, often I have things to say, to spill, to pour out like so much distilled darkness, but I can’t allow myself that indulgence. Those things remain close, fermenting, growing, taking root until they push their way out as tears, impatience and a...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Dec 2, 2010, 12:46 pm
As of today, I have had my job cooking at a large, Protestant church for five months. I had imagined it as a kind of “Top Chef: Church.”  In reality it tends to be more like a combination of “Upstairs, Downstairs” and some kind of circus in which animals are replaced with small children and...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Dec 2, 2010, 12:45 pm
The world is full of filler, for better or worse. There is “good” filler, like the kind of paper one uses to give purpose to a three-ring binder, and “bad” filler like the slimy stuff injected into lunch meat, the exhausted lettuce and weary tomatoes insinuated into innocent sandwiches, and ...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Dec 2, 2010, 12:44 pm
In the midst of doing the “Times” crossword, I came upon this clue: “A pressing device.” Four letters. I had only an “I,” which was the first letter. My mind, steel trap that it is, flew immediately to devices of the literary sort – “Irony” was too long, “Pathetic Fallacy” was ...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Dec 2, 2010, 12:44 pm
A young colleague recently asked if I thought he could be as cool as I am when he grows up. The question elicited both hot-cheeked pride and the urge to laugh; I was, for many years, the most resolutely, hopelessly un-cool person in the tri-state area. My clothes were wrong, I tried too hard, and I ...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Dec 2, 2010, 12:42 pm
I am keenly aware of the fact that millions of people (and let’s be honest – most of them are women) face down dinner time with a mixture of dread, annoyance and resignation. Something has to be for dinner, and unless one in in possession of household staff, or willing to feed the family an endl...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Aug 23, 2010, 12:44 pm
I have been trying, for an entire day, to think about how to write about my 30th High School reunion. If I went all Kitty Kelly on its ass, I could write something that would enthrall, entertain and probably make some modest waves. If, on the other hand, I erred on the side of philosophical interpre...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Jun 14, 2010, 9:08 am
I have just finished reading an excellent blog post about the disappearance of a little boy in Oregon who vanished from school after his stepmother took him to visit his tree frog exhibit at the science fair. The post addressed the fact that there was much speculation about the stepmother’s guilt,...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Jun 2, 2010, 10:35 am
I hate arguing, real or otherwise. I am a consensus-builder, a peace-maker and a finder of common ground. This is not because I was scarred by a combative family as a child, or subject at any point to abusive or explosive anger; it’s really just a matter of temperament. I undoubtedly err on the si...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - May 26, 2010, 9:51 am
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” -Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier There is a basic tenet in Buddhism that the only reality is what is happening now. The past exists only in our heads, muddled by our own unavoidable perspectives and biases, and the future may or may not come to pass....
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - May 24, 2010, 8:42 am
The real issue is the phone. I am almost at the end of the contract that binds me to Verizon and to my pink Blackberry Curve. It hasn’t been a bad run; I’ve never had an issue with Verizon aside from their draconian tendency to declare a payment “late” five minutes after it’s due, and I mo...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - May 21, 2010, 10:54 am
Leroy got a better job so we moved Kevin lost a tooth, he’s started school I’ve got a brand new eight month old baby girl I sound like a housewife Hey Chel, I think I’m a housewife -”Anchorage,” Michelle Shocked My parents both worked, and they had an enviable and sane balance of hou...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - May 7, 2010, 1:29 pm
Of the two very worst things I have ever done, one of them is the way I treated my stepdaughter. I had no excuse; I was well-mothered, as were my parents and my husband. There was a veritable catalogue of loving, generous maternal goodness for me to observe and study. My mother-in-law even gave me a...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - May 6, 2010, 12:14 pm
I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure. -Eric Liddell, “Chariots of Fire” I have always wanted to write more than I wanted to do anything else (with the possible exception of reading). For a different kind of person, a saner, more confi...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 29, 2010, 9:48 am
For most of my life, tattoos have been in the category of “things other people do.” My parents find them vulgar. Growing up, my main exposure was in the context of shows like “Mannix” in which the Bad Person often sported a lightening bolt or dragon on his malevolent forearm. In mysteries, t...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 21, 2010, 10:24 am
There are many responses to a death, all of which are understandable attempts to understand and “handle” something alien and painful. We resort to cliches and saccharine, and people who were completely objectionable in life are lionized and worshiped. He or she was “the best,” best friend, b...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 16, 2010, 9:29 am
Let’s be real, here. People who grow up like I did are not often country music fans. Aside from my mother’s odd taste for the sounds of the Grand Old Opry (acquired during her years at Wellesley, no doubt) I knew no country music unless it was from one of those “Willie Nelson’...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 9, 2010, 2:42 pm
I live by rules that focus largely on compassion, and the avoidance of doing harm. Much of the time it’s fairly easy, and I can feel deeply magnanimous as I carry an insect outside, or agree to help someone when I really don’t feel like it. I am one, big, glowing Compassion Center, lighting up t...
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Ann Nichols posted an article on Forest Street Kitchen - Apr 2, 2010, 12:06 pm
During my brief tenure as a cello student at the New England Conservatory, I often earned money as a “ringer.” Various musical groups in the greater Boston area possessed of rather more ambition than talent would put works on their programs that far exceeded the capacity of their members...
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