Dinner with my Gal Pals

Last week, I rushed down the mountain — after dropping more than $100 at my new favorite yarn shop, The Woolery (nhwoolery.com ) — from my Yankee home in New Hampshire to my Boston home. I was almost late for an 8 o’clock reservation at Bistro du Midi (bistrodumidi.com). I was meeting my gal pals there after they’d toured the Institute of Contemporary Art (icaboston.org). We had a terrific night. They put us in a private room (did they know we’d be having such an inappropriate and loud conversation? or did the privacy encourage it?) and we covered a gamut of topics, from what monkfish really tastes like (I say a combination of cod and lobster) to the merits of fried food, particularly the heavenly fried artichokes with garlic aioli on the Bistro’s menu. We meandered into hair removal … Buddhism … what to cook for Passover dinner … and corning one’s own beef. Sipping a glass of Pinot Noir and savoring my roasted fish in light broth with chickpeas and crumbled chorizo sausage, I noticed a tree up against the window and the Boston Garden across the street. It’s hard not to notice the Garden from the Bistro’s dining-room windows, but the tree was lightly tapping the window for me to notice it. It had a gift for me — buds. My first sign of real spring.

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