Em told me she didn't want an 18th birthday party. No sleepover with friends and Dad making pizza, no wild rumpus.
So you don't want a cake, and have relatives come shower you with gifts? Alright, but it doesn't make turning 18 sound that grand to me.
Well, cake. She decided she does like my birthday cakes. I only make one kind, it's the Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake recipe from Joy of Cooking. There's a hundred other recipes I could try, but it was my first from-scratch recipe and it worked so well I just kind of find myself making it every time there's a birthday cake to make.
I only make one kind of frosting, too. The recipe is really simple: 2 sticks of unsalted butter; 1-1/2 pounds of cream cheese, a cup of powdered sugar, a splash of vanilla and food coloring to make it whatever color your heart desires. In this case, Em wanted orange, and I used a whole bottle of yellow and a few drops of red and this is what we got.
Actually, she got into decorating the cake some with me, that was nice.
Corinna spent some of the party on ice—parties are really hard for her actually. She wants to socialize, loves to entertain, but she pays quite a price for it in pain.
There is a photographic phenomenon I've noticed a couple years running now when I try to shoot Emily across her lit cake. The candle lights reflect, somehow, a bit above the candles, such that she ends up with candlelight in her face, or in this case her forehead and hair. I'm guessing it's a reflection off the UV filter but I haven't taken the filter off to test that theory.
I guess now that Em's 18 there are fewer and fewer things in the world I can actually protect her from. Military service, marriage, voting for Republicans or Democrats, lots of things that could mean absolute disaster, I guess I just have to hope she's been taught well enough to negotiate these choices at least as well as her old man. Better than me, actually.
I know in my own life, there have been plenty of times I've told my parents about stuff I'm either going to do or have done that elicits winces and sighs of despair. And that's the stuff I tell them, the post-filter content.
But no matter what those choices are, even though I'm sure I'll wince, sigh in despair and lose sleep over some of them, she'll always be my little honyock.
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Life is harnessed By a thread. Natures course as unpredictable as a number between 1 and 1000. A life comes through, and takes a gamble. that life is lived and and has it's consequence. A heart fulfilled then collapsed by a gale so powerful, it's crushing force had nearly ended it. It's walk with nature without last words. It's mind unread and lastly unspoken. It's true feelings left abound, that gale of natures calling unsound.
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