...when she needed to look up her recipe for baked rice and found that her site had expired, she tried hard not to extend the metaphor, boiled the damn rice, and simply wrote "renew MM" on her to-do list.

And there it stayed.

So demurely, in fact, that the short, sweet task found itself lost in the shadows of whinier, more imperious tasks. Even long after they'd been transformed into smug, inky blobs of completion.

Not sure why.

Then a friend (the real heaven-sent kind that provokes ugly laughing and ugly crying) sent a terse text, ticked off that she couldn't replenish her homemade granola stash because of my negligence. And when I fed her half-baked excuses, she fed me a fully-baked sentiment that meant more than she will ever know.

And just like that, what was stuck became unstuck.

And what I thought had indeed expired was still there, no worse for the wear.