Today, pots of lipstick-red geraniums are marching up my front steps like Las Vegas showgirls. Today, luxurious basil plants with pesto in their veins are thriving on my porch. Today, five turquoise bluebird eggs more precious than priceless Fabergé trinkets are cradled in my backyard nesting box. It’s the here and precious Now. Tomorrow, the world will impinge again with its Draconian laws against women, its death-cult cruelty to trans kids, its large foot pressing on the neck of the vulnerable. But today, store up beauty like honey in the hive for the fight to come. 

I loved the book and movie version of Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard, and I just discovered a  series of books that reminds me of his brand of humor. The Bouncer, by David Gordon, revolves around the character of Joe Brody, a Special Forces vet with PTSD who’s a bouncer at a strip club owned by his childhood friend Gio, the sensitive head of a Mafia crime family. It’s hard to explain how a series with so much mayhem and blood can also be so funny, but the humor is sly and sometimes laugh-out-loud. Unfortunately, I read all four books in the series over a weekend and will have to wait impatiently for the next installment.

If you live in the Charleston area, you’ll have the opportunity to go to a unique theater event on May 6 and 7. ODE to the SEA, a tribute to both the sea and Pablo Neruda’s poetry will take place outdoors on the stage of the Gun Mount at The Battery Gadsden Cultural Center on Sullivan’s Island. The two plays I’ve seen there recently (Constellations and Into the Woods) have been extra special thanks to this magical island setting with the moon often visible through the trees. Tickets are available online here.

If you’re a regular reader of my newsletter, you know I have a girl crush on Alison Roman. I’m a pitiful cook but she inspires me to try, and this week I set my computer up on the kitchen island and watched her make Tuna Salad while I followed the video. I usually just open a can of tuna, throw in some mayo and dried dill and call it dinner, but Roman takes this brown-bag, pedestrian lunch to a new level. After I finished, I had scraps of celery and tuna stuck in the keys of the computer, olive oil on the floor where it dripped when I tried to drain the Genova tuna, and a nagging feeling I’d forgotten something. (Midway through I had to run to the grocery for capers.) But I loved the result, which I mainly credit to soaking the red onion in lemon juice and zest. Let me know what you think if you try it.

I’m not gullible when it comes to miracle skin-care products, and there are only a few I swear by (Paula’s Choice Exfoliating Liquid and Magic Finish makeup), but I’m in love with Osea Body Butter. Not that it will turn back time on my aging, sun-scorched skin, but that it’s a silky, sea-scented love letter to my time-ravaged body. I don’t want to Botox the miles of bad road from my face, but sometimes a product is just about saying thank-you to your mortal body for carrying you around and putting up with cigarettes, late nights, hangovers, bad lovers, bad break-ups, break-outs and junk food for all these years. Maybe that’s self-indulgent in this falling-down world in which there's so much to feel guilty about, but I often think about a line from “Under One Small Star” by Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska: “Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.” Forgive.