It's not quite dirty talk, but...

yesterday we had breakfast in bed.

"You know what's better than midnight pie?" I asked Dan as we readied for bed on Saturday night. "Breakfast pie."

Despite having built the night around grocery shopping for the ingredients and making a raspberry pie together, we couldn't keep ourselves awake late enough to let it cool and have a slice. Badass as the Golden Girls we, apparently, are not.

So yesterday's rainy Sunday morning was spent eating pie and Breyers French Vanilla in bed, under the covers. We ate and talked and kept warm together and then we put our pie plates down, rolled over and started...reading. (Yeah, we read.) (We did, actually.) Pie and a couple of hours in bed with our books. A better Sunday morning, I couldn't imagine.

We've not had a weekend at home together since August and were dying for a little down/no family/no friends/no agenda time. We got it this weekend and ran with it.

My interest in pie-making was piqued by a book I'm reading (pie connoisseur Joyce Maynard's Labor Day) as well as my aunt's recounting of its therapeutic and meditative properties. I'm the type of person who needs to drink while cooking or baking (or meditating) to avoid getting overwhelmed, so Dan drank with me, we put on Frank Sinatra, and our little Saturday night pie-making date was a success.

We learned Sunday morning that the pie was an even sweeter success.

We bookended the day with another serving after dinner. This time we ate it on the floor of our darkened living room, by the light of a slide projector. Last week my dad sent me home with boxes and boxes of old slides so that, as the family documentarian, I could try to transfer them to my hard drive. I wasn't planning on getting to them for months but Dan surprised me with a borrowed projector. He took down some framed photos from the wall in order to have an empty space onto which he projected these dusty treasures. We moved from the floor to the couch, shifted from pie to a bottle of red, and had our own movie night in our dim living room watching slide after slide, pictures I had never before seen, of my family's life in the 70s and 80s. (I believe the most recent pictures were from 1981, assuming the baby I saw in a couple of the shots was indeed me and not one of my sisters, which only mom could ever say.) The slides were incredible.

I saw rare pictures from my mom and dad's elopement at The Cloisters in Northern Manhattan; pictures of the camper (to finally see the camper!)that they took on their famed cross-continent honeymoon; my dad fishing on some river's edge; my mom smiling in front of a gorgeous mountain view in Banff. Was my mom, that young kid with the long braids hanging over her shoulders ("They're a couple of smelly hippies, that's what they are," I joked to Dan), pregnant then? The trip ended when my mom's nausea got so bad that a camper was no longer an ideal environment. (Later, on my own cross-country honeymoon,---a trip inspired, no doubt, from a lifetime of hearing about my parents' months of travel---I had to rush us home too, due to a wicked and rapidly spreading case of poison ivy; another ailment not ideal for a road trip.)

I saw pictures of them when they became parents (mercifully, not the exact moment) and the joy on their faces as they ran through beach surf, taking pictures of each other and of their firstborn, my sister Tara who is 37 now. I've never thought about that time when it was just my parents and Tara because Becky, her Irish twin, came only 10 months later and there are few pictures of one without the other. There were pictures of Becky (I think it was she) in an incubator, which confused me as I thought Tara was the only one who had spent time in an incubator. Tara was born prematurely and was kept in the hospital for an entire month during which my mom, who still gets upset talking about it, was forbidden from holding her baby as a matter of hospital policy. Fortunately, my dad worked then at the Newport Hospital where Tara was born (and later gave birth to her own child), and was able to play the doctor card and hold her, giving their child the skin-to-skin contact that a newborn so requires.

There were shots of my dad in bell bottoms held up by a peace sign belt buckle and then later ones of him in the army after getting drafted; pictures of my mom's grandfather, a prominent Rhode Island lawyer and judge whom my father treated in his last days before he lost his life to cancer. (Family folklore tells that my father's treatment for my great-grandfather, though unconventional at the time---if not cutting edge at least in the western world---involved medicinal plants. As I said, smelly hippies.)

I looked at these pictures and saw the faces of people---my twenty-something mom and dad, my forty-something grandparents, my aunts as teenagers, my sisters as toddlers---whom I have heard stories about for years.

I looked at pictures of my mom and saw my own face; something I had never noticed before (despite her telling me this for years), and it gave me an odd sense of pride that caught me off guard.

Dan was as interested as I was to see pictures from all those years ago of the cast of characters he has come to know. I thanked him for giving me such a gift of these pictures up on our wall. I don't know when I would have gotten to them.

The night wasn't the stuff of dinner and dancing or sexy music. Instead, it was pie and pictures on a couch in the dark. The Soundtrack? The soft humming and satisfying click and switch of a slide projector. That, and good conversation. (Also, a little Jamie Cullum.)

It's been a long time since I've had this feeling on a Monday morning; this bittersweet nostalgia for something that happened only hours ago; the realization that I've just lived a couple days which I'll always remember as a couple of the best. When times are tough, I'll look back at this weekend for hope and nourishment.

This is what is on my mind as I sit down to start my week with a plan to write about things which are supposed to be other than this. So often I find myself recounting fights with Dan in my journals or worrying about the elements of our lives that need improvement. Writing about these things---my great delight and painful charge---tends to magnify things more than my already overactive mind does. It can change my mood or, worse, my perspective if I'm not careful.

I need to remember to magnify the sweet, harmonious moment, too. I guess that's why I'm telling this schlocky tale. My kids won't get to see the pictures from this past weekend on the walls of their future homes, but I'll be sure to tell 'em about it.

Well, there is this one...