Plate, with three pears

I don't like being controlled but somehow I want it, to be told what to do but to be involved in the telling. Men know what I mean and women know too, women know better than men and usually know before men for some reason.

You know how you just like some people, instantly? The way they look, walk, talk, think? And that when this happens, the other person is often responding just the same way to you. That's the way I'd like to look at the rest of my life, like it's a relationship with the world that's going to get deeper and deeper but not be as complicated as it has been in the past, and that my reponses to it be far more instinctual.

When Grace, 5, saw a cloud in the sky above Portland, Oregon the other day, she said the cloud, "looked like a man holding a spoon with a lamb on it." I asked her if I could write what she'd said down on a piece of paper and she said, "sure."

The plate pictured was made by Lea Ann. I took the picture  of it and the pears first thing this morning.