My daughter passed her driving test today. She got her license. Here she is driving off down our driveway – without me.

I thought about her driving off down the road alone. Then I thought about the first nurse, the one who delivered her, who plopped her onto a table and tossed her little limbs from side to side as she rubbed her – helping her breathe. Not so rough, I thought, then, but said nothing. One must breathe. Tenderly, is what I kept thinking at that nurse, the tears running down my face. Tenderly.

Off she drove today with her music and her mother’s car, her thoughts on horses and her friends – mine on the hardscrabble roads, the screeching of tires, the twisting of iron and the crushing of steel. It crushed like an accordian, they always say – crushed. The odds are against it, I know. She will be carried along our country roads, though tunnels, over bridges and into great cities. She will be carried along crowded highways into her own great life, tenderly, I hope, tenderly, tenderly.

Well, dear World Wide Web, the day has finally arrived. You may listen to my new radio program IN HOUSE now! Just click on this link to hear it. Okay, well you click on that link and you’re brought to a page that tells you all about how great the show is, and then you click on a link called “listen”. Then, alas, you must click on an arrow next to my name and then an arrow in the top left hand corner AND THEN you may listen to my show. Trust me, it’s easier than it sounds, all the clicking takes about a nanosecond. Hopefully, the radio webpage will be simplified soon.

But please give me your honest feedback. I’m editing future shows and would love to hear what you like or don’t like about the first show. Thanks!

So, I’ve been a little busy, these past 24 hours. Yesterday I had three interviews – two in which I was the interviewer for my new radio show, IN HOUSE, and one in which I was being interviewed about my book, Outtakes from a Marriage. I’ve gotten so caught up in this radio thing that I was a little confused when the other radio hosts asked me questions about my book.

“What’s that you say?” I wanted to ask, “Am I to understand that I have written some sort of …book?”

My first IN HOUSE interview of the day was with dynamic accessories design duo Richard Lambertson and John Truex who described the way they started their business in their Chelsea loft, with animal skins and patterns and orders strewn everywhere. Then I visited the home of the great film director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus) who described the way he watched the Nazis remove his parents from his childhood Bohemian home and how he ended up in his beloved country home in Connecticut.

The day before, I visited the home of bestselling (mega-selling) author Jane Green. Jane’s charming book, The Beach House, is about a Nantucket house that brings people together, and in real life, it was actually a beach house that united Jane with her partner Ian Warburg.

So when will you be able to listen to IN HOUSE? Possibly later today! We are working out a few last-minute glitches but you should be able to hear my interview with Richard LaGravanese later today. I will post a link so you can hear the whole broadcast here on my website!

In my first IN HOUSE episode, screenwriter/director Richard LaGravanese (The Fisher King, Bridges of Madison Country, Freedom Writers) discusses the way the offbeat zaniness of his home’s previous owners added to its appeal for him. “They were going through a divorce,” Richard recalls, “and they would mix up a pitcher of martinis and decide to paint a room, but would only paint parts of the room. They’d paint around the sofa….they painted the fireplace purple…”

Richard’s charming antique Connecticut home – the first he’s ever owned – is a far cry from the series of drafty apartments he inhabited as a child in Brooklyn and he discusses the important role the home workspace plays in the life of a writer.

So tune in! I’m going to send updates to my mailing list so if you haven’t added your name, just go to my home page and click on “Mailing List” and sign up to hear about future broadcasts!

I have spent the past 24 hours in a fit of frustration and agitation that has me seriously, seriously unwound. I’m not kidding, I fear for my sanity. I have been trying to edit one single solitary interview for my forthcoming NPR show, IN HOUSE. I spent 18 hours on it yesterday.

I’m not cut out for this type of work. This is the work of patient people who are meticulous and painstaking; people with sensitive ears and delicate fingers, not people who pound at keyboards with oversized digits (I have man hands – there now you know) and grind their teeth and curse and wince at the sound of their own voice.

There is steam coming out of my ears right now. It only has to be perfect – why is that so hard?

How have my friends been able to bear the preposterous sounds blasting from my flapping piehole all these years? I have the most affected, pretentious, aggravating voice… how could I not have known? Now I have to listen to it over and over and over again. I was in the WHDD studio today and Marshall Miles and Jill Goodman were kindly trying to help. At one point Marshall tried to edit this part where my voice modulated and trilled over a series of stammers.

“I’m not sure what that is, a stammer or a stutter,” Marshall said, “and I’m not sure I can fix it.”

His words about fixing my voice made me recall, with mounting panic, the speech therapy classes I was required to take as a small child. I’m speech impaired! Somehow, I forgot to mention this when Jill offered me my own radio show, so dazzled was I at my own fantastical ideas about cleaning out Terry Gross’s old desk and sending her on her way.

Must relax. It’s just a show. Just a radio show. Just my own radio show.

Gabriel is feeling better. The swelling has gone way down and he’s MUCH perkier. Here he is gazing out of his stall (still not looking terribly happy.)

Remember Lulu, who had the hip replacement last April? Well, she has totally recovered. Here’s a before and after:

Really, have you ever seen a better looking dog? She was a rescue, found in Louisiana as a pup. Perfection in a dog, our Lulu. We’re all completely besotted with her.

Here’s a photo I took over the weekend of my daughter Dev (left) and her friend Ellen riding Mark and Snoopy up a country lane:

And here are some Lilies that I photographed just in time, because two nights ago, the deer got them, and now there is a bed of stems.

Well, nobody guessed the right answer to yesterday’s stumper.
THIS is my dear little sister, Meg Seminara:

I just love her.

I went to Marblehead the other night to meet with my sister’s book club.

Here they are, the members of the …I forget the name of the book club but it’s an abbreviation that stands for something naughty. Can you believe how tan and gorgeous and sporty-looking they all are? I felt like a sickly, pale-faced consumption victim in their midst. See if you can guess which one is my sister:

Ooops, the photo’s too big and it cut the club in half. Here are the rest of the gals:

So the other night, I arrived home to find my 20 year old horse Gabriel standing in his stall on three legs. He was DRENCHED in sweat.

The leg was horribly swollen from the knee up. Gabriel has a setup where he can come and go from his stall as he pleases and he must have hobbled in from his field to his stall on the three legs. The vet and I thought he had fractured the leg.

The poor horse was in so much pain that he was sweating and trembling and when his leg was being examined and x-rayed by the vet, I thought he was going to collapse. Thankfully it was not fractured but was badly sprained. He had a few scrapes and we think he fell, perhaps while running down the hill in his field. I spent most of the night in the barn. He’s much improved now.

This is a photo of Gabriel a few days before this happened. He’s a big boy, as you can see, standing at 17.2 hands.

He’s one of those honest, kind-hearted horses who are worth their weight in gold.

Denis has been nominated for an Emmy award for his outstanding work as a supporting actor in HBO’s film, RECOUNT!

In addition to the RECOUNT nomination, RESCUE ME received two nominations- one for actor Charles Durning and one for the show’s great Director of Photography Tom Houghton. So exciting.

Hmmmm. What to wear?

Last night a beautiful moon floated above our field. It was one of those immense and luminous moons that make you draw in your breath and cry out, “look at the moon,” even if you’re just alone with your dogs, as I was. But when I took a photograph, it was just a regular moon.

I had forgotten that you can’t photograph the moon when it’s so big in the early evening, because its size is an illusion. It’s called “Moon Illusion.”

It’s not real, but we all see it. Everything is not what it seems, it seems. It’s beautiful, this moon illusion. It’s strange. For some reason, it makes me a little sad. Not sure why.