Maida Heatter – doyenne of cakes and cookies – died last week at the age of 102. So I baked a cake in her honor. I just had to.

In 1972, I cut a recipe out of the New York Times Magazine for Chocolate Mousse Torte, which looked like the most delicious thing in the world. Which it is.

Although it’s an impressive concoction, it’s not complicated. You make a mousse with semi-sweet chocolate, bake half of it, let that cool and then pile the rest of the mousse inside. Chill and pile a thick layer of whipped cream on top. Rich, but not too sweet. Honest.

Planned Parenthood is benefiting from bake sales to protect women’s reproductive healthcare. A wine bar in Somerville is offering $12 glasses of rose to underwrite abortions in Alabama, where the uterus is apparently now in the public domain.

Am I supposed to celebrate or pull out my hair? The answer is … yes.

It’s crazy that we’re resorting to nickel-and-dime (now $5-and-$10) schemes to insure a basic right. It smacks of the outrage I feel about teachers paying for school supplies out of their own pockets.

Face-to-face conversation is a basic human need. It’s how we learn to speak and think — how we form and maintain relationships. When practiced by consenting adults with courtesy and curiosity, it is one of life’s great pleasures. Conversation has been practiced and refined for centuries: from salon, to coffee house, to cocktail party, to vintage talk shows — before it became acceptable to broadcast a bunch of people simultaneously talking at each other, communicating nothing.

Pundits have proclaimed the art of conversation dead since the beginning of human speech, but it’s hard to banter, gab or chew the fat in the age of the Orange One.

Recently, I read a story about a young woman in rural Nepal who burned to death because she was having her period.

Partabi Bogati was following the ancient Hindu practice of chhaupadi (from a word that means “impurity”), which sees menstruating women as bearers of disease, disaster and bad luck; they are barred from handling food, using public water sources, or sleeping under the same roof as their families. Bogati was spending the night in one of the small mud or wooden huts, some no bigger than a closet or a foxhole. She died trying to stay warm.

I can’t stop looking at the New York Times special feature, “Redefining Representation: The Women of the 116th Congress.”

This gallery of 130 — of the 131 — female senators and representatives is a celebration of racial, ethnic, religious and geographical diversity. It’s full of firsts: first Native American women (plural!), first Muslim women (plural!), first bi-sexual atheist, first black congresswomen from Massachusetts and Connecticut.

This is what American women look like.

This is also what American women dress like. Not when you’re making a midnight run for diapers or going to a wedding. More like when you’re off to a birthday dinner at a tablecloth restaurant, when you glance in the mirror on the way out the door and smile.

I am outside and the app on my phone tells me it’s only 20 degrees. I haven’t had any coffee yet and I forgot one of my gloves, or maybe it’s lost; I lose a lot of gloves.

The commuters sprint by, hoping to make it to the streetcar before it pulls away, lest they be stuck like me, standing with my shoulders hiked up to my ears, exhaling steam, and shivering.

I am outside in the cold most winter mornings, un-caffeinated and losing the feeling in my toes, because I have a dog.

Reading The New Yorkeris a weekly pleasure – not just the cartoons, though they are reliably wonderful. A few weeks ago, (12/17/18) I came across an article about artificial facial recognition, “Here’s Looking at You” by staff writer David Owens. It begins in an Irish cow barn where cameras record the actions of Bossy and Bessie in the service of increasing milk production. This technology may someday enable physicians to make diagnoses before symptoms become apparent; police departments are already using it and other government agencies and it has – as its inventors warn — potentially Orwellian applications.

Watching the TV coverage of the slow-rolling horror in Pittsburgh, I thought:

I’m glad my mother is not alive to see this.

My mother was 92 when she died, a year ago. She was 15 when the Nazis marched into Paris. Her brother was turned in by a neighbor and died in Auschwitz and she barely escaped a transport to the same concentration camp.

The week before the vote, I said good morning to my neighbor, who answered, “He’s not going to be confirmed is he?

I said, “Yes, he is.”

She looked horrified.

I was equally horrified, but I didn’t doubt the outcome. The old bulls (as Dan Rather called the old white men who defend power and money) are in control, as they have been since the beginning of recorded time. They were not going to let one of their own go down. So after a stormy but brief pause, Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in to sit on the highest court in the land, now a seesaw, heavily weighted to the right.

The sidewalk in my Brookline neighborhood is a free-for-all – literally. The students are coming and more to the point, the students are going and leaving behind mountains of stuff: cat-shredded couches, chairs missing legs or seats, and a million giant garbage bags stuffed with the flotsam of student life: clothes, pillows, half empty jars of spices, posters, and … well, better not to speculate about the rest.

 September 1 is called “Allston Christmas” in honor of this smelly phenomenon, but that’s a misnomer and a gross understatement; it happens all over greater Boston and goes on for a solid two weeks.