I can't do enough yoga to ease my troubled mind.

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For dinner I made a quick sauce to go with our steak sandwiches, using cherry tomatoes, scallions, garlic, parsley, my mother's chilies, extra-virgin olive oil, tabasco sauce, white wine vinegar, and a little salt.

I would have used coriander instead of parsley (and consequently lime juice rather than white wine vinegar), but there hasn't been a delivery to the local supermarket in weeks, a situation that compels my brain, wired to detect portents of the upcoming apocalypse (hello Baptist upbringing), to wonder how soon food will run out when our industrial agricultural systems finally fail us. (And when I catch myself in catastrophist mode, I slap myself and drink a glass of water.)

Opening the box containing my mother’s chilies, I get pangs: dozens and dozens of bird’s eye chilies, as red and glossy as they were on the day they were plucked by my mother's hand in her garden and stowed in this container, to fly from San Diego to Ireland shortly after my father's funeral. Imagine: they were growing at the time my father died. How long do frozen chilies last anyway? I can't bear to throw them out. When I finally use the last one, will I finish grieving? Of course this is a stupid question.

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