I like entertaining. I like planning meals and inviting guests, baking dessert, sharing a new recipe, and going with the season. I like dressing up, if only just a bit and talking with guests in the living room. I like being the hostess and slipping away to the kitchen to move the supper along. But do you know the best feeling of all? It's peculiar and I think it only favours the introverts among us... it's when there's a reason – just before the meal, or maybe after when the kitchen is full of the clamour of dishes – to slip outside into the summer evening air even if only to put something in the garbage, where there is no one... You leave the noisy house and close the door and it is like a brief palate cleanser for the brain, from noise to nature, from performance to uninhibited calm. Notice the sound of a cricket, or neighbourhood kids in a game that doesn't concern you, or the blue of the sky, or the stripes on the moth's wings as it rests against the stucco.