I confess, I dread the sound of my phone ringing. My mother, bless her heart (and my diminishing patience), seems to possess an almost supernatural ability to intuit the exact micro-moment I’ve finally settled into a quiet corner with a cup of tea, perhaps even dared to open a book. It's not the calls themselves, not *really*, but the relentless, almost surgical precision with which they slice through my few precious minutes of undisturbed existence. (One might call it a rather efficient method of psychological torture, if one were prone to hyperbole, which I am not, usually.) And then I answer, because of course I do, and another small piece of my rapidly aging, perimenopausal soul just… evaporates. It’s quite astonishing, actually, the speed of cellular decay these days.