My easiest weeknight dinner, a nostalgia-busting history book, and a chic pill box

Plus a stunning fact about magnolias and an update on my dahlias

One afternoon, the August I was eight, my father and I found ourselves in the kitchen, the lights off to keep cool. I was teary over not being invited to a birthday party. Perhaps thinking to offer comfort and some needed perspective, my father told me, as he spread peanut butter on each slice of bread and then added the glossy, jewel-toned raspberry jam, that the sun was a star and would one day explode and incinerate the earth, erasing all traces of human existence. So don't worry about that party. He went back to work. I lay in the hammock and looked up at the washed-out blue sky, catatonic with grief.

We'd been studying Greek sculpture in art class; even though I hadn't yet stood in the cool air of the Greek and Roman wing of the Metropolitan Museum full of sculptures, both soft and hard at once, we'd been drawing David from photos. At the time, this was the oldest object I could think of, gone in a blinding flash.

My mother had a teaching job at Bennington College that summer and m…