I can't help it. I'm worried about my daughter, Julie.
The way she works so hard and comes home exhausted every night, it doesn't seem like she has any fun in her life, no joie de vivre! No man, either. Not that men are any guarantee of happiness. (As anyone who's met Frank, my husband, knows, ha, ha.) But it would give me tremendous peace of mind if I could leave God's green Earth assured that my little girl had someone who made her laugh and took care of her. Someone who loves her as much as I do.

Because I don't have much time.

Not that I'm sick. Actually, I feel terrific. Old, yes, but I'm seventy five for heaven's sake and I've already survived a bout of breast cancer. I won't be a Jack LaLane pulling a boat at ninety that's for sure, even if I do walk three miles a day and always take the stairs.

Just that I've been dizzy lately and yesterday when I took down the cookbook to look up a recipe for Indian pudding – a recipe I used to know by heart – the words turned fuzzy. I had to sit at the kitchen table staring at the pages in order to make sense of them. Yet, no matter how I squinted with or without my glasses, the blurring wouldn't stop.

I called out to Frank, "I think I've been hit!" And Frank, in the living room as always, told me to lie down and take it easy, that we didn't need dessert tonight.

That's when I knew my time was near. If I can't read, if I can't make a simple Indian pudding, then I don't see the point in living much more, really. Because aside from a good book and, perhaps, a fresh morning in a dew-covered garden, few things in life give me as much pleasure as the magic of making a truly spectacular dessert.

I'm a big believer in dessert. And let me tell you, if there were more dessert believers like me, this whole country would be a much nicer place. Certainly better than the nation of jittery, testy insomniacs we've become thanks to those damned Starbucks on every corner.

I swear this national caffeine addiction is what's making everyone so angry these day. Have you noticed? We're angry about the war, about debt, about politics, work, Global Warming, gas prices, the economy, our neighbors. But mostly, it seems to me, people are angry about not being more successful.
They're so busy getting ahead and not falling behind that they've forgotten the simple, inexpensive pleasures. Like eating fresh blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream outside on the picnic bench after a day of swimming and picking berries. Or gathering with friends in front of the fire on a snowy evening with hot buttery bread pudding and baked apples while outside a winter wind howls.

That's what dessert means to me – a dollop of sweet love in an otherwise cold world.

When the kids were growing and Frank was still in construction, I made sure all our meals ended with dessert. Frank deserved it. Sour cream brownies, banana pie made with vanilla wafers, lemon poppy seed pound cake, strawberry shortcake, almond-scented tapioca, pecan blondies (oh…my…God those are good), butter brickle ice cream with butterscotch, angel food cake with rhubarb compote, gingerbread with hard sauce and, on Saturday nights, peppermint ice cream sundaes topped with homemade hot fudge.
Homemade hot fudge is a snap to make on the stove with dark chocolate broken into heavy cream and corn syrup. It's a shame so many people buy that glop from the store. I tried to teach Julie how, but she'd have nothing of it. Julie hates to cook - because of me.

She's never said so to my face, naturally, but I know. I know she thinks I've been trapped in the kitchen, forced to serve her father the meat-and-three dinners he liked to have waiting for him as soon as he walked through the door. I can see that my life frightens her.

The thing is, she doesn't remember being a girl and helping me at the wooden board rolling out her little ball of pastry while I made pie. And how, all by herself, she delighted in folding her dough around a spoonful of raspberry jam. She forgets how she used to clap when it came out of the oven, her tiny pie, brown and sparkling with cinnamon sugar as it cooled next to my own.
I'd give anything to see her so happy again, especially since she's so alone these days and so wrapped up in her work she's forgotten to breathe, to live, to love.

Sometimes I think it's my fault for standing in the way of the man who truly loved her. But what was a mother to do? She was seventeen, a baby, and he was twenty one, a man. I saw the lascivious way he looked at her. I heard the scuttlebutt from my son. If I hadn't taken that young man aside and warned him in no uncertain terms to stay away, there's no telling what trouble she might have gotten herself into.

But now that I'm older and wiser and have learned youthful indiscretions heal quickly while broken hearts do not, I have to admit I might have been wrong. I know for certain Julie's never felt that way about another man since - though she pretends to despise him. And I just bet he isn't over her either -  though he acts as if he is.

The good news is that right when I decided it was too late for an old lady to correct her mistake, I was offered a second chance to bring them together in, of all places, a dessert class.

You never know, it just might work. Like the garlic mustard in my garden and the roses on my fence, love has a funny way of blooming after years of being buried. If it's true love, then it will abide. If it was a fleeting crush, then it will turn to dust.

Either way, the truth will out - at last.

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