Five-minute fix

A solution.

When in the clutches of a chocolate craving, I demand just two things from my fix:

• It must be fast.
• It must satiate.

My first line of defense against this addiction, which grows stronger with the accumulation of gray, cold days, are chocolate chips: a heaping cup added to whatever muffin batter I'm making, a generous scoop at the bottom of a cup of steaming milk, and (when desperate) morsels by the mouthful.

Second in my arsenal is Nutella on an English muffin, a cup of strong tea on the side. I like my muffins crispy at the edges, butter pooling in the cracks and crevices and topped with a slather of the chocolate-hazelnut spread. After making and munching two of them in five minutes, I've found the fortitude to deal with the dregs of a busy weekend.

A road trip

A Haitian woman carries rice rations. Courtesy of U.S. Air Force.

In my mind's eye is a road running through Port-au-Prince that's freshly graded, smooth with concrete and busy with people, scooters, bikes and cars. It's 1995. Bill Clinton is in office, Jean Bertrand Aristide is taking back his presidency after a military coup, and I am a young reporter who convinced editor and Air Force to send me to Haiti to write about that road.

The four-lane highway replaced a pot-holed, dirt road and became a symbol of the country's path to stability. It was built by combat engineers from Las Vegas, where I was a reporter for the Sun. When I climbed on board the C-130 with a couple of blank reporter's notebooks, my Pentax K1000 and a Trash-80, I had one assignment: Cover the road.

For three days, I snapped, scribbled, showered and slept with the 820th Red Horse in their tent city. Every evening, my military escort drove me through twisty, dirt roads to a hotel where the foreign correspondents hung out so I could use the phone lines to file my stories. Afterward, we'd sit in the hotel bar, drink a beer and I'd catch glimpses of journalism literati like CNN's Christiane Amanpour. Aristide was headed home, Clinton was arriving, the buzz and bustle of that city with its rare, paved road was intoxicating.

I was in heaven.

In the years that followed, I'd catch a bit about Haiti in the news and the road would appear in front of me. Then three weeks ago the city was destroyed in a massive earthquake, and I stared at the pictures and maps trying to affix where the highway was, where the hotel was, where the tent city was.

I didn't know.

So in my mind the ground shuddered and the road cracked, exposing dirt once again, dirt that absorbed the people's tears and blood.

Links worth visiting:

The New York Times has an interactive satellite map, showing the city, before and after the January 12th earthquake.

Haitian women are holding up their sky, proving to be reliable and fair at delivering rice rations to 10,000 people every day, according to the World Food Program.

Boston.com's The Big Picture has gathered an amazing and disturbing set of photos of Port-au-Prince, three weeks later.

A group of authors, photographers, painters, quilters and toymakers are holding an online auction, To Haiti, with love.

Aubade

February shadows on the Huffaker Hills' Western Loop Trail, 1.4 miles.

noun
oh-bahd

1. A song or poem greeting the dawn.

2. A composition suggestive of morning.

*

After a rough night, sleep was a shawl that I struggled to shrug off, making the morning discordant and confused. I yelled goodbye to the three older kids from the bedroom where I was discovering that my neglect of the laundry would force me wear mismatched socks and my husband's underwear.

Sigh.

Usually, the morning is synchronized, with my youngest son and I heading out the door for our morning walk at the same time the older kids leave for school. But today my two-year-old stood, jacket and boots on, waiting as I fished for a pair of jeans from the stuffed laundry hamper. I knew I should stay home and tackle the mountain of clothes, but instead we grabbed backpack and camera and headed for Huffaker Hills. (Here's a PDF of a Truckee Meadows trail guide, which includes this hike and others.)

The morning walk -- sometimes a 3o-minute loop around the Sparks Marina, other times an hour or more on a city trail -- sets the mood and melody of the day. It is my aubade. I need this conversation with myself, occasionally interrupted by the chirps and chatters from the little boy on my back. I guess walking is my physical form of writing, if that makes any sense.

Given the day's start, today's walk was critical, so I sought out the gray and empty desert. I needed the vast expanse of sky, the city far off on my horizon, the trail's rocks and mud demanding my concentration. We were enveloped in silence. We heard not a bird, saw not a soul, and although the rumble of a semi-truck and the whine of an airplane pressed against us, it didn't shatter this peace. I wrapped it around my shoulders and felt renewed.