I was about to roll out a pie crust the other day when I stared down at a half dollar size hole in the middle of my pastry cloth. “Time to get a new one,” I begrudgingly thought. Then I realized that after 45 years, the pastry cloth had earned its retirement.

Shortly after, I was visiting friends in a large city and stopped in an upscale kitchen equipment store that fills two floors of a gracious old home. After checking various locations for pastry cloths, the young clerk informed me that, “We don’t have those things.”

The next week my husband was at our local Fleet Farm picking up 50 pound sacks of animal feed. He also brought home a pastry cloth that he readily found in their kitchen aisle.

With the holidays approaching, my new $2.99 pastry cloth will begin work soon. I will enjoy using it as I have heeded a piece of pie making advice from Julia Child. In one of her mid-century TV shows, she declared that many people don’t want to buy a big bucket of lard just to make a few pie crusts. “You can produce a decent pie crust,” she intoned, “by using a pie crust mix and adding two tablespoons of butter.” Ever since, I have produced good pie crusts with a 69¢ box of Jiffy Mix and two tablespoons of butter. And I don’t have stockpiles of lard around for which I have no other use. I am not into deep frying turkeys.

Of course, I could buy the lard and put the remains of the bucket in the Tooley Cafe. The raccoons would love me.

One of my all time favorite movies is “The Brave Little Toaster” (1987). I generally shy away from animated feature films, but this particular toaster won my heart. The story line is simplicity itself: Five appliances find themselves abandoned in their family’s summer cabin. Led by the courageous toaster, they set out on a difficult journey to find their boy in the big city.

I have owned two very admirable toasters in my lifetime. The first was a wedding gift from my brother-in-law. It produced perfect toast for twenty-eight years.

When it finally sprang its last piece, I sadly went out to replace it. The new toaster burnt the top of the bread and left the bottom “raw”. After two months, it refused to toast at all. This was not a noble, faithful appliance. And I was not about to replace it with another of the same ilk.

I bought our next toaster at an antique store. It’s a streamlined, chrome beauty. After seventeen years with us, it’s still making lovely toast. Heaven only knows how much toast it made for its first family. Sometimes its mechanical timer stops ticking for a few mornings, but it always magically heals itself.

A few years ago, we were in a small Chicago antique store. My husband spotted a vintage toaster, still in its original box. “We should buy it,” he urged. He was right: it would have been the prudent thing to do. But I’m a very loyal person. I couldn’t hurt our brave little toaster’s feelings while it’s still popping up beautiful toast.

I was not a supermom. My generation of women did not have to do it all. My daughter’s generation didn’t get so lucky… they have to do it all and then a little bit more.

The responsibilities of a career, family, home and grad school are all in a day’s work for these moms. Their husbands’ schedules are alarmingly similar.

When my children were born, I happily stayed at home, never thinking I wasn’t doing a full time job. I baked cookies every Tuesday, did art projects, took the kids to the neighborhood library, cooked interesting dinners each night and volunteered for causes I believed in. When my youngest went off to preschool, I went with him as the part-time art teacher at his school. He stayed three years; I stayed nineteen.

A generation had passed, and I started a new job, Children’s Programmer (a.k.a. storyteller) for a suburban library. There I had the pleasure of meeting the most amazing supermom. She was the young head of the Physics Department at the local high school. A fierce proponent of women in the sciences, she encouraged scores of girls to take the advanced science courses. She was also the faculty advisory for the school prom.

Nevertheless, for years she faithfully brought her three young sons to Wednesday night 6:30 story hour and joined in with gusto. One evening after the program, she cheerfully told me she was going to head home and make brownies for her oldest son’s kindergarten class. This is also the woman who put on a sensational “Ms. Wizard” science show for our summer library patio nights.

My daughter’s generation superbly juggles multiple jobs… with one exception. They don’t do sleep well, never having time to practice.

I raise my glass to all of you; you’re amazing! Now, meet a friend after work for “tea time” one of these days. And the tea doesn’t have to be tea.

Here’s a surefire way to keep the witches at bay. Paint your front door blue. Anyone who spends time in the Southwest notes the prevalence of blue doors in that region. I assume the populace is brujas free.

While I regard superstition as a sorry substitute for reason, I do enjoy tracing the threads of ancient superstitions as they surreptitiously weave their way into our (hopefully) rational lives.

I have a blue bottle tree in our yard. My reason for creating it is purely aesthetic… I love cobalt blue glass and can’t bear to toss those lovely wine bottles in the recycle bin. The bottle tree inspired me to research the origins of that custom which I believed had originated in the American South. I was only off by several thousand years and miles.

The imaginary thread on my bottle tree goes back as far as 1600BC when hollow glass bottles began appearing in Egypt. Sometime after that, rumors began circulating that night spirits could be lured and trapped in glass bottles where the morning light would destroy them. The bottle as trap idea traveled through sub-Saharan Africa up into eastern Europe and eventually was brought to the Americas by African slaves.

Europeans contributed glass “witch balls” to capture witches and “gazing balls” to repel them.

In folklore from all over our little blue planet, blue is considered the best color to do in ghosts, witches, spirits and “haints”. So drink up your Riesling and hang up those bottles. The witching hour is near.

A gallery of blue follows to protect you from any unruly spirits this Hallows Eve.

Blue Amulets Guard Against the Evil Eye in Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria

Dare I use the word… cozy? (Cosy, if you’re British) It’s such an old fashioned word and the antithesis of the age we live in. Today’s culture exalts super-sized everything, violence ridden movies and video games, tattoos and piercings and the demise of courtesy.

Cozy, on the other hand, connotes all things warm, small, soothing and sheltering.

Cozy food, a.k.a. comfort food, oozes warmth. If I were to run “The Cozy Cafe”, tomato and pea soups, macaroni and cheese, grilled cheese, waffles, cocoa, tea, chocolate chip cookies and butterscotch sundaes would be mainstays of my menu.

The English have cornered the market in cozy housing. They invented the Cotswold Cottage: petite, quaint and ensconced with an English country garden. Requisite cats, the coziest of creatures, dwell inside.

We also can thank the British for “cozies”, a book genre. Despite the fact that a murder invariably occurs, lots of tea, English villages, vicars and flowers abound.

Cozy clothes are more of an American thing. Maybe it started with casual Fridays. Or maybe we never got over the frontier. Flannel shirts, well-worn jeans, fur lined moccasins and granny nightgowns come to mind.

If you’re envisioning me cocooned in sweats and living in a Mary Engelbreit decorated cottage, you would be wrong. But an occasional foray into the world of cozy can cheer up any bleak day.

What’s your cozy?