My birthday was a whole week ago now, and because I’ve decided I’ll be 28 for five to 10 more years there was little urgency to celebrate. The only thing I really wanted to do was drive to Hope for pie, because there is a place there that serves very good pie, and because when I get an idea in my head I can be a bit of a beast.

So we hopped in the car and we drove an hour and a half to Hope and the rain was torrential and occasionally turned to hail and Nick kept asking aloud where he had gone so wrong in his life and I didn’t care, because I had my Snuggie and a mix CD full of all the delightfully crappy music I like.

We stopped at a thrift store for a break from the rain along the way and bought a new stein for our collection, and when we got to Hope there was plenty of parking at the restaurant and they had all the kinds of pie.

For the past while, food has not been exciting. There was the lull of the end of winter and early spring; sometimes you can have too many yams, and sometimes the radishes seem like they will never arrive. There was so much rain. And my appetite had left me.

Then somewhere in the middle of that lull, I unexpectedly acquired a fetus. We have dubbed it Space Dinosaur in the hope that it turns out to be an actual extraterrestrial raptor (if it can’t be a dinosaur for whatever reason, I would also be happy with a panda). The tragedy of this event has been an utter disinterest in any food that is not canned peaches, York peppermint patties, or grilled cheese sandwiches. Until very recently, I could go all day on just a few bites of fruit and a Chai latte.

What has begun to replace that disinterest is a feeling I can only describe as “hangry.”

Midway through a meal I feel stuffed, but at the same time my stomach churns furiously, insisting that I am still hungry and that I need to put in more food, even when the urge to purge becomes violent. It happens without warning; I will go all morning or afternoon long without any desire to consume anything but ginger tea and then all of a sudden a malevolent pang will instantly rearrange my priorities and moments later I will find myself desperate, shaking the vending machine for another bag of chips, or chewing out the clerk at the bagel shop for giving me the smallest possible bagel on purpose. I am hangry then.

And I was hangry in Hope. After a reasonable breakfast of waffles and blueberries, hours passed without fussing and then we got to where I wanted to go and my grilled cheese sandwich came and I ate until I could eat no longer, and yet my stomach howled for more. I hoovered a huge slice of cherry pie and two scoops of ice cream, and I could have thrown up but still the knot in my gut suggested starvation. It was a fabulous piece of pie. Well worth the trip. And I demanded that Space Dinosaur get its shit together because we love and are satisfied by pie and this was unacceptable.

So there you go. Food was gone but is now back, even if in a modified capacity. I’ll try not to bore you with the details. Nick is relieved. Just in time for the season’s first radishes and, with any luck, a summer full of very good pie.