Is everyone aware that Martha Stewart Living is closing their online and paper catalog, The Catalog for Living.

Am I the only who cares?

Where am I going to buy my pom poms to make those cute little insects she featured one Spring? And who else sells bakery twine for the price of a good pair of shoes? The linens, the dinnerware, the tableware with the jaunty red plastic handles that I purchased at great expense, that said they were dishwasher safe, only to have little pieces of red plastic littering my silverware drawer and family getting their fingers cut by jagged edges that were cracking and dropping off - where else am I going to get that?

I'm sure there are many of us that will miss the opportunity to spend $129 to buy a roasting pan, twine, and a baster, all things that I know I have somewhere in this kitchen, but gee, Martha packages up all so nicely, and surely it's worth spending over $100 for it....

Martha, I've been thinking of you. You only have, what, 2 months left till you get out? Christmas came and went without you showing us how to make our own snow globes and velvet scarves. We nearing up on Valentine's Day and there's no special on TV about antique letterpresses and  pink lustreware tea sets.

I did see a horrible show on The Food Channel where this half-wit tried to show us how to buy packaged fondant icing and use it to cover a store bought cake. A store bought cake! With packaged fondant icing! I wanted to cry, me, who has spent every Easter for ten years trying to make cut out cookies with that gorgeous, flat vividly colored pink and white icing with polka dots.  Mine are lumpy and end up beige as the pink and white icing flow into each other. It's okay, I understand my limitations, but I will always have the Martha standard to measure myself against.

Martha led us to believe that if we knew how to do something, we would be able to do it. She was the ultimate autodidact, and she gave us the faith in ourselves that we too could make a 7 layer ice cream bombe, recane a chair, raise majestic chickens, wax our walls to give it a Park Avenue sheen, collect transferware in every color,  make chicken paillaird, meringues, and prune our own apple trees which we grafted from root stock flown in from Belgium.

And like Ralph Lauren, Martha was all about lifestyle.  Martha may have  four homes, but notice that they  were in the northeast. Martha may fly to Aspen to ski and Mexico to sun, but on TV, she puttered around Westport, Bedford, Maine, and the Hamptons. Martha made us lust after family heirlooms that didn't come from Sears, paint colors that weren't on a rack at True Value, and baked goods that didn't come from a warehouse store wrapped in cling wrap on a giant cardboard base. Martha didn't make us want to fly to Morocco; she made us want to learn how to make our own couscous, grind our own spices, and weave our own draperies for our tent. Despite our inability to make a  good box mix, we believed that we too could learn how to make puff pastry, and spend a weekend rolling and turning that wad of dough 100 times in order to make those flaky layers.

Martha didn't hawk dozens of long stemmed roses for Valentines Day; Martha showed  us  the perfect pendulous orchid quivering with rarity and dropping an elegant petal on her Abusson rug. Martha made us believe that if we built the greenhouse, raised the orchids, hand-loomed the rugs,  sewed the slip-covered wing chairs, and raked up our own oysters, we would have a life as rich and polished as her own. And in her catalog, it was all there for the taking. The product, the kit, the dreams, the desires. All a click away.

Until Martha is released and begins spitting out shows about how to apply a French polish finish with 50 layers for a mirror like finish on the antique dresser that we will have to go out and buy, I will have to be content with  relying upon  my own personal MS, my in house arbiter of taste and perfection, a woman who has given herself a migraine on more than one occasion over a holiday dinner, a woman who cleaned the house like the Pope was coming whenever company was expected, a woman for whom we could never strive high enough, or be too well-dressed, too polite, or too hospitable: my very own mother.

She's slowed down some. She is, after all, turning 80 this summer and she's sworn off cooking and entertaining except for mah jong, canasta, and bridge.  She's had enough of toasting slivered almonds in butter and making eggnog to serve in a sterling silver pitcher on the red velvet tablecloth she made out of the skating skirt she'd sewn my sister. She's no long interested in turning icing roses on nail heads for all those birthday cakes.But her idea of  casual entertaining is still a 5 course holiday dinner followed by coffee and dessert in the living room and not at the dining room table.

Martha could use my mother's condo as a halfway house when she gets out of jail. My mother would make certain that Martha would have the privacy and time to get back up to snuff before she had to face the world. And my mother will tell her if her slip is showing, jewelry is too loud, and if she needs a haircut and color.

Now don't all of you go clicking over to website for the going out of business sale at the catalog - not that they would be so gauche as to call it that, they refer it to as a "tag sale". They're out of the gorgeous jadeite cake stands that I've lusted over for  years, always planning to buy and always shirking from pressing pay when I added up the cost. And the binding thread that came in its own box with cute little holes to thread it through, sold out. Ditto the poplar baskets lined with linen, and the blue lustreware dishes, and the copper cookie cutters in fantastic shapes and sizes, all gone. Forever.

Never hesitate to buy your dreams. Or at the very least learn how to make them yourself.