Some good things that come from the cold weather are the coping strategies that we use. A steaming bowl of steel cut oats is a warm and chewy way to start a morning. Aromatic soups both mundane and exotic are just the right thing for supper, and their preparation warms and perfumes the rooms.
Sharing a small blanket with a friend while watching television harkens back to the bundling practices of colonial America. And if you and your friend are of like mind, there are delightful liberties that can be taken under that covering.
Those puffy down jackets and coats are amazing armor against arctic weather. Even my 35 year-old Loden parka, heavy wool that it is, is a barrier no icy blast can penetrate.
And when your bathroom feels like the crisper drawer in a refrigerator as you strip down to take a shower, a small portable heater can create a micro-climate just for you.
I think that our cats feel much the same way. Without the need to constantly patrol the back yard against marauders of various species, they can remain indoors and devote themselves full-time to their true love … napping.
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We still don’t have much snow here in Paradise, and the nearby ski areas are starting to complain that they would like quite a bit more, if you please. Ski resorts here in the mountains so frequently grumble about how much snow they’ve received that in this they are much like the farmers of the prairie states who absolutely never get the amount of sunshine or rainfall that they want.
In general talking to those farmers during the growing season is tiresome. They will rail against the weather of the present, and when they are done with that they will begin bringing up the meteorological misdeeds of the past several decades.
These orations are so similar to one another that farmers could really save themselves time and energy by transcribing one of them and then printing it as a handout to be passed around in place of conversation.
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I can’t recall if I’ve brought this up before, but my approach to cooking is to learn how to do everyday dishes well, and leave the more exotic and the gourmet to others.
So it’s a tasty roast chicken that might come from my stove, but probably not coq au vin. I don’t worry about the intricacies of working with phyllo dough because I skip over any recipe that contains it.
From time to time a new recipe will work out so well that I take one bite and my jaw drops and my pupils dilate. Although this is not a culinary blog, I am going to start sharing with you those times when something turns out that good that I can’t shut up about it. My first such share is for a chicken noodle soup that rocks, and is in a total ‘nother country.
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Readers of this blog over time have learned that I attend AA meetings pretty regularly. Even though I haven’t used alcohol for a very long time now, there are at least two reasons that I still go to those meetings.
- First, one is never “cured” of whatever being an addict is, and so far there has been nothing found that works better than the comradeship and support of people in the same pickle that you are in in maintaining abstinence.
- Second, if you have found a small boat to have been a lifesaving tool for you, gratitude leads you to personally want to make sure that such a useful watercraft is tied up to the dock and available for the next person who needs it. An AA meeting can be that boat.
Robin and I are watching the British television series Call the Midwife, and in one of its story threads it has subtly laid out the progression that many people who now suffer from alcohol addiction have followed in their lives. A main character in the show first enjoys the camaraderie and sophistication that she feels when having a dram on special occasions. Then it is on non-special occasions. Then nightly. Daily.
Because the series was so successful and lasted so long, this progression took place slowly over several years, as it often does in real life.
Eventually there come the attempts at self-control and their subsequent failures with accompanying guilt and dishonesty. The lucky ones eventually find their way to a therapeutic community, with AA being one example.
All of this has been laid out quite believably in the series. There are no big dramas, no surgeons passing out and pitching forward into the abdominal cavity (oh, the stories we accumulate), but only a good woman doing what other good women were doing but finding that somehow … inexplicably … she developed a problem while they did not.
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[Sometimes it helps to turn to poets to see through the smoke, at those times when life becomes a dance of perplexity and anguish. A friend of mine long gone used to say “Poets are the last truth-tellers.” Of course, he said a lot of things … some of them were true.]
Exquisite Politics
by Denise Duhamel
The perfect voter has a smile but no eyes,
maybe not even a nose or hair on his or her toes,
maybe not even a single sperm cell, ovum, little paramecium.
Politics is a slug copulating in a Poughkeepsie garden.
Politics is a grain of rice stuck in the mouth
of a king. I voted for a clump of cells,
anything to believe in, true as rain, sure as red wheat.
I carried my ballots around like smokes, pondered big questions,
resources and need, stars and planets, prehistoric
languages. I sat on Alice’s mushroom in Central Park,
smoked longingly in the direction of the mayor’s mansion.
Someday I won’t politic anymore, my big heart will stop
loving America and I’ll leave her as easy as a marriage,
splitting our assets, hoping to get the advantage
before the other side yells: Wow! America,
Vespucci’s first name and home of free and brave, Te amo.
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Little Home In The Valley 