Good Morning, and my apologies for such a lengthy absence. Many, many things and doings and happenings to tell, and they're all scrambled into jottings and memories and thoughts-to-compose, with scarce time to gather them.
So for now, just a remembrance from the first year of this blog, of other Winters, other times, and of settling into a snowy day---it's just sort of a miraculous, disheveled comfort, somehow:
We went out and about today, in the slow,
drifting-down flakes the size of cornflakes; their warm reception from the
ground sent them melting the moment they hit. We strolled the
dampening aisles of the grocery store, in company with fellow-gatherers intent
on those gallons of milk and loaves of bread.
And you know, that's our Southern upbringing---ten flakes past a window, and
the school buses started carting the cheering younguns home, as their parents
sought the earliest moment they could desert their own posts at work, to get to
the grocery store. Milk, I always understood, but how all those clumpy soft
loaves of Wonder Bread would save the day in an emergency situation was a
mystery past my solving. During all my years of living below the M/D, only once
did the power in our area go out for any length of time, and that was during an
ice storm, in which the relentless freezing rain coated every tree and bush and
shrub with unbearable weights of diamond-clear ice.
The valiant plants shouldered the burdens as long as they could, then with
resounding cracks akin to the calving-cries of the ice itself in colder
climes, the limbs gave way and surrendered, tumbled, fell. The landscape took
on the look of a vast planet on which giants had lumbered through, shearing off
the tops of things and smashing the bits to ground, shattering away the
sheathings crystal clear, and leaving the dark bones like some wasteland where
old beasts go to die. Tarzan's legendary Elephant Graveyard must have looked something
like our devastated pecan grove.
And as the layers grew on the harp-strings of power wires, they sagged ever
lower in their ponderous glaze, in symmetry of drop-string on cakes I'll never
bake, pulling the supporting poles with them into tinkertoy bows and bends. And
the lights went out for miles.
Except mine. I'll never
explain that, for the power people worked for DAYS, re-attaching and
re-positioning and raising the poles, and surely SOMEwhere between us and the
power station, there was a complete break. But we had lights at our house. The
Grandparents and the Great-Grandparents had gas heat and plenty of lanterns and
lamps and candles, and could cook and stay warm; they laughed and said it was
just like "living back at Home"---the homes of their raisings---to
have to spend an evening around the kitchen table, with only the glow of
coal-oil lamps, and a jig-saw puzzle for entertainment.
So today is nothing in the scheme of weather things. The snow fluff had taken
on a new energy when we emerged from the store, whitening the streets and our
driveway, and we crunched up the sidewalk with our bags, our hair full of drifty
clumps and our footprints filling before we could return. We stomped in, put
away groceries, changed to warm dry socks and soft flannel pants, and have been
cooking a couple of old family favorite recipes for supper---the meatballs in
"red gravy,"---not the pasta kind of sauce, but the raw
peppers/onions/canned tomatoes layered in the covered skillet of browned meat
with a good shake of black pepper, some salt, and a smitch of sugar, perhaps a
bay leaf according to your whim. It cooks down into a fragrant hearty peasanty
dish, delicious over rice or mashed potatoes.
I made a big Ziploc of the dry spiced tea mix DD2 likes so much---I'll send
that tomorrow if the weather warrants getting out to the P.O. And now the house
is again Christmas-perfumed of cinnamon and orange and clove, with a faint haze
of goldy-tan upon the kitchen counters. Whisking all the dry ingredients
together is an impossibility in the weights of things---the dry tea floats on
the arid heft of the sugar and the Tang, and rises like lines of thin flotsam
on the edges of a tide. I set the kettle, poured a cup, sipped the familiar old
flavors of the Seventies, when Tang was a marvel of wholesome fare, and the dry
mix stirred up in countless kitchens for a comforting cup at home, or for bringing
out Mrs. Heafner's samovar to impress the visiting Grand Matron, as ladies in
hats sipped dainty sips of the exotic, heady brew called "Russian
Tea."
I also minced an onion, sweated it in a
little knob of butter and some salt, then laid in about 3/4 of a pound of
chicken livers, left from the giblet-gravy-making on Friday. I'd saved one
boiled egg, as well, from the ones boiled for devilling, to make Caro her
holiday favorite: Chopped Liver, to spread warm on little pita-points toasted
crisp.
And I just finished cutting up what was always known in our downhome Meat 'n'
Threes and cafeterias as Combination
Salad---iceberg, sweet onion, bell pepper, a bit of cucumber, some
grape tomatoes---to be served with the last of the pimiento dressing from the Christmas
Eve slaw.
Caro and I are having a Girls' Evening---dinner on trays at five, and my choice
from the big stack of "Classics" DVD's she gave me for Christmas:
Austens, mostly, with Jane Eyre
and Middlemarch in the mix as
well. And since Middlemarch is seven
hours. . .
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