home fires
It’s gray and cold this week here in Brooklyn. (It occurs to me that opening this missive with a weather report is, qualitatively speaking, about on par with beginning a song lyric with, “I woke up this morning.” Oh, really? How fascinating! Tell me more! We’re all friends here, though, and I trust you’ll be understanding if I lean on the occasional cliché when I pop in here to say hello.)
As is appropriate for a time of blizzards and hard freezes (oh, yes, and a global pandemic), I’m keeping my spirits up by stoking home fires both metaphorical and literal. The old stand-bys–regular exercise, rib-sticking nightly dinners, the occasional bouquet of bodega flowers–continue to serve me well, as does my newish tradition of baking a batch of scones or muffins on Sunday mornings. For pure escapism, though, nothing–but nothing–beats a good book.
Right now I’m reading Rosamunde Pilcher’s Winter Solstice, a story I am wrapping around myself like a cozy cable-knit sweater. Set in rural England, London, and Scotland (so far), Winter Solstice is a book in which not much outwardly happens, save the catalyst that sets the plot in motion. Rather, the reader comes to intimately know a host of characters, all of whom are weathering loss and loneliness while doing their level best to take care of one another. They’re flawed and well-intentioned, forever eating homey meals and drinking mugs of hot tea in front of fireplaces whilst they sort themselves out; it’s all enormously comforting. To wit:
“…she put the kettle on, found the frying-pan and the bacon. She laid the table with a checked cloth, and cups and saucers. She cracked two eggs. Oscar enjoyed a cooked breakfast, and although Elfrida did not eat it with him, she relished the smell of bacon frying.
Cautiously, she made toast. Making toast in this old-fashioned kitchen was something of a hazard, because the toaster was elderly and past its best, and behaved accordingly. Sometimes it popped up two quite reasonable, nicely browned slices. Other times, it regurgitated two uncooked slices of bread. But if in a bad temper, it forgot to turn itself off, with the result that the kitchen was filled with dark smoke, and the blackened crusts on offer were so disgusting that not even the sea-gulls would eat them.
Every now and then Elfrida told herself that they should buy a new toaster…One day she had gone into William G. Croft’s to price the cheapest, but quailed at the expense, and departed without having made a purchase…So she struggled on with the old inherited toaster, having decided that if she did find herself with a bit of spare cash, she preferred to spend it on books or flowers.”
I mean. Did your shoulders relax, reading that passage? Mine certainly did.
A whispered aside: I have been writing, showing up at the page most days to let some ideas out to play. It’s too early to say much more about it as, frankly, I don’t know where any of it’s going (or, indeed, if it’s going anywhere at all). I have moments of flow and small bursts of clarity, but more often than not I am stymied, certain that everything I’m scribbling is destined for the waste-bin.
Patience, then, seems to be the order of the day, a necessary ingredient for baking, writing, and making it through a time of crisis. As Rosamunde Pilcher and her sympathetic protagonists knew well, copious mugs of hot tea help too.
May the day land gently, wherever you are.