Lightning Hits the Living Room

My winter cleaning project has turned out to be more all-encompassing than I thought--and that's an understatement. If you had told me a week ago that I'd be clearing out some of the items I've parted with, I wouldn't have believed you. Some of these things have been with me for quite a while, but once I started taking a closer look at them, I began to wonder why that was so. Was my regard for these items justified, outmoded, based on ideas I no longer believed in--or simply uninformed?

In some cases, I decided that objects I really didn't want any more were just taking up space, the way you do sometimes with impulse buys you later regret. In other cases, I had books and music that I had never read or listened to; when I started looking at it, I realized that some of it I would simply never get around to and some of it seemed to be different than what I had thought I was getting. That happens sometimes when you're researching a topic and cast a wide net, but it was also the case with items that were suggested to me by others or that I bought for class. I guess the result of developing a more discerning mythic eye is that you really do start to "see through" things; I could have saved myself some money by leaving those items in the store.

I cleared out a lot of albums and CDs, too, some of which I still listened to, and the story on that is a bit more complicated. I liked some of the music a lot but in the end it seemed to be taking up way too much oxygen. I looked at the cover art of some of my CDs and started to see a story that I had no idea was there before. Again, I've probably looked at those CDs dozens of times without really seeing them and was truly shocked when I started to see that what had seemed fairly inconsequential actually had an unnoticed layer of meaning. Some of the items went from being well-regarded and familiar to something that seemed quite alien in less than 30 seconds. I couldn't keep them anymore, and the sad thing is that I wondered why I had held onto them for so long.

The same thing happened with some family pictures, believe it or not. I saw some photos that my brother had posted on the Internet, and I suppose you would have to know him as well as I do, but I saw into them, or thought I did, with an acuity that was painful. It was like he was trying to tell me something. OK, mission accomplished. After that, I put away some family photos that I had out--it was probably time to do that anyway.

It's very difficult to admit that you just didn't see things, and this is especially true when you're an information professional who's used to assessing and judging things. It's easy to misjudge, though, when you only have partial information and no guidance other than your own understanding. If you're in the dark about things, you will make mistakes. I've often had the feeling that others know much more than I do (or believe they do) about things that concern me closely, which angers and distresses me more than I can say.

So it has been a week of clearing out space, both physical and psychic. When I went to bed on the evening of the day I had thrown out so much, I could hardly breathe. I literally felt that I was suffocating and wanted to go outside and run around in circles, though I doubted it would help. It felt like someone had just died--that overpowering feeling you have when something is lost that can't be recovered. I recently read a scene in a book in which a character's husband of many years died unexpectedly, leaving her to pick up the pieces. I hurried through that part because it was so painful, and here I was going through something not altogether different myself.

I often think that the first thoughts I have after waking up in the morning are probably the truest, and my immediate thought the next morning was that I had done the right thing and wouldn't regret it, no matter how empty my shelves and my desk seemed when I looked at them. They still look that way, several days later, but I have begun rearranging things to take up some of the empty space; I've let go of so many other things that I'm starting to get used to it. I was complaining in a previous post about having too much furniture in my living room, so maybe the desk will be the next thing to go now that it's almost bare. I always liked the living room better before it was here anyway.

I hope the room I'm making in my life will be filled with better things than have come my way recently. Even an optimist likes to have a little return on the faith now and then. I'll say further that some things are forgivable, but others are not--and I think anyone who's honest will agree with me.

Rainy Day in a Small Town

Last weekend I took a trip to my hometown on a misty, drizzly morning. I wanted to pay a visit to a family member and make perhaps one or two other stops, and it was impromptu, so no one knew I was on the way. I don't know about you, but I usually have an indescribable mix of feelings when I see the outskirts of my hometown come into view. It almost seems like another lifetime since I lived there, and it's been a long time since it really felt like home. I can remember, as a young teen, watching the sunset warm the brick facade of the church down the street with an alluring glow as I looked longingly toward the west and wanted to be elsewhere.

I spent a lot of time imagining elsewhere back then, and it seemed to me that life wouldn't really begin until I could get out of that little town and on to bigger things. Not too different from the way many young people think, although I gather many adults my age look back on their early years and realize they didn't know how good they had it until it was gone. I don't quite look at it that way, but I was surprised to find mild feelings of nostalgia coming up as I was driving around in the rain, looking at places I remembered, many of which remained mostly unchanged, at least to look at.

I didn't find my aunt at home and decided to continue driving around, so I went down the street my grandparents used to live on (and that street has changed--the house is no longer there). I had a clear memory of doing laundry with my mother in the small Laundromat near the end of the block while we were visiting my grandparents on vacation; I can still remember the smell of the place and the peppery taste of the locally-brewed soft drink that we drank ice cold out of the machine. I remember the African violets my grandmother had in her kitchen window, the uphill pitch of the backyard, the squeak of the glider as my grandfather rested there, chatting with whoever stopped by, and the trees we used to climb in the yard. Many of those are happy memories.

I drove past the church and the school I attended and the earliest house I remember living in. I decided to stop and see a friend, though I didn't have much confidence she'd be home, and while I turned down the wrong street initially (funny to get lost in so small a town), I realized my mistake and found the right turn eventually. I didn't find her at home, but I left a message with her mother and continued on my way, out past the high school and into the parking lot of the little shopping center next door. I was thinking about the many times fellow students skipping out must have patronized the businesses in that little mall, the only one of which I remember clearly was a Dairy Queen (now gone). I felt what I might describe as a moment of sympathetic nostalgia on behalf of the other students (I wasn't a skipper) before I turned my attention to the running track, where I did a few turns in gym class back in the day. I didn't particularly like gym or track & field, but it's funny how benign a sight it seemed that morning, a touchtone to a shared past. I spent four years of my life in that school along with my classmates, and although I was happy to move on, when I looked at the building all I felt was a pleasant sense of seeing a piece of the past.

I remembered visiting the homes of friends and classmates and tried to locate some of them, although that was more difficult with all the time that's elapsed, and I felt sure most of their families had moved on long since. I had lunch and decided a trip to the library was in order to get my uncle's address. Since my aunt died this year, I wanted to stop and say hello. I didn't find him at home, either, and that's when I decided to drop by the church, which his family also attended. I wasn't expecting to see him or anyone I knew there, but it was about time for the Saturday evening service, and it had been so many years since I'd been inside that I wanted to see the place again.

Everyone's familiar with that feeling of going back to a childhood place and finding how much smaller it seems, but I was surprised at just how much the dimensions of the place seemed to have shrunk. I assume this happened because I had so few other churches to compare it to back then, but still, I was surprised--I remember it as being bigger by at least half. I do have pleasant memories of services there, especially around Christmas, and I still found it to be as pretty a church as I remembered.

I recognized my uncle a few pews ahead of me, and after church we talked for a few minutes, a conversation in which the names of many family members came up and a sense of the passage of time was very strong. He encouraged me to stop by my aunt's house again on my way out of town, saying she was bound to be home on a Saturday, so I did that but still didn't find her at home. I was a little concerned but knew that there were other family members nearby and figured it was a case of bad timing--it was such a drizzly day that she may have gotten cabin fever and decided on a day out with a friend. Then it was back on the road west, back to Lexington . . . where all these many years later, I can say life did change once I left my hometown, and that many of the things I dreamed of did come true, although I didn't anticipate how challenging life could be at times. I don't think you ever do.

It's hard for me to imagine living in my hometown again, and yet to be honest there has always seemed to be some quality missing in Lexington, something that I can't put my finger on that has to do with the pace of life and the security of knowing many of the people around you. I may have said this before, but I think I've always wanted to combine that sense of belonging and the aesthetic appeal of small town life with some of the diversions and opportunities of a larger city. I've never figured out quite how to do this.

The imprint of small town life remains with me; when I've traveled, I've sometimes come across places that reminded me of where I grew up, and it's a little surprising how pleasant that is. I think it has to do with the human scale of things, the ease of getting from place to place, the likelihood of seeing a familiar face. It used to be nice to be able to walk down the street for an ice cream cone or to see a movie, things I have to get in my car and drive some distance to do now. I don't want to romanticize small town life in any way, because it has its drawbacks--but it also has charms that are lost in the noise and hustle of a city. Maybe it is true that you can't go home again, but I think it's also true that you always carry some of it around with you, no matter where you go.

Idylls and Loss

I spent this last week reading Richard Llewellyn's novel, How Green Was My Valley. I seem to remember it being included on a reading list in one of my high school English classes, but I was never drawn to it. The title seemed to suggest a certain degree of sentimentality, and indeed "sentimentalizing" is one of the charges laid against it, along with misrepresentation of Welsh life and an insular outlook on certain topics. What I think it does most memorably is present a portrait of a close-knit family, and that was what sustained my interest. Regardless of any of its shortcomings, I wanted to find out what would happen to the people.

This is an instance of a book that doesn't deal overtly with mythological characters but has at its center a mythic theme, the loss of paradise. The narrator mentions Adam and Eve and the expulsion from the garden several times, seeing in that story the source and foreshadowing of his own early experiences with sexuality. This narrator, Huw Morgan, the youngest son in a family of nine children, recognizes the loss of innocence that comes with the first fumbling knowledge of adulthood, but the entire novel is preoccupied with the archetype of loss.

From repeated descriptions of the ways in which the valley's beauty is being eroded by growing slag heaps to the narrator's experience of adulthood not being quite what he had bargained for to the eventual parting of the ways of family members, the novel is full of reminders of an original state of grace that can't be sustained. Early in the story, various family members, particularly the boys, leave home only to return, or if they go for good, don't go far, perhaps to the next valley or the farm over the mountain. When several of the boys, at odds with their father over their views on unionizing, leave the house to take lodgings down the road (followed by their younger sister), the episode becomes a poignant illustration of the mother's role in holding the family together. Eventually, though, forces of change in the valley, along with the characters' own inner callings, break up the idyllic home life.

Much of the novel is taken up with accounts of Huw's education, both at home and at school. The family has high hopes for the future of their intellectually gifted youngest son, and there is an assumption that he will eventually win a scholarship and go off to university. I have to admit to feeling disappointed in Huw when he decided to follow his father into the colliery. While various family members and friends try to dissuade Huw from becoming a miner, his mother is all in favor of keeping him at home. At that point, I confess, the warm family life started to feel a bit claustrophobic, despite my liking for the characters. My assumption (which would be shared by most readers, I think) was that Huw would leave home to become something else and return as a teacher, a doctor, or a man of letters. But even his fateful decision does not stave off the changes that economic forces, disappointed love, and death eventually bring to the family.

Is the novel a tragedy? Yes, probably, but only in the same way all family stories are. The novel made me think about a conversation I had with my aunt about how connected our family used to seem when my grandparents were still alive and how far apart everyone has grown since then (I'm not talking about an idyllic family, just one that got together regularly). She told me that the death of parents had the power to change relationships among even the closest siblings, something I wasn't quite sure I agreed with. The story of the Morgans, however, illustrates ways in which separation is inevitable and possibly even desirable. Whether the Morgan children leave the valley to pursue their dreams, find their fortunes, or merely to flee thwarted hopes, they're now in a position to begin new stories of their own.

Huw acknowledges that his brothers were right to leave the valley before tensions among the miners intensified, tensions in which they would undoubtedly have been caught up had they remained. Perhaps the breaking of family ties provides some insulation for those who have begun to build new lives elsewhere. Or perhaps not--for a family as close as the Morgans, there would be no forgetting their early happiness, especially if their later lives proved disappointing. About individual fates, however, the end of the novel is largely silent.

I have wondered sometimes whether or not an idyllic family life, if there is such a thing, is an advantage or a disadvantage. Sometimes it seems to me that having a less-than-ideal home life might actually be helpful in some ways, making the inevitable break with home easier. Perhaps most people, regardless of the kind of family life they've had, are happy to leave home when their time comes, and the Morgans are an exception. I've never known a family quite like them, though certain aspects of their story seemed familiar. I remember big family meals, with everyone crowded around the table, and good food.

Aside from that, I'd still like to see Wales, regardless of whether there are any Morgans there or not. Apparently, it is still quite green and is still fertile ground for myths and legends of all kinds, as it has been for centuries.

Demeter's in the Kitchen, and She Has a Blender

I seem to be preoccupied, in my recent Facebook postings, with food. I think there are several reasons for this. For one, it's winter, and most of us are in hibernation, especially with the kind of deep freeze we've had this year. You can't always hit the sidewalks for a carefree stroll in the sun (especially when they're covered with ice), but you can always put a casserole in or bake some bread.

In just the last month, I've written posts about baking bread and cinnamon rolls, cooking chicken stew with escarole, making marinara and Bechamel sauce for lasagna, fixing Spanish rice, baking chocolate Valentine's cookies, re-creating a ravioli and broccoli dish I had years ago in Somerville, Mass., and trying to figure out how my grandmother made cornbread. Unlike other things that might eat up your day, a well-prepared meal can rarely be considered a waste of time. My only regret is that my circle of college friends, whom I used to enjoy cooking with, is now too far-flung to make group dinners possible.

OK, so it's winter, but I believe there's more to my food-mindedness than that. In addition to my own birthday, both my mother's and my father's birthdays occur in midwinter, so I've naturally been thinking more about the two of them than usual. Inextricably tied up with memories of childhood are memories of foodways and family meals. How I regret not finding out how my mother made certain things, like pancakes and meatloaf! How I wish I could be in my grandmother's kitchen again, eating her fried chicken. How well I remember the taste of a grilled cheese sandwich and Campbell's Tomato Soup, a common childhood lunch. How much fun it would be to prank my dad on his birthday one more time by putting hot pepper in the Jello!

If I were to self-analyze, I'd say that many of my kitchen adventures represent self-mothering, an attempt to take care of myself through culinary means. Gridlock in Washington? That's OK, here's a blueberry smoothie. Emperor has no clothes? Never mind, have some stew. Yet another inane conversation overheard in Starbucks? Time to make biscuits. Snarky relative? There's a recipe for Chicken Piccata around here somewhere.

I can tell that it really is self-nurturing and not self-indulgence by the judiciousness with which I (usually) weigh what I'd like to have with what seems most nutritious. I grew up in the meat and potatoes era, but I've branched out: I'm always looking for new ways to fix vegetables, including some I'm not used to using. I think I shocked some old friends the other day when I announced I making the potato soup I've been making for 30 years with celery instead of leaving it out as I've always done. "But you hate celery!" I heard, almost immediately. It's true, I always did; but then I vacationed in New Orleans, where the food was so divine and sometimes had celery in it, and there was that yummy tuna dill sandwich they used to have at the library that included celery, and so . . . there I was at the grocery store on Tuesday, eyeing celery on sale for $.77 and wondering why the bunches had to be quite so big. (The soup experiment hasn't gone down yet, but I can't imagine it will use more than a couple of stalks, which could mean ants on logs in my near future.)

You may not believe it, but I also have less of a tendency toward snacking and unrestrained dessert foraging than I used to have. That's not to say I've dropped it altogether, but I'll give you an example. I heard about a new type of Ben & Jerry's ice cream yesterday that apparently includes two different flavors in a single pint along with a core of something delectable like raspberry jam or fudge. My most immediate thought was, "Wow, that's extreme!" instead of "I have to see if Kroger has it!" (I will have to see if Kroger has it, but it wasn't my very first thought. See what I mean?)

So I can't, at the moment, do anything about unemployment, political intransigence, ignorance, incivility, dishonesty, or the rampant failure of so many schools to teach information literacy, but I can at least try to feed myself, which is saying a lot in a world where way too many people still go to bed hungry. We could all use an infusion of Demeter, which is probably why I'm so preoccupied with her. When I think about my parents, I think they'd be pleased that I invested the money a couple of years ago in all the kitchen basics I'd never bothered with before. Fake it till you make it, I can hear them saying. Fake it till you make it. And by the way, your biscuits are better than they used to be.

Portrait of a Summer Night

Walking tonight in the Arboretum, I was thinking about summers past. It was a lovely June evening, and the hilltop views of the big orange sun going down were almost panoramic: I felt I was on top of a mountain and could see for miles. There was a grandeur about the sunset, with dramatic rays of sunlight streaming out from behind gorgeous clouds in a clean blue sky. But I was thinking back to my childhood, when the archetypal summer night was contained within the modest yard of my grandparents' frame house in a small Kentucky town.

I wonder if most people don't have a similar image that conjures up everything a summer night consists of. For me, it goes like this: a backyard of green grass, tilted slightly uphill, big enough for croquet wickets near the top and a gathering of lawn chairs under a big maple at the bottom. Under the tree was where the grownups sat. The kids didn't sit anywhere for long, but there were several options: a picnic table, a swing-set, and a glider on the back porch. If you sat on the glider, you'd share it with my grandfather, who favored it, and who always had his tobacco can and cane nearby.

The house itself smelled like pipe tobacco, the soap my grandmother used in her bathroom, biscuits, and fried chicken. It had a smell all its own, somehow old-fashioned and Southern, and it will never be duplicated. I remember also the damp, musty smell of the basement with its gravel floor and rough-hewn posts, usually visited when Mason jars were needed for fireflies. It was full of Daddy-long-legs, was lit by a bare bulb, and was somewhat of a novelty in my eyes. In Florida, where I lived with my parents and siblings, I hadn't seen many houses with basements.

There was always something to eat at the house, since family gatherings inevitably involved food: my grandmother's fried chicken, salty and tender, especially the little piece with the wishbone that I liked; her rib-sticking biscuits (I later imagined Tolkien's lembas as being a bit like those savory morsels of shortening, flour, and salt); potato salad; corn on the cob, baked beans with onions, ambrosia salad, green beans with ham; cucumbers in vinegar; cornbread (salty, not sweet); sliced cantaloupe; watermelon; and brownies. Sometimes, we'd make ice cream, and the kids would all take turns with the crank. That ice cream was both sweet and salty, due to the rock salt we used.

There were only four rooms in the small square house besides the bathroom. The kitchen, which opened onto the back porch, was the heart of the enterprise, the repository of all the food, and the place where as many as ten people were sometimes crowded around the table if it was raining. (Typically, everybody picked a spot outside, picnic-style, paper plates full and balanced precariously.) There were African violets in the kitchen window, countertops full of food-containing Tupperware, and (always) a plate of biscuits on top of the stove.

There were also two bedrooms and a living room. When we visited our grandparents from Florida, my brother and sister and I would sleep on fold-out cots in the living room. Otherwise, that room was mainly known as the way out to the front porch.

I remember the front porch as being the domain of kids; there was another glider there, the perfect spot for drinking sweet iced tea and rocking slowly. There was a maple tree in the front yard that we liked to climb, and there would sometimes be as many as six or seven cousins perched on various branches. When we weren't doing that, we'd watch people from the neighborhood, either on foot or in cars, go up and down the street. It wasn't a busy street, and there was just enough activity to be interesting. Three doors down was a tiny plaza with a laundromat, where my mother would do our vacation laundry and we'd buy Ale-8-Ones (a local soft drink with a gingery bite) out of the machine.

What did we do on those long summer nights? Nothing special, but that's what was so great about them. To me, the choices seemed infinite: first of all, you would eat. Afterwards, you could sit on the glider, listening to it squeak as you rocked back and forth, climb the tree, play croquet, goof around on the swing-set, make ice cream, listen to the grownups talk, catch fireflies, watch Amos (our Grandpa's big collie) chase his tail, view home movies on a screen in the back yard, play with sparklers (if it was near the Fourth of July), have another biscuit, and look forward to the next day's outing to Natural Bridge or Boonesborough State Park.

I realize now that things were not as perfect as they seemed, but I'm glad I didn't know, because I have those warm, carefree nights, somehow both aimless and full, to go back to in my mind. They're still my yardstick for what a summer night is supposed to be. I remember the feeling of being surrounded by people, of belonging, and of never being bored. I remember the green-yellow light of the fireflies, blinking on and off in the yard, and how they became a living nightlight, small Mason jar beacons to drift off to sleep by in the living room. The next morning we'd let them go, and they'd all disappear in the bright light of day, a bit dazed by their experience, if you ask me. It didn't matter: they'd be back, all out again in force when twilight fell, at the end of another full and infinitely long summer day.