gravy

I just finished reading Academy Street by Mary Costello. It's a novel about a quiet life. Almost nothing happens in it, yet everything does: a haunting portrait drawn with exquisite detail of the ordinary.

And because of her minute reckoning, from time to time my mind flew away with a detail from my own life. Sometime the description was about food aromas. The one that replaced the book's in my own mind was the aroma when we walked through the back door of the kitchen coming home from church on Sunday noon. Immediately we were greeted with the browning smell of roasting meat and our hungry stomachs would sigh with anticipation. Before services, Mother would brown some excellent cut of meat - all  from the local butcher - and set it to a low roast. So all the while the hymns were sung, prayers offered, instruction set forth, sermonizing unraveled, and after church socializing took place that meat was roasting to a melt-in-your-mouth doneness. And with a magician's quickness, mashed potatoes graced with butter and pepper, and if the gods were truly smiling - tender lima beans from the garden (that bear no earthly resemblance to the large mealy hateful things you buy from the frozen food section of your modern grocery store), and gravy- lovely smooth, shining - were all "dished up" and the table burst into action.

That browning smell triggered the whole scenario of family ritual - click, click, click the childhood picture slid into place.

I remember with joy - and hunger pangs.

I think that I shall never see

Walking home from the farmers' market this morning, the scents of basil, tomatoes, peaches, corn, wafting up from my Downton Abbey bag, my happy cup brimmed over. Because, not only do I live within five walking minutes of the market every Saturday morning May through October, my walk takes me through sun-dappled  trees of every description - towering, low, evergreen, leafy - and the immediate coolness is such a delight. A pleasure that grows dimmer and dimmer in this era of air-conditioning.

In childhood, the trees were our absolute refuge. We would sit under the trees to husk corn, peel peaches, hull peas, shell lima beans. Trees had chairs under them -sometimes just house chairs but in lawns there were often big wooden chairs that we later called Adirondack chairs, but surely they were Lancaster County chairs before that! And if those chairs didn't contain working women and children, they held visiting relatives, friends - talking, commiserating, gossiping, laughing, sometimes singing. Even the hottest summer day seemed more bearable with a breeze. The trees were our staying point all summer long,

And for me they still are. Often escaping from the air-conditioned indoors I  go out on our patio and look high up to the blue sky beyond the tall greenery and feel instantly at peace. And judging from the cascading symphonies, all the birds and cicadas agree.

Give us this day

How many times do we read a tragic headline and think how glad we are that we and all our friends are safe from such sorrow? I read the headline of the deck that collapsed in North Carolina as a family photo was being taken and felt a chill. I discovered about a day later, that incident involved a work colleague and her family and was truly horrified. One minute you are healthy, smiling, and in the high of a family reunion and the next minute everyone is in a splintered heap. My so-recently vigorous, strong colleague is in a wheelchair facing months of recovery from a fractured body.

We all know we should say that prayer of gratitude each morning when our feet hit the floor solidly, but it's so easy to forget and go about our day, complaining about the slightest ills. The healthy, happy world that smiles back at us each day is the rarest of sparkling gems.

I need to take out my polishing cloth and shine up each ordinary glorious day and then store them all  in a grateful heart.

Remember

My library is a bit like the Cheers bar. Everyone knows your name and everyone wants to pull up a chair and chat. Only the libation is different - bottled water most of the time and coffee from Katy's on Saturdays. But what I have noticed lately is the commonality with Cheers in terms of confessions. And seniors are my best customers!

Though I do have laments of children, spouses, in-laws, etc., from the general population, I'm getting wholesale mourning of memory loss. Seniors check twice, thrice, to see if I've given back their cards after a transaction - and the search leads to - "I go into a room and can't remember why I made the trip." Or "I saw this book review in Sunday's Post and wondered if you had it but I can't remember title or author - but it looked good!" Or "I misplaced my car keys, phone, ____________ (fill in the blank of the moment)."

It's all so recognizable! And perhaps that's why they come to me instead of my whippersnapper of a boss. On one of the first days at the library he said, "So how long have you been in the system?" And I said, " Since 1982"... and looking sideways at him commented, "and you're weren't born yet, right?" And he grinned and said, "Not quite." (!)

So there you have it, folks. We've been around! And that hanging out allows us to forget billions of details - from 60 years ago, last month, yesterday, 5 minutes ago. It's all good! By grace we are here- " awake, alive and alert" like my long-ago pastor used to request we stay during his sermons. We have so much big-picture living to be thankful for, we simply can't sweat the small stuff!

Boom!

Fireworks.

I think my earliest recollection of fireworks occurred at the Policemens' Rodeo somewhere around Hershey, PA. I'm guessing I was about 8 years old. The show was fascinating enough to my small-town eyes, but when the fireworks began, seemingly within the outdoor arena where all the rodeo antics took place, my mind was literally blown - at least my ears were! The explosion of color was stunning, but the booms!... chest rattlers! And I know I was so young everything was magnified, but I have yet, in my seventh decade, to have that experience of sound and sight duplicated. I've seen fireworks in Lancaster, Reston, Herndon, Pittsburgh, DC, Austria, Montreal ,Saranac Lake, Ohio, Kansas.... but never, never as extraordinarily shockingly exquisite as good old Hershey, PA when I was still in pigtails!

Some things really don't improve with age.

I'm reading Dandelion Wine for my book club next month and while the whole thing is a coming of age/ childhood journey, the part I read yesterday included a part about front porches in their small town.

Our front porch of childhood was in a small town, but not one like in the old movies that was connected by sidewalks, ours was next to a busy road. That didn't stop its magnetic powers - both for us and our neighbors and relatives driving by in cars. They'd see us out and stop to chat - as a matter of fact, if we noticed family going by without at least a brief stop it was considered strange. And the neighbors would wander over on warm summer nights just to share the evening.

Why did we sit on our front porch? Well probably for lots of reasons, but the first being coolness. No a/c other than the breezes fanned by our Norway maples in the front yard. And secondly, entertainment. No TV to nail our souls to the indoors. Our family made games of everything and we would count cars - makes of cars. Everyone would take a model. Today I would be hard pressed to recognize anything but a VW bug!! But in those days it was American-built all the way and not that many choices. But we watched and watched the flow of cars, the dances of fireflies in the gathering dusk, the sun setting across the fields. All of this brought the activities of the day down, down, down to a peaceful level - to prepare for the night. When it was finally dark, many a night was capped off with a dish of ice cream and pretzels on the side - always the sweet/salt combo.

Nothing of significance happened on that porch ..... yet, everything did.

By a nose

About a decade ago, my classmates from the two-roomed schoolhouse that I attended Grades 1-8 had a reunion. Among other amazing aspects of that occasion was a compilation of questionnaires that one of my energetic classmates had compiled. It was fascinating to see what memories "stuck" from those years so long ago. But one memory persisted above all others - bringing potatoes along to bake on the door ledge of the round coal/wood stove that supplied our heating in the winter. The potatoes were marked with chalk with the student's initials, as all potatoes are not equal under the law, and placed strategically to catch the heat. All morning long we would smell the mouth-watering aroma of baking potatoes. It was enough to distract one from one's readin', writin' and 'rithmetic!

I mused about aromas again this week with the quick blitz of lilac season. There is simply nothing like the smell of lilacs to transport me back to childhood and if you meet another lilac lover, you sense that immediate bond of softened tone, almost misty eyes and rapturous "ahs". And its usually girls who are doing the reminiscing about the lilac scent. But the other day, a friend said it was her father's favorite flower. I was startled! I realized I had been shelving the lilacs with feminism!

Scents are so evocative. Some doctors even encourage families of comatose patients to bring in all kinds of aromatic objects to lure them back into the present. I remember one story claimed that cinnamon is what revived her husband.

Whatever the scientific basis, I celebrate the nose and all its attendant nostalgic baggage!