books

What’s Your TV ‘Comfort Food’?

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Writing Prompt: 
What’s Your TV ‘Comfort Food’? “Gilmore Girls”? “Friends”? “NCIS”?
What show do you turn to when you are stressed, tired or just need a lift? Why?

I don’t watch television or stream shows or movies.  I’m not visual and that sort of media doesn’t engage me for long.  I might be tempted if there was a Silly Symphony or Looney Tunes channel I could get.

I did go through a spell where I watched Law & Order, usually SVU, for hours at a time.  And I have no idea why.  But it certainly wasn’t to give me a lift.  It was an avoidance tactic.  And it left me with disturbing images and cynical thoughts.

I’ve written elsewhere about giving up Law & Order as a New Year’s resolution one year so I won’t bore you with that story again, but I will confess that now and again – many months apart nows and agains mind you – I might turn on Law & Order while housecleaning.  I don’t know why I do that either.

I do, however, have comfort music and comfort books.

When people I loved started dropping dead around me like raindrops in the April Appalachian Mountains, I developed what I call the Grief Quartet of CDs.  It was actually 5 CDS as one was a double album.  These were Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Allison Krauss, The Essential Leonard Cohen, AJ Roach’s Dogwood Winter, and The Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions. These 5 CDs have been in my CD changer of the Big Stereo since several days after Doug died in June of 2013.  I managed through trial and error and stupid luck to attach an Echo Dot to the Big Stereo and then network it so that when I fire up the Big Stereo every Echo in the house (and I have one in every room) plays the music.

Photo by Julia Peretiatko on Unsplash

I crank it up.  I pour coffee or wine or champagne.  And I wallow on my Beloved Sofa, and I sink intently into listening. 

My grief at losing 4 dogs, a father, a best friend, a partner and two co-workers within eight years of one another has morphed into sweet memories of days gone by.  I have beatified the dead – forgotten their flaws and celebrate what made me love them. 

My time with this music is now enjoyable.  Music, for the most part, and this music in particular is never just background music.  I listen with intent.  One CD after the other.  Sometimes I will use the remote to repeat a cut.  Sometimes two and three times until I have wrung every drop of comfort out of the lyrics and notes that I can.

I will listen to all five of the albums.  Dependent on how I am feeling as I finish the last one, I may fire up Mozart’s Jupiter symphony.  I love that piece. I’ve had the CD since CDs first came out.  I first listened to it with a Walkman and cheap headphones. 

I also have comfort books.  There are a few particular books – The Secret Garden.  Skinny Legs and All.  Time in its Endless Flight.  The Princess Bride — That I will flip through.  Or my collection of children’s pop-up books.

But every book in my house is a comfort book.  I enjoy my walls of books.  I like looking at them.  Knowing they are there.  I inherited many of them from two of the folks who died and they are mostly as of yet still unread.  I don’t read like I used to.  I hope to get back to it, but writing takes up a lot of my reading time.

My books are legion.  I say, and people think I’m joking, that I think the only thing holding up the barn are the bookcases.  It’s not a joke.  The bookcases reinforced walls and the roof.  I have far too many and I can’t part with any of them and I don’t need to.  I live alone.  There is no one to fuss about the piles of books everywhere.

But mostly I have comfort coffee. 

I love sitting in this room on a quiet snowy day listening to the furnace hum as the steam from a hot cup of coffee bathes my face.  I hold the cup like it is the Holy Grail.  Unlike music and books, I can do other things while I drink coffee.  I can think.  I can write.  I can make a to-do list.  I can read.  I can listen to music. 

But I particularly like silence with the first few cups of the day.  My brain is a noisy place and I sometimes can lower the talk radio in my head to a low murmur if I sit with the coffee lot enough.  Multiple cups of coffee.

I always come out the other side refreshed and ready to get on with things.

You can have the noise and chaos of a television show.  I’ll just be over here, sipping this coffee, letting my mind quiet and my spirit nestle like a dove who has returned home to her nest.

Happy Military Brats Day!

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I’m working on the final proofreading of the Museum of the American Military Family’s book, E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure (Gender, Religion, rAce, Identity, Culture, and Ethnicity in the Military/Family.) As one of two Writers-in-Residence for the museum, I have been heavily involved with this book since January of 2021. You can learn more about the museum here.

I just got my grubby hands on the proof. Oh my. I am so proud to be a part of this project. The book is chock full of essays (11 of them are mine), photos, and quotes from survey responses that gave the book structure. The survey respondents ranged from age 9 to 92. There is even a statistical analysis and report from two anthropologists. We did it proud!

The first essay I wrote was on Identity. I also made it into a digital story which you can watch now.

The walk down Memory Lane that I took while writing my essays was by far the best time I had while experiencing the Long COVID symptom of extreme fatigue. I tired very easily and slept a lot. I had dream after dream of my deceased father, my childhood, and my experiences of the GRAICES.

That walk and a promise I made to myself finally spurred me on to begin writing a memoir based on my experiences as a brat during the Vietnam War. The memoir is a labor of love and tears. I’m referring to it as a collage–it will hold traditional memoir fare, but also short stories and poetry I have written, excerpts from my father’s letters home during his four tours as well as parts from his memoir, Expendables: Vietnam Memoir. There may even be a recipe or two.

My identity is all kinds of wrapped around my experience as a military brat. In one of my essays, I ponder how it was that the first 14 years of my life so marked me that all these years later (I’m 62), I still think of myself as a military brat.

E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure will be printed soon and available for purchase.

I have eight more months left in my term as Writer-in-Residence and we are already underway with the next project. I hope it proves to be as much fun as this one. I would happily serve another two-year term, but I don’t think it works like that.

I’m Hungry — A favorite Tom Robbins quote

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“Lunch,” he said. His tone was even, rational, devoid of any knuckle of bellicosity. “That’s what we call it in my country. L-U-N-C-H. Lunch. I’m fond of lunch. I am, in fact, a lunch aficionado. Give me liberty or give me lunch. Breakfast comes around too early in the day, and dinner can interfere with one’s plans for the evening, but lunch is right on the money, the only thing it interrupts is work.”

His voice rose slightly. “I require lunch on a daily basis. I’m insured against non-lunch by Blue Cross, Blue Shield and Blue Cheese. Finicky? Not this luncher. I eat the fat, I eat the lean and I lick the platter clean. … In the dietary arena, pals, I have nothing to hide, and would at this juncture gladly masticate and ingest Spam-on-a-stick if you served some up. All I’m asking is that you serve something up, and speedily. I become grumpy when denied my noontide repast…”

—Tom Robbins

 

A Hallelujah Chorus in Leaf Mulch

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I love windows.

I love windows.

It did my evil little heart good to get outside in the garden today.

I hadn’t attended to any of the leaves until today because of the cataract surgery. When one lives in a forest, this is, perhaps, not a good idea. I am not exaggerating – I had fallen, unraked leaves that accumulated on their own into 1’ and 2’ piles in the fenced area of the garden.

I did a lot in the garden this past spring. Doug was recently discharged from the hospital and not well enough to be left alone for several weeks. That time period coincided with a streak of beyond-gorgeous weather that makes a body’s heart hurt.

I’m reading a book by Julia Keller titled A Killing in the Hills that is set in West Virginia. I’m not very far into the book, but she astounded me on pages 27-28 with her description of an Appalachia spring. I’ve spent years trying to develop a concise, accurate description that could be conveyed in writing without accompanying photographs.

Keller wrote:

It was a beautiful place, especially in the late spring and throughout the long summer, when the hawks wrote slow, wordless stories across the pale blue parchment of the sky, when the tree-lined valleys exploded in a green so vivid and yet so predictable that it was like a hallelujah shout at a tent revival. You always knew it was coming, but it could still knock you clean off your feet.

leavesImagine if you will that the acres surrounding my barn exploded into a lengthy mountain music version of the Hallelujah chorus. That was this past spring. Imagine now, piles of leaves waist high being mulched with a lawn mower. Can you hear the closing strains of those Hallelujahs as they shelter the plants for the winter under a blanket of leaf mulch. Yes, the wheel turns.

Gardening and writing keep me sane. Last spring, my sanity was hanging by a thread. Some would argue the thread broke. That stretch of spring, with its soaring melody, kept me grounded. Since Doug slept a lot, I spent a lot of time outside – often working by lantern light.

My long-time readers know that my garden is a work in progress – one that began with acres of packed gravel inches deep in unblastable clay. In the beginning, to plant a daffodil required a pick axe and sometimes an auger. After 22 years or so of waging battle against bad dirt, I was sure this year was going to be The Year My Garden Landed on the Cover of Southern Living.

a lot of work

During the 2013 Garden Palooza

By my standards, I poured a ton of money into the ground out back. I painted lawn furniture, bought new cushions, planted a dozen or so shrubs and bushes, and planted flats and flats of petunias and impatiens. I babied a patch of Irish moss, let lavender roam free, and lost all sense of prudence when I bought the fountain and the super-duper-big planter to hold a tropical, vining plant. This was going to be the year.

And then the rains came. The news described them as “scattered storms.” Every one of those scattered storms stalled over the top of my piece of heaven and monsooned. I joked and quipped and carried on about building a lotus pond combo moat to try and keep my barn from sliding off its foundation in a mudslide.

I measured daily rains in inches. Really. If memory serves, we had one of the wettest Mays and Junes of all time and I got more of those scattered storms than most.

Marine Corps Veterans - Daddy and his Good Officer's Wife

Marine Corps Veterans – Daddy and his Good Officer’s Wife

And then Doug went into the hospital for the last time. As I moved into my role as psychopomp, the garden boiled in the wet heat. And then it was overrun with weeds. And then the lawnmower broke. And then I was grieving.

The garden is a mess. A passerby (if I had passerbys) would swear it’s been neglected for decades.

I’m hoping the weather holds for the rest of this Veteran’s Day weekend. I could do some serious cleanup, weeding, this-and-that’s and have a garden ready for frolicking come March. Last year was the first spring I was able to just leap into planting mode without having to spend on weeks on winter clean up. I’m hoping for a repeat.

petunias in november

Petunias in November!

It’s been abnormally warm.  I found blooming petunias today as well as a climbing hydrangea with buds. It’s too much to hope that this weather will hold for long, but I’m enjoying it.  My serotonin levels are enjoying it and I’m pretty sure my Vitamin D got topped off today.

Four months.  I can hang on until then.  Happy Veteran’s Day Weekend, y’all.