comfort food

I am always in the mood for Madeleine L'Engle.

Yesterday I was feeling crabby and tired. My work day had been trying, and I'd parted from a significant amount of money that evening when I ransomed my car from the auto shop. Janie had shredded one of my Buechner books and torn the binding off my current journal by the time I returned home. Our kitchen was a mess, and our fitful heater was back on its emergency setting and doing a less than stellar job of warming the drafty house. When the house is a mess it seems colder anyway, because it lacks the cozy factor.

All of these conditions combined to bring out the worst in me. To combat them, I knew I needed a reliable fix-me-up, and fast.

So: I fixed a pot of coffee and some stovetop cream of wheat, and I picked up Meet the Austins by Madeleine L'Engle: the comfort food of literature.

It is rich, harboring all the "sound and fury" of a teeming household: rowdy dinners, tumbly bedtimes, homework, chores, television, bicycles. All of this homespun content is handled deftly, in a way that reveals good parenting and childhood epiphanies while managing to avoid the trap of sanctimoniousness or sentimentality, most of the time. It is utterly engrossing without relying on glamor or spectacle. And it has moments of hilarity.

Basically, it reminds me of all the reasons being a human being is so wonderful: fellowship, family, creature comforts, laughter, engaging with life and death and beauty and pain in the setting of ordinary life.

It was the novel version of this poem by Barbara Crooker:

Ordinary Life

This was a day when nothing happened,

the children went off to school

without a murmur, remembering

their books, lunches, gloves.

All morning, the baby and I built block stacks

in the squares of light on the floor.

And lunch blended into naptime,

I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,

one of those jobs that never gets done,

then sat in a circle of sunlight

and drank ginger tea,

watched the birds at the feeder

jostle over lunch’s little scraps.

A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,

preened and flashed his jeweled head.

Now a chicken roasts in the pan,

and the children return,

the murmur of their stories dappling the air.

I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.

We listen together for your wheels on the drive.

Grace before bread.

And at the table, actual conversation,

no bickering or pokes.

And then, the drift into homework.

The baby goes to his cars, drives them

along the sofa’s ridges and hills.

Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,

tasting of coffee and cream.

The chicken’s diminished to skin & skeleton,

the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,

but this has been a day of grace

in the dead of winter,

the hard knuckle of the year,

a day that unwrapped itself

like an unexpected gift,

and the stars turn on,

order themselves

into the winter night.

Now, don't you feel good?