Comfort food ~ and Self-Isolating Questions

Write about comfort food.

When I ate lunch in the Circle@Crown Café last week, I bought an extra item.  Everyone's been raving about their homemade biscuits, so I got one to eat later at home.  What is it about certain foods that comforts us?  In my case, food reminds me of my mother.  She was a school cafeteria manager and loved to feed people.

The biscuit, of course, wasn't as good as my mother's biscuits.  Nothing ever is, since in our minds what we remember was so perfect.  This week, the Café is not open at all, and that day last week when I gathered with friends around a table to eat and talk and laugh feels like a distant memory.  This week, nothing is normal.  This week, the world feels strange, as I reported last night in "the reality around here."

Sorry, there's nothing "comforting" in this line of thought, so I'll answer the questions I posed earlier.  Let's see if I can be positive.

Quarantine Questions ~ now Self-Isolating Questions
On Thursday, I learned the latest terminology is "self-isolating," leaving "quarantined" to those who have been been officially quarantined.

1.  What am I grateful for today?

I'm grateful for friends at the retirement center where I live, and that includes staff as well as residents.  The staff is going above and beyond to make us safe and take care of us during this pandemic, and that includes getting meals delivered to our doors so we don't have to leave our apartments unnecessarily.

2.  Who am I checking in on or connecting with today?

When my BFF Donna ordered groceries, she added a few things I needed.  So I went to her apartment to pick up food for Clawdia and me.  Along the way, I spoke to Margaret, Iva, Karl, and Miriam in the hallways.  I talked on the phone with the Donna who is on staff, BFF Donna (several times), Sheila, Nancy, and Judy.  I replied to Donna Rae Jones, our yoga instructor (yes, a third Donna today), by comments on this blog and by email, as she attempts to set up a virtual yoga group, since "Gentle Chair Yoga" has been suspended for now.  While Judy and I were talking by phone in our own apartments, we waved to each other from building to building across the entrance and patio below.

3.  What expectations of "normal" am I letting go of today?

I'm letting go of the expectation that we need to face each other to talk and share.  As you can see, I talked to a lot of people today, mostly by phone.  Hearing each other's voices can bring us together without having to see each other in person.

4.  How am I getting outside today?

How about bringing "outside" in?  I opened the window for Clawdia so she could smell the fresh air, listen to sounds, and scan for any birds in the trees below our window.  It took three tries to get this photo of her, since she kept turning around to see what I was doing with that cell phone camera pointed her way.

5.  How am I moving my body today?

Other than walking from my apartment to Donna's in the other building, I haven't done much moving today.  Maybe I could do this SilverSneakers virtual exercise class on Facebook.  "Join SilverSneakers Trainer Jenny O’Callaghan for our first live-streamed SilverSneakers exercise class here on Facebook!"  Thursday, March 19, 2020 at 10:30 – 11:00 Central Time.  That's tomorrow!

6.  What beauty am I either creating, cultivating, or inviting in today?

I shared coloring pages on my bulletin board that people can take home, color, and re-post them on the board to share with any of us going by the elevators on my floor.  Several people have already taken pages and returned them on our board.  I need to put up more pages, since they are almost all colored now.  If you want to color one and don't live here, send me a photo of it, and I'll add it to our bulletin board.

Write about your childhood

Write about an experience from childhood that has stuck with me?  Okay.  I could combine this with a page from Michelle Obama's 2019 book, Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice (unpaged):

"Describe your childhood home.   What are some of the details that stand out the most?  What made your home different from your friends' homes?"

In 1943, we moved into the house my mother grew up in (see the black-and-white photo below, taken about 15 years earlier).  I wrote about my mother's family a couple of weeks ago and used that picture of them in front of their home.  My grandfather Monroe, on the far left, was killed in traffic in 1930, so this may be 1928 or 1929.  My grandmother Inez is standing beside him, with their children lined up according to age:

The four siblings on the back row, left to right, are Chandler, Paul, Bonnie, and Howard.  Coming back from right to left are Mark, Wylee, Mildred (my mother), and Allen beside their mother.

Click to enlarge the photo

The children grew up and left home, except for my Aunt Bonnie on the back row, who stayed and took care of their mother until she died in 1943.  The rest of them decided Bonnie, who never married, should have their share of the house.  When my parents moved us into that house with her, I was only three years old, but I do remember one thing about that moving day.  I had seen my mother pack my toys and stood watching the movers carrying in the boxes until ... sigh of relief ... I saw my toys being brought up the three steps and across the front porch that's behind my relatives in this picture.  The bricks in this photo weren't quite so visible when I lived there.  My grandmother had a green thumb, and by 1943 there were huge bushes all along the front of the house.  The flowering bushes grew where my uncles stood for that photographer.  The bushes extended all the way to those three porch steps (mentioned above) to the right of what you see here.

Eventually, Bonnie sold the house and moved in with me and my children on Signal Mountain in 1973.  We'd built a basement apartment for my husband's parents, but after we divorced, my mother-in-law chose to move out, even though I assured her I wasn't divorcing HER.  (My father-in-law had died several years earlier.)  Being there after her son moved out was awkward for her, so I understood.  When I invited my mother, it was time for Bonnie to quit living alone, too.  Born in 1904, she was 13 years older than her little sister.  The two of them shared the apartment in my basement, using twin beds that once belonged to Mark's children (the tall brother on the right end).  Those twin beds are probably as old as I am (80 in April), and I sleep on one of them now in St. Louis.  (The mattress is much newer, of course, and I'm ready to replace it again.)

Give details of the home, our instructions say.  I have a hard time imagining how two parents, six sons, and two daughters could live in a two-bedroom house.  Off the living room was a sort of sitting room, so maybe some of them slept there.  I wrote about the living room in January, specifically about the coal stove that vented through the fireplace and the coal shuttle that was beside the stove.  I learned to play the upright piano in that living room, which looked very much like the photo at the top of an antique piano I found online.  There was a dining room open at an angle from the living room, a pantry closet out the other door, and an eat-in-kitchen beyond that.  There was a screened-in porch between the kitchen and one of the bedrooms that I considered a shortcut, at least in the warm months.

In the side yard, to the left of the automobile parked in the driveway in the black-and-white photo, were lots of growing things.  (Remember, my grandmother had a green thumb.)  I especially remember two large crepe myrtle trees with pink blossoms like these.

In the back yard were a plum tree I could climb, a detached garage with a place to store coal on one side, hyacinths beside my sandbox, a rock garden, a flower bed enclosed by a row of bricks, forsythia ... lots of flowering things planted by my grandmother, in other words.  We moved away from there in 1949, shortly before I turned nine years old.  What I remember best are the growing things and playing that piano.  I still take sheets of music downstairs to one of the two pianos here in the Crown Center and try to remind my fingers how to play.  Would you like to hear a cat play the piano?

I don't remember much about homes of friends.  (I haven't been a child since the 1940s and early 1950s, after all).  But looking back now, I don't remember pianos in the houses of my friends, and I think we had more flowers and flowering trees than anyone else in the neighborhood.  Interesting.

Write with me ~ about memories

Write a list that begins "I remember."

(Why a list?  Why not just write about a memory?

Okay, do whatever you like about "I remember,"
and maybe write a paragraph in the comments?)

I remember the stove in the living room of our house when I was a little girl.  My experiences with that coal stove came to mind when I read this line on page 204 of Jacqueline Winspear's novel Birds of a Feather (2004):

"Maisie prepared her bath, opened the door to the fire and settled down to soak before embarking on the rest of her day."

When I was three years old, my mother's mother died and my family moved into her house with my Aunt Bonnie Reynolds.  The coal-burning stove sat in front of the closed-in fireplace, where the stove pipe vented.  It looked something like this one I found online, but our fireplace was still there behind the stove.  Our stove wasn't as boxy as this, but had more rounded corners.  Beside it was the coal shuttle, shaped like this one.

That little stove was the only heat for the whole house (not counting the kitchen's oven), and I'd run to the living room on cold mornings to warm myself — front and back — at the open door of the stove.  Maisie, in the novel, opened the door of her stove for the fire's warmth, just as we did.  Both bedrooms, where I lived, opened onto the living room, the one where I slept with Auntie at the front of the house and the one where my parents slept at the back of the house.  Between the bedrooms was a connecting bathroom, with a clawfooted tub and a big closet.  I probably would have welcomed a warm stove near my bathtub, as Maisie did.

Modern technology enabled me to "visit" that house again by googling the first address I ever memorized; I lived on Fifth Avenue in East Lake.  The open lots on each side are still there, but the big tree in front of the house is gone, replaced by a smaller tree on the other side of our front yard.  Grandma's two beautiful crepe myrtle trees are missing from the side yard.  Ah, well, everything changes, doesn't it?

I googled that address for a 2013 post, where I also mentioned the changes wrought by the decades since I lived there.