GRACE

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writers’ musings:

“…the prose shouldn’t even be noticeable. But it takes alot of work to make it not noticeable.”

unattributed

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GRACE

Having friends in takes care of it. Being by oneself also takes care of it. I made some lentil soup on Sunday. You get the onion sautéing and add the garlic and the carrots and the dry lentils and you keep adding: some celery, some parsnip, until it’s time to put the broth to the sauté. And then you go out to cut some parsley while it all bubbles in the soup pot, and eventually you add the whatnot, the seasonings and the salt and something alcoholic, some old leftover wine et al. It cooks along until the lentils are soft, and then you have a massive huge amount of lentil soup spilling out of the huge soup pot which was never the intention but there it is, and what the hell are you going to do with it all? You’re only one woman. You can’t invite the dogs to sit at the table with you. That lentil soup projects itself into your immediate future for days and weeks, and you’re sick of it even before you have the first bowl of it. You can’t have it on Sunday night, that’s for sure. It has to marinate in itself. It’ll be much better on Monday, and on and on through the foreseeable. Sigh. The resignations of living alone. We were in the Caribbean once, for two months, June and July, as it happened. It was the year I had that baby, that second baby, and Rex had been an employed cog in the wheel of Broadway for all the previous months and that of course means you’re in service eight-times-a-week to that industry, and don’t you kid yourself, it’s exhausting, so after months of that life in Gotham we picked ourselves up and collected everything we’d need for our wee little children and parked ourselves on the leeward side of a semi-tropical island where the babies could study sea and learn sand and we could just chill. Well, hardly chill. Wrong word, but you know what I mean. Anyway, we were tooling along one day on that isle so fair and stopped at a road side restaurant that was the livelihood of the Afro-Indos who devoted themselves to that place and there was a cauldron between the road and the patio with a wood fire underneath, a big old iron cauldron it was, the fire keeping the cooking at a simmer and giving off some gorgeous redolence, and somebody was feeding that pot belly with strips of goat meat and maybe breadfruit and manioc and we were incapable of passing the scene replete with those smiles of the lissome humans who were busy and laughing and we found ourselves at a little table and the story of the stew was told. The stew had been going in that very pot for 68 years. The fire never went out. The food kept cooking. Anything and everything kept being added to that big old iron pot, cinnamon sticks and pork cheeks and some crazy old beer and it was an eternal flame on that island, and maybe they were having us on, us whiteys, but I don’t think so. I think that stew and that cauldron are still going. This was 1974, the year of that second baby, 52 years ago, and add up the 68 and 52 and you have it at a hundred 20, and I will keep it forever in mind. My first impulse was to invite the guy who lives in my barn over for a bowl but he’s been cowardly and skulking around me of late and I’ve soured on him since he didn’t invite me over when he made supper for the lower neighbors, which wasn’t nice, considering all the times I’ve invited him, and come to think of it he’s NEVER invited me over and a decent forgiving christian soul I’m not so he’s on my shit list now, even though I figured I’d probably give him some lentil soup at the end of the day. But then I thought of Bill and Gail, the upper neighbors, who’ve sold their house and are now moving after living on this hill for 48 years, where they homesteaded even before power lines were run up to their place, and surely they’d love a nice bowl of something home-cooked in the face of all the ups and downs from the old house to the new, and I read it right, my soup offer was accepted, but only Gail came because Bill was too preoccupied with loading and unloading so I served Gail lentil soup and loved her easy ways and thought about how young they were when they first got here, so young and appealing, handsome and lean, the both of them now old and lean and healthy for all that, and I gave her a nice container of my soup to take home to Bill. It’s what country people do: share the homemade soup and the new-pulled asparagus and the tomato harvest in late summer. I really made a dent in that overflowing pot of lentil soup, now thinking I’ll be having it for only a few more nights. So did I give any to the barn guy?

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Hard copies of DIARY OF OLDING, Vol. 3 are now available: all the SubStack postings from 2025. Volumes 1 & 2 are sold out. You can order direct: jma@thetrak.com $25 postage paid

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