October 27, 2021
It has been cold enough the
last couple of days that I turned on the electric heater, one that’s disguised
as a fireplace, which sits in my office. This room where I spend the better
part of my day has two of its four walls as “outside” walls. This is an old
house, more than a century old, and it has no proper insulation in these walls.
Even in the dead of winter it’s
not usually too cold in my office. However, from mid September until May on any
given day when there is a wind out of the north or north-east, that wind
manages to penetrate the combination of plaster, lathing and aluminum siding.
While the “fireplace” that
surrounds the heater is of a good size (standing about 4 feet tall and with a 14-inch-wide
mantel on top), the heater itself is not very big. That’s okay, because this
isn’t a big office, either. And I find that if I turn on my tower fan, and have
it blow gently across the front of the fireplace where the heat comes out,
well, the whole room warms up fairly quickly and fairly well. After an hour I
generally turn the thing off, and remain comfortable for quite some time.
Outside my window, from what I
can see of the outside around my very larger computer monitor, there are wet
leaves everywhere. Some are still attached to the walnut tree, just waiting for
us to clean up the ones already on the ground before they fall. However, the
good news is that there are no more walnuts left to come down. Our daughter has
gone back to parking in front of the house, because it has been cold and
raining a great deal the last few days, and who wants to walk an extra half
block in those conditions, when its not necessary?
Her diligence paid off and no
falling walnuts landed on her brand new, pristine Ford Edge Titanium during the
blessedly short season of nut-drop, so that’s something.
Because our daughter changed
her eating habits and become vegan (well, she’s Vegan except for eating eggs
and drinking milk) I am always looking for things I can make that she will
enjoy. It’s been nine months now since she said goodbye to meat. Within two
months of that change in diet, she was at the point where, if she accidentally ingested
some beef grease—as happened once when she ordered a veggie burger at a burger
place and they weren’t careful enough to cook it away from beef—then the result
was she would feel sick pretty much for the rest of the night. She says she
does feel better, overall, since she made the change in her diet. Our daughter
is a very practical soul and will opt for the logical over the emotional every
time.
I made a homemade vegetable
soup on the weekend, which was a new soup to me, and it worked out well because
it was gobbled down quickly. And then on Monday I made “meatloaf”, which seems
to be this family’s favorite comfort food. Actually, I made two meatloaves. One
for David and me with actual hamburger, and one for our daughter which had
plant based “impossible burger” in it. Whenever I am preparing meat and
meatless at the same time, I’m careful to use separate utensils so there is no cross
contamination of the two. I do add the same nonmeat ingredients to her meat
loaf as to I do to ours simply because when she was eating meat she really
loved my meatloaf. She says hers is very good, and David loved the one I made
for the two of us, so that was a success, overall. We have packages of mushroom
gravy mix on hand now, because there are no meat products or by products in
them, and it’s a gravy both daughter and daddy like.
It remains one of my purest
pleasures in this life to cook food that my family loves to eat.
Sometimes, when I make supper,
our daughter doesn’t want any of the several “plant based meat” she has on hand.
So instead of one veggie with the potatoes or rice or pasta, I’ll make two veggies.
These are on days when our daughter would have had an egg for breakfast or
lunch, so it’s not a case of protein depravation for her. And she certainly
doesn’t mind sharing the table with us when we do have meat. Now that I have a
few dishes that I can make that we all three like that are meatless, supper
time has smoothed out some for me. Of course, I can’t help but worry that our
daughter may not be taking in enough protein. I just have to remind myself that
she is a grown woman, and capable of monitoring that on her own.
As I look out at today’s somewhat
pale dawn, I’m reminded that it's that time of year that tends to be wet and
intermittently cold, when leaves litter the ground, covering grass and sidewalk,
and what plants remain in the flower beds begin to die off.
It’s a time of transition, and
a time when I become very conscious that life never really stays static for
long. Everything always comes to pass.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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