I’ve not written anything for a while.
There was another winter cold, which, though not terrible, came on the heels of the World’s Worst Cold, and thus made me feel bitter and oppressed.
“I can’t believe this is happening *again*,” I moaned to Don who tutted and wisely refrained from mentioning the five or six things that might be worse than a slight cold at the end of November.
Then the cold cleared up and there was Thanksgiving; a flurry of papers to be graded; an ill-advised foray into the Strength Train Together class at the YMCA (think aerobic dancing with barbells); and general lethargy. The desire to sleep instead of write in the mornings. The afternoon naps from which I wake to stare at the window on the other side of the bedroom where green boughs are framed in summer and black ones in winter and which makes me feel, as I lie there watching boughs sway, strangely comforted.
When I was nine and ten and eleven and so on, I spent the Advent season chopping gumdrops into tiny cubes. Gumdrop bread, along with gingerbread men, crescent cookies, date candy, and Christmas fudge, were a part of my mother’s military-grade holiday baking operation. If you’ve never heard of gumdrop bread well…think, like, cranberry bread, except with gumdrops, walnuts, and raisins.
It’s an odd food. I rather suspect it was born of Depression-era scarcity or WWII rationing. No fresh fruit? How about some processed, gelatinous sugar-thingies? I could Google, but honestly, I’d rather finish writing.
Gumdrop bread is an ordeal. Gumdrops resist being chopped. They are, as noted, gelatinous and sugary. They stick to knives and must be tossed regularly in flour which itself becomes sticky, necessitating a Switching of the Flour, which can be timed to fall either before or after the regular (read: endless) Washing of the Knives.
Mom and I did most of our chopping in the basement in front of the television. When Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music showed up on ABC, it was Gumdrop Time.
At the time, I thought this was all a lot of unnecessary work for an unappetizing cake. We had fudge! We had cookies dredged in powdered sugar! Sometimes, there was even pie. Why on earth were we wasting valuable holiday hours on gumdrop weirdness?
But, when mom says, “Chop,” you say, “How long?” And at Christmas, the answer to that question was, invariably, “Forever.”
Except it wasn’t forever. Except it ended. Except Dad died and the house got sold and mom forgot everything about cooking and baking and moved to a facility where they serve three meals a day in a dining room. Except I live in Michigan now and go to another family’s holidays and lie in a bed that was strange only a year ago and watch boughs sway in order to be comforted.
I can’t explain exactly why I ordered the gumdrops from Amazon last week. I certainly did not have a clear plan to make gumdrop bread. After all, I don’t even like the stuff. And I can’t explain exactly what drew me away from my work yesterday to the kitchen, to the spreading of flour and the methodical rocking of the knife. I don’t know if the bag of tiny gumdrop cubes sitting on the counter will become gumdrop bread or not.
I only know that in all of it there has been some strange comfort
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