ERIC'S BIT or THE CRUELLEST MONTH
“April is the cruellest month….” wrote T.S. Elliot in The Wasteland. Which just goes to show he should've got out more. Specifically he should've got out today, when the wind is gusting, there's a foot of snow on the ground, and temperatures are plunging towards zero. If he were sitting on the porch roof outside our office window right now (and what an image that is) I'll bet he'd admit that the cruellest month is February when we've already suffered through more winter than we can endure and there's no relief in sight.As for Mr Elliot mixing up his cruel months, I can hear him taking the Star Trek defense through chattering teeth. "Dammit Jim. I'm a poet, not a weatherman."
To which I can only reply, "Off to the Heaviside Layer, sir! And take those frozen cats with you!"
Outdoors everything is white and silent and stiff with cold as if the landscape has died and rigor mortis set in. Or maybe that's just the way I'm feeling. But when the sun struggles up from behind the mountains its thin icy light reveals new tracks in the snow where the local wildlife has been quietly going about its business all night long. The backyard is crisscrossed with dainty lines of deer tracks and twisty little ruts where smaller creatures -- rabbits, squirrels, mice -- have plowed through the drifts. There are also footprints leading to the propane tank after my Arctic expedition there to check the gauge a couple of days ago.
It could be worse. I've known worse. While living in different places I've experienced snow storms that buried the world in nearly three feet of the white horror and bouts of freezing rain that brought trees crashing down, limbs glistening with an inch and more of ice.
I'm discounting the monster snowfalls I remember from my childhood because everything looks bigger when one is smaller. Besides, heavy snow meant a day off school. I was never a big fan of cold but bundled up sufficiently I still enjoyed sledding and building snowmen and, of course, simply not having to go to school. I understand that today, thanks to the Internet, schools call for virtual days when the weather is bad, forcing students to work from home via computer. How unutterably cruel is that?
As I write this I'm chugging down pots of coffee, which is what I do in cold weather. I've always drunk coffee but the colder it gets the more I drink it. Lately that's a lot since temperatures haven't gotten up to freezing in weeks with the thermometer falling into the single digits nearly every night. For half my life I drank tea. As a teenager I lived on hot dogs and tea with sugar and lemon. How I don't know. I doubt there's enough nourishment in a hot dog to support a sparrow, which might be why sparrows don't eat hot dogs. Anyway, count on teens to choose the most unhealthy diet possible. I switched my allegiance to coffee after Mary and I got married. Since she was from England she should have been the tea drinker, shouldn't she? Life is strange. I actually don't care what I drink so long as it's hot and loaded with caffeine.
Sometimes I can warm up by writing. Rubbing words together to make a fire.
The wind's begun to howl.
I haven't seen two riders approaching...yet.
NECESSARY EVIL or THE BSP TICKER
The ticker is tapping away in a positive tiz-woz at the prospect of announcing news again...
A ROUNDABOUT ROUTE or HOW A WHO'S WHO OF TUDOR WOMEN CAME TO BE
In the latest contribution to our Behind The Scenes feature, Kathy Lynn Emerson relates the long road leading to the publication of her three volume set A Who's Who of Tudor Women. Point your clickers here to read how it came to be:https://reed-mayer-mysteries.blogspot.com/p/weve-thrown-ornamental-iron-gates-of.html#emerson
MARY'S BIT or SLUDGE OR SLUM-GULLIAN?
I collect unusual words and recently learned a new one: slum-gullian, courtesy of a gent we know in Virginia who also provided a photo of a large pot of same simmering on his wood stove. The ingredients: hamburger, tomato paste, and several vegetables. It immediately struck me as essentially the same recipe as that for a dish we call sludge, made from cooked mince stirred into spaghetti.Investigation of slum-gullian uncovered more than one theory as to how it got its name. The most common explanation of this prime example of a portmanteau word is that it's composed of slum, in the sense of an area with poor housing conditions, and gullian, said to be English dialect for cesspool or mud. Not exactly the most enticing dish to appear on a menu but its culinary cousin sludge provides equally hearty vittles in the sort of weather Mr Maywrite writes about.
According to those who know about these things, the first literary reference to "slumgullion" occurs in Mark Twain's Roughing It, published in 1872 *, The dish shows up when the proprietor of a stagecoach stop serves it to the latest batch of travelers passing through, Twain among them. Though it bears the name, it's been argued it's not the genuine article since Twain refers to it as a beverage pretending to be tea "but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler."
Admittedly naming our culinary invention sludge hints at nosh almost as awful as that served to Twain but in its defence it is both warming and filling while also attractive to us for another reason.
Why? Because sludge requires only three items: a tin of mince, spaghetti sauce, and a packet of pasta, meaning its ingredients don't take up much storage space, This is important for us because we don't have much room to spare after stocking up the pantry in late autumn against those days or weeks when due to local geography and stretches of brutal winter weather our buggy cannot roll to town. Thus we purchase enough comestibles we calculate as sufficient to provide sustenance for 77 days, the longest period -- so far at least -- when grocery shopping was just not possible. The most difficult time we've had in that regard was several years ago when we almost ran out of coffee. The horror! The horror!
Whatever way you spell it slum-gullian is a word to gladden wordsmiths' hearts, just crying out to be used in a limerick. Here's my attempt at
Boarding house owner Miss Mulligan
Claimed to serve genuine slum-gallian
Her paying guests cried
You stand there and lie!
Where's its bacon-rind scraps, you rapscallion?
Perhaps Miss Mulligan would have been better served by providing her boarders with a hearty helping of the stew whose name she shared.
* Twain describes this entertaining travelogue as a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing. It's available on Gutenberg at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3177/pg3177.txt
AND FINALLY
As mellifluous troubadours Simon and Garfunkel sang in the sixties, April *will^ come and on the 15th of that month the next issue of Orphan Scrivener will spring with a hey-nonny-no into subscribers' in-boxes. See you then!Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at https://reed-mayer-mysteries.blogspot.com/ There you'll discover the usual suspects. including more personal essays on a wide variety of topics, a bibliography of our novels and short stories, and libraries of links to free e-texts of classic mysteries and tales of the supernatural, not to mention a couple of our short stories of the latter persuasion. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Meantime, just for the heck of it, we'll also mention our names on the social site formerly known as Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales. Drop in any time! To unsubscribe from this newsletter jot a line to maywrite@earthlink.net and we'll take care of it.
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