No parties, no cards, no Italian cookies, no eggnog, no wrapped boxes in the mail or left on the porch, no 2021 family photographs, no shortbread. Instead we have a half-dozen crumbled COVID masks on the floor of the car or the pockets of our jackets.
We pass Christmas trees, discarded, forgotten, horizontal, abandoned on the curb. (I’m for keeping those trees up year-round). We see limbs not leaves on the pecan trees.
We’re fatigued from festivities but we manage to stretch out the holiday to include one final celebration, the Italian favorite, the Feast of the Seven Fishes (although I think we only had six). We make more potato latkes way past Chanukah, only this time we call them hash browns; we add Ketchup instead of sour cream and apple sauce. We keep the menorah (and the table size Santa) out a few more weeks.
Who’s keeping track?
Credit: Carmela Aliffi
Credit: Carmela Aliffi
We search for the last square of chocolate: Where is it? Where did I hide it? Come out, come out, wherever you are (“and meet the young lady who fell from the star,” thank you again, composer Jules Styne for the Wizard of Oz).
January, once known as the in between month, is now the indecisive month. To travel? To hug? To eat indoors? To go back to school in-person? January, which I always thought of as the long slog – so grey, so colorless and anticlimactic, so flat and interminably drawn out – has become, in my mind, not long enough. Where can I apply to make it – and life – just a wee bit longer? To whom do I have to speak? As soon as we get used to the short days, the long nights, the abrupt isolation from holiday falderal, they change again and everything starts to reverse position. Not fair.
COVID numbers are up, numbers are down, numbers are stable. Which is it?
I’d love a croissant right about now, a really good flaky croissant with lots of butter. The best croissant I ever ate came from a regular old petro station in some forgotten small country town in France we stopped at on our way to the airport. During a recent convalescence a friend read my mind (or heard my pleas) and brought by a box of croissant. Full disclosure: we added butter (and then felt a little sick at our indulgences).
But that was then. Now the focus is microbiome, food to feed your gut (not unlike the detritus of those foods – the stems, the roots, the yellowed leaves, the eggshells, the coffee grounds, the apple cores, the orange peelings, the banana peels, the onion skins, the squash seeds) that feed the compost pile, the worms, the chickens, in no particular order). Now it’s all about foods that start with “k”: kefir, kale, kimchi, kiwi, kraut, kombucha, kohlrabi. (Kollards? Kroissant? Kabbage?).
Now, post-giving, post-holiday gathering, the trick to cooking is finding enough counter space for our new (or old) precious kitchen toys - the pizelle maker, the venerable Champion juicer, the coffee maker, the coffee grinder, the mixing bowl, the pressure cooker, the Cuisinart, the Magic Bullet, the ice bucket, the martini shaker, the cutting boards, large and small. They are all important; they all take up space. A bigger kitchen? Maybe a smaller one. Might be easier to find something.
Time to distill, to pare down, to reconsider and reassess. But hurry up. The month won’t last. February is already breathing down our necks, calling for our attention. With so many empty days there’s a lot of time to worry. This is when I remember the wonderful last verse of Mary Oliver’s poem, “I Worried.”
“Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing/And gave it up. And took my old body/and went out into the morning/and sang.”
Jane Fishman is a contributing lifestyles columnist. Contact her at gofish5@earthlink.net or call 912-484-3045. See more columns by Jane at SavannahNow.com/lifestyle/
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: An ode to the mercurial nature of January and worrying. Maybe we need more time to reassess.
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