The Mundane

Best cream soda ever!

Welcome to my new nest! I'd be glad to have you burrow in with me! I've made a commitment to myself to do two things: 1. To document a weather report twice a week that I will be pairing with just the right food and drink to fit the forecast and 2. To chase after the daily mundane and write it down. 

I am from many places and absolutely nowhere, with lots and lots of the South thrown in there since the age of eight and beyond. Raised by a southern dad and a mid-western mom, I am an amalgamation of many things! I do not have definitive roots in the sense that I have a hometown. Having moved many times when I was growing up and often being the new kid in school, I found that, looking back, as an adult, I absorbed culture in the sense of food and traditions and the ever-present, ever-interesting weather you get in both the South and the Very Deep South (that is a thing, trust me, and it is stunning). I know this to be the case because as an adult, food and weather are the two things that bring me tremendous comfort. 

Now, if you think that I enjoy a tornado forecast (RUN FOR COVER, there will be zero food pairings for this particular type of disaster), you're very wrong! What I mean by weather being a comfort is that as it changes daily and seasonally, I find myself seeking that gift of the perfect day. On those perfect days, there is nothing that can compare to the feeling of having been handed 24 hours of sheer bliss. There is a genuine feeling of elation I get when I wake up in July in upper Northeast Tennessee to find that we are in the 60s at the moment and only heading toward the upper 70s with lower humidity. Does that happen a lot in July around here? No. But it happens enough that one knows to look for that particular day in July, a gift to not be taken lightly and would you PLEASE eat a warm, garden fresh tomato to celebrate? It wouldn't hurt to chase that tomato with sweet ice tea!

I chose to write about the mundane because when all is said and done, mundane is just another word for the routine of daily life. We find ourselves complaining about eating the same food or being in the same job indefinitely or the monthly trip to the movie theater but nowhere else. Then, when these things are altered because of less-than-welcome circumstances, suddenly, we crave the mundane. 

The cliche of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich comes to mind. It's very boring, if you think about it. It's a tin can of soup eaten with some bread and cheese we fry in a skillet (well, fried food is never really boring, is it?). Yet it ceases to be boring if the perfect weather for it has rolled in unexpectedly. Suddenly, it's the cashmere sweater of foods, the luxury that wasn't a luxury the day before when the weather wasn't 45 degrees with drops of ice cold rain coming down. To call it mundane feels very unfair. I prefer to twist that word around, to reinvent it and to celebrate it.

Moments of feeling alive are built around the mundane, particularly the subtleties of how we grow and change over time. But the mundane can also be hard-wired or "coded" from the relatively bland (or mundane) things of our youth, so to speak. Our past speaks to our present on every level. In my late 20s, I once walked by a candy shop that smelled of cocoa and citrus. I was a very small girl again in that moment, opening a brown paper lunch sack at Christmas. That lunch sack held loose vanilla cremes dipped in chocolate rolling around on the bottom, an apple, an orange, candy canes and loose walnuts and pecans in the shell. When opened, that heavenly smell of chocolate and orange floated up. I was incredibly surprised when my eyes welled up with tears that day so many years later in life. It was a nice moment, but it was an unexpected moment that became this huge gift just for me.

That small bit of my past made that singular moment in my adulthood special. It started out as just a boring walk past a candy shop, but it became a whole new memory born from the 1970s. And so we see how the mundane matters - the casual stroll, an unexpected scent, a comforting, familiar view is all it takes to fling us back in time and make the present suddenly very, very precious. As I roll through this year, I hope to find out what it is that I have loved so very much from my past that lingers and, by doing so, permeates and shapes my present and my future. Let's cheer the mundane, for when it is elusive, it is dearly missed.

Now, not to get you overly-excited, but my next post will probably contain details on wood varnish fumes on a hot, summer day and basements. There ya go! 

Today's weather calls for a celebration of the first day of the second half of the year, and also the day that summer appears to have shown up in this neck of the woods!  For me, nothing but an ice cold Frosty Blue Cream Soda will do! And for heaven's sake, don't forget to look up! The July sky is the second-best bluest sky of the year, outdone only by the October sky!

Happy July 1st to you. Let's see what the second half of 2020 brings to us! I'm going to count the blessings as they come along.