The end of the year is fast approaching, and I feel panicky. Winter makes me want to die. I do not mean that figuratively. I hate it. Summer engenders a lot of complaints from me, but I'll take sweating over freezing any day. Recently the air has started turning cooler, especially in the evenings, and I feel that dread creeping up on me. I get out of work at 7 or 8, and it's dark, and I feel it welling up in my chest. Now that we've changed the clocks, and it gets dark so early that I sometimes forget that I've seen the sun at all.
I know this much: part of it is that seasonal depression, like a drunk, belligerent ex, will show up soon, barge into my life and take over the things I've managed to reclaim over past eight months or so. And so I'm steeling myself for that. But there's something else, something that speaks to the biological imperatives that are built into us about what winter means for food supply and survival, and it manifests in the way we cook and eat.
Beth and I usually start eating denser, heartier meals as the days grow shorter, stews and puddings and curries and soups galore. We start making things in big batches so that they'll last for a several days, maybe even a week. Canning and preserving and pickling begin in earnest, even though we can drive a couple of minutes and buy all the things we're making from the store at a moment's notice. We are in little danger of being snowed into our apartment.
Human societies, by necessity, live in defiance of the seasons. The contemporary way is to assume all things will be there. In the United States, as in most of the first world, we have built a society in which all fruits and vegetables will be available to us (middle class and above) folks at all times. The supermarket does not shrink in the winter. If anything, it becomes more plentiful, with folks stocking up for big holiday meals that once signified our appreciation of the harvest, but now signify the time of excess in between awkward familial interaction and football. In recent years I've found myself coming into a different type of winter living, one that is probably a bit more difficult to handle in some ways, but is perhaps more emotionally honest and in tune with the way I've always wanted to live.
Progress is a fine thing, has provided me with more shiny objects than I can name in a single breath, and given me more comfort than I am probably even aware of. I am lucky to have the things I have. I know this; I feel it. I am not ungrateful. I've read things like this whatever it is that I'm writing now and thought to myself, What a privileged jackass. And yeah, maybe. But I recognize this privilege. I'm not talking about "slumming it" in order to achieve some sense of keeping it real. I'm talking about a genuine way of living. The progress we have made as a race of bipedal, opposable-thumb-having mammals with the capacity for speech is wondrous. It warms my heart to see the progress we make as beings of reason and science. But what of the idea of the human animal? Aren't we both? Each of us, I suppose, has a different level of "animal" behavior. I have a friend who desperately needs to go off into the wilderness at times to be away from the hum of progress and feel that there are real things at stake, that there is within him the capability to survive less than ideal conditions. It's a centering process. I spent a great number of years avoiding any such thing, all the while finding myself more and more discontent with the fact that society is always geared towards comfort. The idea of growing up is, more often than not, tied to the idea of comfort, reaching for comfort, attaining a level of success and fiscal solvency as to have all your needs met and then some. But the idea sold to us is comfort without any frame of reference. Comfort eventually ceases to have any meaning if we are surrounded only by it and nothing else. More and more I find that my connection to what I eat provides the both understanding of my needs as a human animal and the means to stave off the fear of succumbing to the winter months in a blind panic.
I make bread now. I make bread a lot. I make it in the summer for fun, but I make it in the winter for different reasons. The oven, like the hearth that used to be the centerpiece of home life, is a great provider of warmth. Our drafty apartment with its worn, splintered wood frame windows is not the most comfortable place to be in the winter. You can keep beer cold in our bedroom closet (he says from experience). Cooking with the oven, specifically baking bread (where I preheat the oven at least a half hour before baking for the sake of my baking stone) provides a welcome respite from the cold tendrils that snake around corners and under couches in the rest of the place. There is nothing quite like baking bread on a cold day, seeing the steam rise from it as you eat it in one of the colder rooms in the house. It's like a little trophy.
Well said! The balance between thankful appreciation of comforts and hedonic adaptation is a delicate one.
ReplyDeleteyeah, it's a blurry line for sure. i've found myself hip-deep in fried foods and whiskey, looked around and though, "oh. i've probably gone too far." but you get there step by step, i guess, and when i forget to keep the proper perspective, it's easy to go astray.
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