fireside loafing. . .i mean, tea, a loaf of pumpkin bread, and a candle

Two plates littered with pumpkin bread crumbs.  A white candles burns in the center of four fuschia mum blossoms.   There's the constant low roar of the dehydrator, a smell of apples.  Outside, against white and grey skies, cedar boughs bend in the wind, yellowing petal-leaves of the quaking aspen shaking.  Aspen leaves always seem as if they should make noise: a tinkling, like a triangle ringing, as they quake.  The apple tree groans with a late harvest of red and green. 

My voluminous purple shirt is splashed with juice stains.  I cored and sliced a dozen apples and Bea dipped each slice in lemon juice before arranging in the dehydrator.  She kept up a merry monologue; each sentence ended with "right, mama?"

"I'm a good worker, right, mama?"
"We're going to need another apple, right, mama?"
 "The girls are going to love to eat these apple chips, right, mama?"

Right.  I love your little nose, your bright eyes, your face so happy, I told her.

I hope the girls remember their parents in moments like these, working together at the kitchen counter; I hope they remember us all sitting around the supper table, making up our own lines to raps (a way to get around 'no singing at the table' rule); I hope they don't remember us always sitting in our own little world at the table, pounding on our keyboards.

Because goodness knows we're doing a lot of that recently.  I believe we've clocked hundreds and hundreds of hours in this kitchen already.  I could work up in our bedroom, or Martin could go out and type in the garage, like he's been planning (he's nuts), but we both find ourselves here, near to tea and candlelight and the biggest window in the house.  Which brings me to this quote from Tom Hodgkinson's column in UK's Country Living Magazine:

"Beer, said Cobbet [18th-century self-reliance expert], is the ideal complement to the labouring life as it 'puts the sweat back in.'. . .[Cobbet] does, however, indulge in an attack on that great evil--tea drinking, which, he says, 'enfeebles the frame' and encourages 'fireside loafing.'"

I couldn't disagree--and oddly, agree--with Cobbet more.  I'm not so sure about putting sweat back in, though.  That sounds. . .yucky.

I like to start a letter to a friend or a blog post with details that place my reader directly where I am, and it's not just for their entertainment--it's for me.  I cloud over when I write--that is, I become concentrated inside, and everything outside goes whitish and vague.  To write something else like a letter, or place a phone call, or pay a bill or wash the dishes, or even to stop and eat--this plucks me out of the other world and places me firmly again in this one.  That's why, if I've ever met you for lunch after writing for the morning, you find me rather wishy-washy and distracted.

I find it hard to shake myself out of the world of the book Martin and I are writing at the moment.  We've tentatively--or carelessly, presumptuously--given ourselves Christmas as the deadline for a first draft, though just twenty single-spaced pages in, I have this feeling that we've taken on a beast that will be with us for some months and probably much longer than two more mere months!

Time to get up for a stretch before I turn into oatmeal.  Maybe I'll walk to the post box down the road--a favorite daily distraction in a year of sitting. at. our. kitchen. table.