Dear J,

This is the month I sit at my low water mark. Christmas was an anxious holiday for me even as a kid: I felt like I had to radiate delight and gratitude. In my teens and twenties, December reminded me how little money I had that wasn’t being handed to me by Mom and Dad.

Hey, I ran across a depression-coping technique in one of the filthy cartoons that make P and I laugh: the idea is to list all the things for which you feel gratitude. I never would have thought of gratitude as an antidote to depression! But it works, kinda, a bit. Like all the other stuff helps.

Amazon Fresh delivers a frozen banana cream pie that needs to defrost for at least eight hours; if you have the patience, you get a slice with a silky texture, plenty of banana flavor and whipped cream that is airy, with high peaks.

I’m grateful for reliable delivery service in a time of pandemic.

P, his sister and nephew are all playing a PS4 game together online; we’ve got a headset with a microphone plugged into the controller, so they can all hear each other as they play. It’s a game centered around collaboration. You play as cooks in a kitchen, prepping, cooking, plating and delivering meals. Frantic fun, and hearing P laugh buoys my spirits like nothing else.

I spent a lot of my younger years feeling lonely. This is no self-pity party; I never went hungry, always had nice clothes and shoes, access to books and toys and so on. But the loneliness was real, and I wonder if that’s part of the reason I cling to P so tightly. (Other than, you know, his many wonderful qualities.)

I’m grateful to him. Also to Miss Penny, who apparently gets upset when I leave these days? P says she walks around calling for me, which… is adorable. We bought her a bunch of new toys, and she’s been having fun losing them. She’s decided that she loves the faux fur throw on our couch; she falls asleep staring in the direction of P’s office.

I’ve had some story and character ideas recently. I’ll make myself sit down with the bass next week. The PC will show up soon, and then I’ll be back to reading and writing on a real screen; this month, everything is routing through my phone.

I’m grateful that I can type this note, send an email, get groceries and burritos delivered, all thanks to this mini monolith in my hand.

Hey, I love you, J. I look forward to a future holiday where we make a gingerbread house together.

::hugs:: 

C/

Dear J,

Last time I wrote to you, I said something about feeling the urge to get an oar in, to steer myself out of the slough of despair. Occurred to me in retrospect that only using one oar, you’re doomed to go in circles. Whoops?

This week, I kept the pantry stocked, the house reasonably clean and even got laundry (my ancient nemesis) sorted.

Today we’re doing another pot roast. Same recipe as last time, but tweaked to address the issues last time, when the roast, potatoes and carrots cooked down too far, giving us something more hash-like than a pot roast, salty and spicy but not appropriately savory. So we used liberal amounts of beef stock to replace a thick beef consumme. I was less extravagant with pre-sear salting of the roast. We cut back on onions, and now…. we wait.

P and I have talked about establishing a tradition of big Sunday dinners that we prep together. This kitchen is big enough that we can work together easily; while I seared the beef and threw stuff into the Dutch oven, he cheerfully peeled and chopped potatoes and onions.

We didn’t talk about politics.

We’ve been watching the Mandalorian (Star Wars) TV series on Disney+, and Netflix released a holiday episode of the Great British Baking Show. We theorize about what differentiates winners from all the other super talented bakers who appear on the show. We also speculate inappropriately about the private lives of contestants and (after this last season) attempt to identify why the most recent seasons aren’t quite as magical as earlier ones. (I blame the people casting the hosts!)

I ran across an article today talking about the woman who wrote Harriet the Spy. I didn’t know that she died so young (45?) or that she was a lesbian. Irony: she took very little satisfaction from having written something I adored as a kid. She wrote another book, I guess, a YA novel about a girl falling for another girl… but the manuscript has vanished, and her estate apparently was happy to disappear any evidence of the author’s ‘scandalous’ love life.

We have made progress, darn it. A hundred years ago women couldn’t vote. Twenty years ago the idea of gay marriage was shocking to people.

Some things just take time. Like a pot roast?

::hugs:: 

C/