Released from Medical House Arrest

     I had a doctor's appointment on Tuesday, with the result that I have been released from medical house arrest. I can drive again. I can walk outside, and I can put my foot flat on the floor as long as I'm wearing shoes.

    Was I still limping when I left the doctor's office because my foot hurt or because I was afraid it would hurt? Or out of habit?

    The first thing I did was get in the car and drive to Rogue Roasters for a latte. I felt the freedom of a teenager with her first driver's license. I can go where I want when I want. 

    I went to Rogue Roasters and had a latte.

    Then I went to the grocery store, just for the pleasure of walking up and down the aisles and seeing what was there.   

     If I wear the big, restrictive boot, the doctor said, I could take walks outdoors. When I asked if I could walk the quarter-mile down the hill on a gravel road to the mailbox, he raid, "Listen to your foot."

   My foot says, "Not too fast." It says, "I feel swollen. Can you put some ice on me?" It says, "Whew! This is weird." It says, "How nice to feel the floor under my shoe again."

   The day after I drove home, I took my first walk since well before Christmas. I marveled at the hard frost on the dirt road. I skirted storm-strewn puddles. I walked with the nip of fresh air on my cheeks and through sunrays dappled on the path. I walked through the winter silence of the forest. When I stopped to listen to it, I heard an overwintering bird chirping a staccato rhythm in the leaves. I walked a quarter-mile through the woods, a distance which, as I was limping and lurching and stopping frequently to gaze around me, took forty-five minutes.

    It was a joyous walk. 

    I am outdoors again.

The Way I Like to Cook

     Tonight I will have fish stacks for dinner—three corn tortillas layered with Alaska cod (sautéed with onions, tomatoes, lemon juice, and oregano) and feta cheese, baked for ten minutes, and topped with  yogurt with a smidgeon more oregano. Yum.

    How do I know it's yummy? 

    Because I had it last night. And I'll probably have it again tomorrow night.  

    I like to cook by recipe, and, since recipes generally come proportioned for four (or more), I cook a dish for four and don't have to cook again for four days. Sometimes I halve the recipe. Sometimes I stagger two recipes. Sometimes I freeze dinners. I like to cook one-dish meals—I don't do a slab of meat and sides. My usual dessert is yogurt with tahini and honey.

    I have 32 cookbooks and four years' worth of Bon Appétit magazines, a great source of recipes. Some cookbooks are so well used they're falling apart.

Others, like the two-volume Horizon Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating and Drinking through the Ages, I have never actually cooked from, but I'm always thinking I will. Some, like Great Recipes from around the World, Paul Pépin's Art of the Chicken, and the Heritage of America Cookbook, are just simply beautiful books. I have some old standbys, like the Joy of Cooking and the Moosewood Cookbook, and some specialty cookbooks, like the Cake Bible. I have a box of well-worn, fifty-year-old handwritten recipes and another, neater box of cut-out-and-pasted-on recipes.

I have a couple of collections of family recipes. One is called Quick and Easy and Sometimes Good. One of my cookbooks, "The Prize-winning Recipes from the Pyrofax Gas Teen-age Baking Contest," has a recipe from me in it.

    When my mother gave me a small specialty cookbook entitled The Twelve Days of Christmas Cookbook, with a wassail recipe I still use, she inscribed it not "To Diana, who loves to cook," but "To Diana, who loves cookbooks."                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Kindness to Friends and Strangers

    People have been overwhelmingly kind to me while I have been house-bound after foot surgery. They have picked up groceries, taken me to appointments, brought me lunch (and left a dinner at the same time), called to check in, stoked the woodbin with firewood, brought me books, and emptied my garbage. 

    It warms my heart to know that kindness among friends remains high, especially when kindness among strangers seems to be diminishing. Not only do we have fewer interactions with strangers— grocery-store clerks, bank tellers, librarians—now that we can self-help ourselves with those tasks, but anger and greed from the general public seem to be squeezing dry our opportunities to do a kindness to a stranger. For instance:

    When I noticed the low-air icon lit up on my dashboard a few months ago, I stopped at the gas station in Jacksonville to have them put air in it, as I have an unreasonable fear that the tire will blow up in my face if I do it.

       The gas station attendant said no, he wouldn't do that for me. 

    "It's a new policy," he said, "We can't put oil in the car or air in the tires. We can't do anything except put gas in the gas tank."

     The reason, he said, was that the company has been sued by people who claim things like their car blew up because of the oil the attendant put in it.

    Too many suits, too many angry people looking to cast blame.

    The man stammered a bit more and then said, "Oh, I'll do it. I'm the manager. There's no one here to tell me I can't."

    That was kind. 

    But it's heck of a world, isn't it? if a person isn't allowed to do a kindness to a stranger. Thank goodness we still do kindnesses to our friends and that a sense of doing a kindness to a stranger can override unnecessary rules.