Category Archives: post-apocalypse fiction

Scrap the Pizzas!

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Do you know, it almost feels weird to be writing about normalcy again, after the long occupation?

A pleasant sort of weird.

Today’s crisis involves 120 bagels, a vat of tomato soup, and a whole lot of plastic.

It has always struck me as ironic that the Save the Earth and Feed the People groups can’t find cheap ways of working together. I have a thousand two-ounce plastic cups which I will be filling with cheese today (well, a couple hundred of them) and then lidding with yet more plastic.

Now the good thing about all that plastic is any lidded container is a treasure to the homeless people lucky enough to get motel vouchers so they can stay in a 10×10 with heat and tv and–best of all–a microwave and fridge so we can give them some heat-and-serve food. They will reuse the little plastic cup until it falls apart – or someone shrinks it in the microwave. :] Things happen.

We (my friends Amelia, Michele, and I) were all set to do bagel pizzas on Sunday. We had all the fixings for veggies and cheese, and Amelia very kindly was bringing summer sausages to slice up and add for meat options.

Enter snowmageddon, and our fun fellowship of cheerful women slapping pizzas together has turned to Wendy shoving frozen bagels still in plastic wrap out the door with little cups of cheese for make-it-yourself faux grilled cheese sandwiches (call them bagels au gratin?) and a large styrofoam cup of tomato soup. Yes, stryofoam. If you don’t like us using it, buy us some stuff that’s biodegradable but still warms your hands if you’re not one of the lucky ones and you’re camping up behind…. never mind where. The police will go rip it up if they know, sadly. God bless everyone involved in those decisions and I don’t fault the officers for doing what they’re ordered to do. I fault the ones who ordered it. Thanks.

So here I am, alone in my kitchen, surrounded by plastic and feeling desperate to shove these meals out the door before the snow flies. And thanking God that the people whose names and stories I have come to know are safe inside motel rooms.

Some of them might get in trouble, because if they have two beds and only use one, they will share. They may “rent” out the other bed. They may have friends and relations. They may just know someone from the food bank. If they get caught, everyone gets in trouble.

Sigh. Gotta go stuff little plastic cups with cheese now. Have a great day and stay warm, wherever you are!

The Monday Book: THE LONG WINTER by Laura Ingalls Wilder

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I found THE LONG WINTER at a thrift store, one of my first fun outings in a year involving non-socially-distant hiking. The title looks different when you’ve emerged from your chrysalis, post-vaxx and post-winter weather, to go do something with a friend.

Most American school children read this book before they graduate middle school. As a child I had the boxed set and devoured them over and over. It’s a little odd to read them as an adult and realize how much sweetness hides some truly terrible things.

Last night I read LONG WINTER in one sitting. How did I miss that sense of threat that pervades every chapter, as the family ticks down from the last of the butter to the last of the milk to the last of the flour to the last of the potatoes, to the last of the burnable fuel? The dawning realization of the townspeople that the train was not coming, the train that was their literal supply line, anchoring them out on the prairie with the safety of coal and already-ground wheat and other “new-fangled” things like kerosene. Ma’s ingenuity at producing a button lamp from axle grease. Pa buying the last two cans of oysters in town for Christmas dinner. The hay sticks that they burned as fast as they made them; twist hay to have the warmth to twist more hay.

And the darkness. The robbery that Pa participated in to get the supplies he came home with.The dying of the lamp on Christmas Night. The inability to buy flour or lumber at any price because “Banker Ruth bought it all.” What happened to Banker Ruth when winter was over, one wonders?

The heroism of Almanzo and Cap, going to buy wheat from a man in the middle of nowhere, is offset by the fact that Almanzo walled up 150 bushels of wheat before they left. So no one could ask him to buy it.

It is a different book as an adult than as a child. I’ve observed there are several rewrites and washouts of these American classics over time, based on racist overtones and the charming overwrites of things like being illegally in Indian territory, or quite possibly murdering a railroad employee, etc. You know, these are still American classics. Just, now that I can see what wasn’t meant to be visible to children, I appreciate Wilder’s two-layer genius in writing all the more. She told the whole story, twice at the same time, for two different audiences. Gonna go back and read the rest of these now.

Yep, American classics: fear, prejudices, frontier justice, snowball fights, family spirit, and all.