January Catalog
Mimi staggered out to get a fresh box of tissues. "Penn," she gasped, "My nose is so sore. I was just looking at a show about Florida, sunshine and flowers. Why don’t we pick up and leave winter behind, now you’re retired? We could sleep there tomorrow evening, and eat oranges in the sun in the morning." As sleet ticked against the window, she blew into a tissue.
The grip had settled in Penn Humphries’ chest, leaving his head sore, but clear, He managed to twist about in his easy chair to project astonishment. "You ought to have inner resources," he told his wife. "I mean, winter is the time for rest and planning. This is when nature lets us read good books and enjoy the fruits of our labor. What d’y’ want to go and spoil the whole thing for?" Mimi just waved with the tissue box and wandered back to the bed room.
Penn had about perfected his corner of the living room. Within a grunt’s reach, to his right, stood a case of books: poetry, an encyclopedia of gardening, the dictionary, "The Life of Samuel Johnson," and his cousin, Marion’s book, "How to Think Like Einstein." At his left elbow, a reading lamp stood on the table he used for cough syrup. Just now though, he had a slick stack of nursery catalogs, fresh from the mail. But he reached first to finger a volume off the lower shelf. He grunted as he seized it and, after a few minutes page-turning perusal, grunted again as he found what he wanted in Houseman’s "Last Poems," his memory was still with him. He read huskily, for his own benefit, because it was a comforting vision.
"The year might age, and cloudy/ The lessening day might close,/ But air of other summers/ Breathed from beyond the snows,/ And I had hope of those."
Beyond the icy window pane, darkness took the landscape and, in the quiet house, the yellow pool of light extended only to his big easy chair. Penn’s savoring of winter solitude was only marred, not dispelled, by the sudden onset of his barking cough, which aggravated the headache he was ignoring. Exerting control, he dipped into the first of the catalogs to plot out their vegetable garden for spring. Heck, he’d be starting his peppers in February, just next month. Better get a move on. He leafed toward the peppers but got hung up on "Cavallo Nero," Tuscan black cabbage, really kale, imagine eating that...he made a small vacation to Dante’s kitchen. So then, "Sessantina," "About Sixty," a new variety of that Italian ancestor of all crucifers, broccoli di rape. His eye strayed on to the Venetian spires of Romanesco cauliflower and those deplorable names given to broccoli. "Packman, phooie!" he sneered. Right across the page varieties of beets, "Chioggia," and "Forono," took him back to Italy, to beans cooked in a bottle, "Tongues of Fire," "Canellini," and "Fava." Limp-wristed fennel, finocchio; Proust’s cardoon; artichokes, they say you can grow them in the north now? He drifted toward the Amalfi coast, drawn by the mental image of a plate bearing globe artichokes, steaming up the olive oil and fresh lemon juice with which they had just been drizzled. The land of eggplant, melanzane; on the pages of a half dozen catalogs they lay, glossy black, purple, pink, white, striped, wide, thin, long, short, Italian-style and Oriental, but Penn knew to look for the ones with a purple calyx. Eggplant led, as surely as day leads to night, to escarole. Cooked with celery and dashed with lemon juice or tossed in salad, it was beyond improvement. He checked it.
As a gust of wind slashed ice against the window to his left, Penn’s concentration broke. Night had gotten on and he was going to have to take himself to bed in a bit, but he was eager to look through the flower catalogs, to help ward off the cold and his cold. He dropped a few catalogs off his lap and the offerings of a rose company chanced open. He loved roses, antique mosses, with their raspberry-canes, the cabbages, the teas.... He opened the catalog’s heavy-weight pages and stared at "Souvenir de la Malmaison." He leafed on, taking in the intense pastels until he could nearly smell them. In fact, he could smell them.
Penn slapped the booklet shut. Sweet mother...he had actually smelled the damn roses. He was hallucinating from all the cough-syrup. He glared at the clock. He had wasted away the whole evening and Mimi would be sound asleep. And he was undergoing major distortion of his perceptions. His eyes rolled in their net of inflamed capillaries to settle on the book of Houseman’s poems he had left open on the broad arm of his chair. As if some disappointed guardian angel directed him, Penn read the stanza which followed the one he had sought originally:
"They came and were and are not/ And come no more anew;/ And all the years and seasons/ That ever can ensue/ Must now be worse and few."
Penn heaved up from his chair, treading fragrant vintage out of the slippery cascade of disregarded catalogs. Abruptly, he went rigid. Bending, he lifted a fist-full of catalogs, which he sniffed with a red nose, luscious with the cold and suspicion. "Scented ink," he growled. "Be damned!" He snapped off the light and set course by memory for their bedroom. Her bedside lamp showed Mimi still awake, her head propped on a folded pillow, the tissue-box resting on her stomach.
Penn came to lean on the brass rail at the foot of the bed, staring intently at her. Mimi’s eyes opened fully. "You going to be all right, Penn?" she asked.
He shook his head softly, like a dog with a sore ear. "Hon, first thing in the morning you set the thermostat on fifty and start packing. We’re going to Florida."
appeared January, 2002