In 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s wife, Sara Fricker, spilled a pot of boiling milk on his foot. It was a happy occasion for literature, though perhaps not for Coleridge.
His friends went off on a hike to take in the splendors of nature, which they thought of as Nature, and the injured Coleridge had to stay behind, in the shade of some lime trees. There, he wrote one of the great works of Romantic poetry, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.”
In the poem, he imagines all of the glories that his friends are witnessing before realizing that he can enjoy nature (sorry, Nature) on a smaller scale, right there under the lime trees.
With the coronavirus still rampaging throughout the land, I have been feeling a little bit like Coleridge myself these days, except for the part about the burned foot.
Restaurants are open everywhere, but I am confined to my kitchen. It may be a little out of date (cherry wood cabinets, shiny black countertops), but I am OK with that. It is larger than a jail cell, too, yet the walls (variegated, dark backsplash) feel as if they are creeping in on me.
In happier times, my wife and I would go out to dinner every Friday night to enjoy the offerings of the town. We had a rotation of perhaps a dozen or 15 places that we would regularly visit, and often tried new restaurants as we heard about them.
Fortunately, all of our favorite restaurants are still open, and they all offer takeout. We still get carryout every week, but as our world contracts, the number of places we patronize is considerably smaller.
Some of this shrinking cannot be helped. There is one steakhouse we love but we haven’t ordered from there even once because the quality of the food would diminish tremendously in the time it would take to get it home. We also like to frequent one of the area’s iconic burger joints, and we went a couple of times when we could eat outside at a socially distant table.
But now it is too cold for outside dining — they have put away their tables — and the 10 minutes it would take to bring it home is just enough time to turn a great hamburger into an unappetizing, soggy mess.
Circumstances have limited our options. Now we only order takeout from restaurants that are quite close or have food that does not have to be particularly warm to enjoy. I find we get a lot of food from places that specialize in rice and sauce — Chinese food, Indian and the like — but that may just be because I am especially fond of Chinese and Indian food.
Pickiness comes into play too, though. The more we are sheltered in place, the more easily we are annoyed. Restaurants that used to please us we now find us wanting.
Maybe it loses something in the commute, like the steak or the hamburger would. Maybe the restaurants, which are under such existential stress these days, are finding ways to cut corners that they hope we do not notice. Maybe I am becoming even more crochety and curmudgeonly in my advancing age, though I hardly would have thought that possible.
Or maybe it is the effect of the lime-tree bower, my prison. Maybe it is the kitchen walls closing in on me. Maybe I miss the whole going-to-the-restaurant vibe more than I knew.
I suppose I should take advantage of the situation and write a great piece of literature. This column might have been good, if it hadn’t been for all that part in the beginning about Coleridge.
