Elizabeth Loupas

After all the excitement last month—comets! conjunctions! occultations! penumbral eclipses!—this month is quieter. There is some good planet viewing, however, particularly of Saturn.

• March 8th: the moon, just two days to full, rises in the east at nightfall, just above the star Regulus (Alpha Leonis, the brightest star in the constellation Leo) and the plant Saturn.
• March 9th: the moon rises between Regulus and Saturn, with Regulus above it and Saturn below it. A moon sandwich!
• March 10th: the full moon rises below both Regulus and Saturn. Saturn is at its brightest for the year. One of my favorite childhood memories is the awe I felt the first time I observed Saturn and its rings through my little 60x telescope.
• March 20th: the Vernal Equinox occurs at 6:44 a.m. Central Daylight Time, marking the beginning of Spring (yay!) in the Northern Hemisphere.

And speaking of Saturn: just this week it was reported that scientists found a moon hidden in one of Saturn’s outer rings. How cool is that? Saturn has a lot of moons (sixty-one, counting the new one) in addition to its rings, but there’s something about an unknown and mysterious moon hidden away within a ring. How could that be worked into a story?

We all have “comfort food”—foods that either evoke our childhoods or special happy times in our lives or just make us feel safe and comforted. One of mine is popcorn—every Friday night was popcorn night at our house when I was growing up, and I still have and use the pan my father used to pop his corn. He would make two pans’ worth, put it in a big roaster with butter and salt, and give each of us a little dish-full of our own. The dishes were green Melmac. Heaven!

Comfort food isn’t something we eat every day, or even necessarily our favorite food. It’s just—well—comforting. Comfort reading is much the same. My favorite sort of reading is a big, thick, richly-textured serious historical novel, with lots of detail about another place and time. But my comfort reading is E.F. Benson’s deliciously witty Lucia novels.

I love Lucia (Mrs. Emmeline Lucas to the uninitiated), her aide-de-camp in the culture wars Georgie Pillson, her great rival Miss Elizabeth Mapp and her lesser adversary Mrs. Daisy Quantock. I can read straight through all six Lucia novels and then go back and start again from the beginning. Bliss! Why do they soothe my soul so deeply? I’m not sure. English society was certainly undergoing enormous upheaval in the period between the two world wars, but in backwater villages like Riseholme and Tilling, order remained. It is that sense of order and place that I love. There was a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do. It had nothing to do with morality. It was about behavior. I think it’s the same craving for order that leads me to read old etiquette books with such nostalgic delight.

What is your comfort reading? How does it differ from your favorite books?

A terribly sick doggie over the weekend. This morning at last he seems to be better. Not sure if it was some kind of bacterial or viral thing, or just some contraband delicacy he came across in the back yard—the vet seemed to be leaning toward a dietary indiscretion because sick as he was, Mr. Boo had no fever. In any case, about six-thirty last night he suddenly got up, stretched, ate food, drank water, and looked around as if to say “What’s all the fuss?” He slept normally through the night with no emergencies. Life chez Loupas can now carry on as usual, I hope.