Popcorn Soothes

Popcorn Soothes

She decided to make some popcorn. She felt vaguely hungry, though she knew she shouldn’t for she’d had a big supper. But, with the house now quiet and the television softly chattering away in the background, she felt the desire to munch on something to occupy her mind.

She’d spent the evening bustling around the house, tending to a thousand gift-wrapping details. She went through a peculiar anxiety every year, a collapse of self-confidence regarding her gift choices, and a lingering nagging sense that she had forgotten someone from the list. As she had done for so many Christmas’, she sat in the center of the living room floor, surrounded by plastic shopping bags, tissue, paper, ribbon, tape, scissors, and cards, trying to sort through the jumble, trying to remember what she bought for whom.

This year, because money was tight, the list was shorter and the gifts far less lavish, but instead of the guilty feeling she’d anticipated, she felt liberated. She had come to resent how materialistic the holiday had become, how corralled she felt into the general mob mentality of more, more, more. What she had wanted to do was make gifts for everyone but she had run out of time, and in the end, courage. She was pretty sure that some of the more significant relatives would smile graciously at her hand-made offerings but complain bitterly behind her back at her cheapness later.

Wrapping the gifts tonight was like solving a 3-D puzzle and she had that same sense of self-satisfied accomplishment when she pulled the last ribbon tail to a fine curl and set the final gift aside. She smiled as she looked over the little treasure trove. She felt good this year with her choices, having finally released herself from trying to meet the unspoken expectations that she usually bent to. But a twinge of anxiety still pulled at her and she translated the feeling into that indistinct urge to nibble.

So there she stood by the stove, listening to the ragged rhythm of the kernels bouncing in the pot while she swayed the long handle across the burner. The smell erupted across the kitchen and filled her senses, taking her mind back through years in rapid acceleration. The smell of popcorn had always meant Dad was getting ready to watch TV, probably Hockey Night in Canada, meaning, in turn, that she could stay up, curled in under his arm and listening to the contrived voices of grown men pretending to argue inanely about the whereabouts of a tiny, flattened, rubber sphere on a limited expanse of manicured ice.

The sound of popcorn brought the image of her bunk in the family camper drilling through her mind. The exploding kernels echoed like rain beating on the fiberglass roof only inches above her head. She loved to laying there, snug in her sleeping bag, the cool night air filtering through the breezeway windows on either side, her parents snoring softly just below her. The rain drummed on the roof and in her heart, driving away all other sounds, freeing her imagination, and lifting her spirit into flights of fancy out among the clouds.

The lid on the pot strained as the expanding corn pushed against it, the quick-fire popping slowing as the space for the kernels diminished. She waited until the popping sounds were nearly stilled, and lifted the cover to pour the grains into the big white enamel bowl she had used for this purpose since she was a little girl. As she drizzled the melted butter over the top, she thought of each night spent studying in the kitchen of her childhood home, the heat from the oil stove warming her back as she tried to focus some degree of interest on the stuffy, parched subjects that promised to open her future to her. She made popcorn then too, nibbling away in an effort to calm her panic over her performance and to keep herself awake.

Tonight she wondered what purpose popcorn served now. Was it comfort? Was is solace? Was it a gossamer thread into the treasured memories of times now long passed? Was she sad in some obscure way, needing to fill a void that gaped somewhere deep inside, that no other tangible resource could actually reach? Or was she just hungry, and popcorn soothes?