For months, I disappeared from everything, reluctantly shopping for groceries when refrigerator and cupboard were both finally bare, the last bag of Trader Joe's noodles eaten, awash in more and more booze, years of it.
Now no booze. Interesting change.
I'm calling it a diet rather than recovery.
I don't want to recover. I just want to put off my next alcoholic drink indefinitely. Diet is easier for my spirit to swallow. I've invested 21 honest days in my diet so far with no insurmountable urges or temptations.
Uncorking, decanting, let it breathe, polish the right glasses, a toast, first sips. I miss the little ceremonies with wine. Cocktails were full of ceremony, too. There's so much drama around drinking. We'll always remember the truly tipsy.
We had a house in France for 20 years. Simone didn't drink alcohol at all, ever. But she delighted in speaking French to cousin-in-law Jean-Claude and cousin Fabienne and talking to the French proprietors and clerks. We tasted at small vineyards, under Jean-Claude's direction and hoisted eyebrow, choosing one or more types and styles, to buy a half case or a case if we'd found a taste we were looking for (cedar and leather for me) and it could age for years. Jean-Claude had a restaurant-grade wine cooler in his garage. I had an attic. Complex, durable reds were my preference.
When we took possession of the house in France, the first guides we bought were, rightfully, Michelin: sights and restaurants. But the third essential book was an English-language pilgrimage to boutique vineyards tucked into pockets of land throughout our intensely cultivated region. We had all manner of microclimates and microsoils in Occitanie. Our tiny town hid one outstanding vintner. He sold almost his entire production to a single resort in Switzerland. Or we could buy a bottle locally for an exorbitant price at our struggling convenience store with the day-old produce.
We walked the vineyards of our village almost daily. It was especially kind at twilight when the heat left the dirt. Fragrant. Flowering. If rain had settled the dust, you could easily see the Pyrenees, ramped between France and Spain. In the summer, the air was hot as a skillet outside cool shuttered houses. Prickly pear cactus grew in our neighborhood. It got cold, too: we spent one January there and immediately had our contractor replace the old miserly heat with something much warmer faster.
Vineyards were sometimes the only business in a village. The man of the house farmed. The woman held down the fort at the barn where the stuff was made and sold to any travelers who rolled up. Seasonal labor arrived for the harvest. Every fourth town it seemed had a cave coopérative where local farmers pooled their crops. I felt grounded in France when I had a box or two of small-production, high-grade wine in the trunk of our rental.
Twenty-four days without a drink, and my webinar producers sent me wine as a gift. The universe likes its little jokes.