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A palate cleanser is a neutral flavored food or drink that serves to cleanse your palate so you can taste something else more effectively. It is like a plate of crackers at a wine tasting.
Going for a walk, looking at cat pictures, playing some music, these are all palate cleansers. When the world goes mad, it’s good to pause frequently to rid yourself of the after taste. Fortunately the world goes mad quite often, so you’re entitled to lots of crackers.
My hubby is quite spoiled. He has me, right? So obviously he has found great favor with the Lord! I am laughing here, but he was sitting in his new leather chair his kid just got him, that looks out the window at my astounding flower garden full of so many birds, all while eating sausages. It was kind of like paradise. We have a birdbath and bird feeder and just this whole array of little flying creatures putting on quite the show.
A raven showed up the other day. That was kind of funny! I felt him long before I saw him. The whole atmosphere changed and there was just this charge of energy. They are huge, they sound very different from crows, and this one was crashing about through the trees rather clumsily making quite a racket. Also, he cleared our entire yard in an instant. The birds vanished, the cat ran under the house, and everybody just let the raven have whatever he wanted. I have no idea what he wanted, he just hung out and glared at us for a while.
We try to go walk together everyday. Hubby’s health is fairly good, especially since the smoke has lifted and the heatwave has now passed. I live near a bay that used to be lined for miles with these massive oak trees. Only a few of them are left now, so an effort to replant the oaks is being made. We like to go check on the baby oak trees. It’s a bit like watching paint dry, only slower.
This is not a very good picture, but they are the root balls of two trees that fell over and they look just like a couple of trolls chatting with one another and having tea. The day we took that walk, the Navy was doing an exercise which I knew nothing about. It was a bit funny because there was a siren that came out of nowhere and then sudden machine gun fire and I thought, Just fabulous, now I get to die in the middle of a forest with a couple of trolls having tea.
I really meant that “fabulous” too, as in I was a bit disappointed not to have had such an enchanting demise. Now I have to go back to just prying toast out of the toaster with a butter knife….
There are a lot of sad and frustrating things going on in the world right now. I’m not sure if Tolkien was the one who wrote in the LTR about how it was our job to make the sad things un-sad, but that was the general idea and I think it’s very good advice.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
I visited a house a few weeks ago that was built on the edge of a military artillery range. It was one of the most postapocolyptic things I’ve every experienced.
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We have some military bases from WW2 here that became state parks and they can feel a bit post apocalyptic, too! You’ll be walking in the woods and suddenly come upon a sidewalk, a lamp post, and a bunker, all overgrown of course.
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Wow. That sounds rather jarring.
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I grew up within 10 miles of an Air Force bombing range. I often heard 20mm canon fire. Trolls were rare in Eastern New Mexico, though.
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LOL! I’ve heard canon fire before, but never a machine gun. It probably wasn’t even a “machine gun,” but it was a large rapid fire weapon of some sort, shooting blanks I think because it was a drill. I could vaguely hear the word exercise on loud speakers, so that was somewhat reassuring. 🙂
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Be more specific. Just listening to music doesn’t clean your mental “palate”…if you already have music on the brain. If I went to a Manheim Steamroller concert, last night, listening to more instrumental music, today, would not free my mind. I’d have to listen to something with powerful lyrics, maybe, OR just…as Depeche Mode says…”enjoy the silence.”
If you want to talk cleansers, let’s talk about the bottled water I was served in Athens, Greece. Now, THAT was magical water; it stripped the flavors of the local lasagna right off my tongue, allowing me to dive right into dessert. That has never happened for me (before). It was a magical meal, that summer.
There are not enough crackers in the world to cleanse me from the madness this world seems to generate…or, should I say, the madness HUMANS generate. I cannot speak for the other species. If birds and bees are contributing to my foul outlook, I will have to have a stern talking with them…once I find a translator. Also, that is WAY too many crackers for one person to eat. I cannot poop enough to cleanse the bowels that will need cleaning after my foolish attempt to purify my tongue…er, mind.
That was no ordinary raven, then. I feel it was a spirit, not just a bird. Some presence wanting you to be aware of it, a past acquaintance, perhaps.
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