Today I Want a Fancy Salad

Can someone please make it for me

Steffany Ritchie
4 min readFeb 11, 2024
A colorful plate of salad with boiled eggs, black olives, lettuce, tomatoes, croutons and more
Photo by Anthony Leong: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-vegetable-salad-with-boiled-egg-2092903/

It’s lunchtime. It’s Sunday in February, and raining and gray in the north of Scotland. I am hungry, as usual, an hour after my husband.

I feel sluggish, stodgy with carbs and meat and tea and biscuits. These are not traditionally salad days where I live.

I am wearing a fleece lined long sleeved t-shirt under a sweater and my thickest sweat pants. I want to be swaddled and cozy, but I also want to feel light.

I haven’t seen sunlight in what feels like weeks. It’s rainy and dark and cold. I caved and bought a S.A.D. lamp for the first time a couple of weeks ago.

It has become my near constant companion. Oh, I am only supposed to use it an hour a day? Tough, I now rely on it’s perky blaring light, convinced it is doing me some kind of good without feeling it yet either way.

I have long resisted their luminescent lure, coming from stiff upper lip second generation Catholic New England alcoholic Virginian stock. I practically raised myself.

Lately I think I have undiagnosed ADHD. Or maybe that’s just too much time watching bite sized videos about ADHD on the internet. I face a wave of crashing mood swings, achy joints, panic and apathy in my post Dad death Mom scary sick perimenopausal…

--

--

Steffany Ritchie

Hi, I write memoir, humor, music, and pop culture. American in Scotland.