I confess to a love for fermented drinks. Distilled products, my husband’s cuppa, don’t do it for me, but a warm, brown lager…yes, please. I’m partial to dry wines, mead, and a sucker for champagne.

Not that I drink that much alcohol but am wont to consider a bottle of ale around nine a.m, following coffee. Something about a rich brew suggests breakfast to me. Maybe it’s the barley. Up to this point, I’ve managed to delay any move for the baby grand, where I keep mead and wine at hand, until well after noon.

Following Yule, we had two bottles of mead leftover from the holiday, but they were dwindling by last week.   As I neared the halfway mark on the second bottle, my source running dry in February, I drank mead more and more slowly, finally rationing to half a glass a night. Someone desperately needed to make a liquor store run. Not me. I don’t leave the house unless there’s an emergency.

As I said, I don’t drink that much alcohol so running out of mead didn’t count as a state of catastrophe. Besides, there’s microbrewery ale in the refrigerator out in the garage. Wine in the closet in the basement. And there’s that bottle of champagne we keep for celebrations. I told my husband this bubbly was necessary because you never know when you need to pop a cork and no one wants to spoil the effect by a prior trip to the store.

In Kansas, I remember a time when liquor stores were closed on Sunday. Heck, I remember when I had to drive over the county line to buy beer at all. Not so anymore. Liquor sales are now legal on Sundays after noon.

So what does my husband do with his day off? Just to keep his wife happy and inebriated? By himself, he makes a run and comes home with a box. Three bottles of mead, two in the blue bottles with wire bales I like (I reuse them to make fermented soda pop and rose petal wine) and one of Chaucer’s. Good man!

And the only thing this has to do with writing is that sometimes I write with a glass at my left hand.