Snow yesterday around sunset.

All of it melted today. Outbreak or not, it’s still mud season.

Last year I read A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre (Voyage autour de ma chambre, published in 1794, but of course I read a recent translation by Stephen Sartarelli). I found it at the township library completely by chance, and only a few months later now, I can’t remember why it caught my eye.

I’m glad it did. I won’t review it here, but I will say that it’s amusing, and now and then funny. De Maistres was under house arrest for dueling, an aristocratic punishment for an aristocratic offence. He wrote a short volume about some of the objects in his room, which of course involved various digressions and tangents.

“Towards the end of the 18th century, a young aristocrat, confined to his house in Turin for 42 days as a result of a duel (one presumes his antagonist came off worse), decided to both ease his boredom and make a joke of it all by writing a – well, there it is in the title,” writes Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian. “It was Blaise Pascal who said that all the troubles of humanity came about because of the difficulty men had in simply being happy to sit alone in their rooms; here is the result of such an enforced confinement. And it is wonderful.”

His book comes to mind now for obvious reasons. Time, then, to look around my house and find some objects to write about. I’ll never be as witty as De Maistres, but so what. When circumstances keep you at home, best to ruminate on the clutter around the house. Why else harbor that clutter if you don’t do that sometimes?

Such as one my worn t-shirts, the kind you don’t wear any more, but don’t discard. This is the back; the front is a corporate logo.

In 2002, when I worked downtown editing a magazine, Krispy Kreme opened a location not far from my office. The shop was giving away free doughnuts and t-shirts specially made to extol that particular store, hence the mention of the Loop. The doughnuts didn’t last long back at the office, naturally, but I wore the shirt now and then for a few years, one of the few advertising shirts I was willing to wear.

KK was on a growth bender at the time that didn’t end well, but didn’t put the company out of business, either. The brand contracted for a while, including the closure of the downtown store and one near my house in the suburbs. In the 2010s, the company seems to have grown at a more measured, and presumably more sustainable pace.

In fact, now you can buy KK doughnuts in a score of countries on every continent except Antarctica. But I remember when it was a Southern thing. So Southern, as in the Deep South, that I’d never heard of it growing up in Texas. I discovered it when I went to school in Tennessee, and what a discovery. Delicious hardly did them justice. Good eating by yourself and always welcome at gatherings.

(I realize looking at the 2009 posting that I haven’t mentioned Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys in a long time. Someone has to keep that name going, and that someone is me.)

What I wrote nearly 11 years ago about the KK location that closed is still true when it comes to the nearest open one to us, about 20 minutes away: ” I’m fond enough of their product… but the truth was, the only time we ever bought doughnuts at the Hanover Park location was when we got a hold of coupons offering two boxes for the price of one, since a dozen normally comes at a premium to more ordinary doughnuts.”