When you live in a place where we figure if you steal food, you are probably really really hungry

My mom and dad are from a small town in northern Wisconsin. One set of aunt and uncle(s?) (my dad has two brothers, my mom has six siblings – they are all married and I have 26 first cousins) live in the town with stoplights, eight miles from the small town. Medford has three stoplights, I think? One of them is new this year. When we discovered two months ago, we were annoyed.

Years ago, I stayed with an aunt and uncle. They let me borrow a car. When they came home, my aunt asked where the keys were.

On the counter, I told her. Duh. Like I was going to keep them in my purse?

Why didn’t you just leave them in the car? she asked.

Umm. Because at the time, I lived in Austin and you would never leave the keys in the car in Austin?

Also, they did not give me a house key. Because why would they lock their house?

So yeah – roadside produce stands are on the honor system.

What the heck is happening to MY ARMS?

OK you guys. WHAT IS GOING ON?

For the record, I have been working out with weights for – *does the math in her head* – 26 years.

Nope, I am not muscle bound.

Nope, I am not lean.

I am sad to report that the adage “Great abs are made not in the gym but the kitchen” is absolutely true.

I am not willing to be hungry to lose weight and that’s kinda what it comes down to in my case. Plus I just like to eat. It’s my hobby. I don’t work out almost every day because I like to exercise, I work out almost every day because I like to eat.

And maybe if I worked out five hours a day, I wouldn’t have to worry about what was happening in the kitchen, but I can tell you that even when I was riding my bike to work every day – 20 miles, round trip – plus going to the gym at lunch because I was bored and I am not paid by the hour so why would I work through lunch?, I was still not ultra lean.

My ancestors gave me a body designed to survive in famine and in winter, which I suppose will be useful if the apocalypse comes but honestly does not do much for me fashion wise now.

But then I remind myself that if my worst problem is that I get more than enough food, I have a really great life.

But now I think I am getting a worse problem?

Despite the bicep and tricep work – 26 years’ worth, I am getting Old Lady Arms.

You know what I am talking about. I have also heard them called Cafeteria Lady Arms.

I am getting the upper arms that don’t stop moving.

Maybe this is a slightly chubby person thing? Does this happen to thin women? Do their upper arms keep shaking after the intentional movement has stopped?

Is this a problem I could solve if I lost weight in my upper arm? Or would the skin stay the same size?

I feel as if my body is betraying me. I exercise. I eat a healt – ok, a moderately decent diet. I don’t smoke (yet, but once I already have face wrinkles, I will start, because it looks like fun and the only thing keeping me from doing it now is vanity), I don’t drink (not for moral reasons but because I think beer and wine taste awful and for the calories, I would rather have butter), and I now, unlike my misspent youth, stay out of the sun.

Yet I occasionally catch a surprise glimpse of my neck. Or an in-focus view of my eyes. And now the upper arms. And I wonder when it all happened and if all my sisters who have gone before me were as surprised by their new selves as I am.

 

 

Contemplating my own mortality at 10:11 p.m. on a Thursday when I should be sleeping and will surely regret it tomorrow but I can’t sleep anyhow so whatever

I find myself drifting into melancholy lately. Part of it is probably because everything is all verklumpt at work – new CEO, new VPs, new boss. Most of what I loved about my job was the people I worked with, especially my boss but he is not my boss anymore.

I need to find a new job but I don’t want to look for a new job because it’s hard and I don’t feel like doing anything hard. I thought I was done with hard.

(OK you may laugh at that because how dumb is that to think you ever get to a point in your life where you don’t have to do hard things?)

Everything is changing.

Have I mentioned I hate change?

Except I want to escape my life now. Which would be change. But – it would be change I choose, right? And that makes all the difference.

I think the other part of it is that for me, summer is over.

We were robbed of a decent May and June and then early July was hectic. We had a chance to visit the Museum of the American Military Family, which is the very first time in my life I have ever seen my life represented in some way outside of actually living my life. (Except for Major Dad, of course.)

The lives of military brats don’t show up in popular culture. This museum is just a small collection in what used to be someone’s house but there are archives dating back 100 years – diaries military brats and spouses wrote about their lives and artifacts that I recognized – beer steins from Germany – and many I didn’t.

The woman who runs the museum stepped out for a second and left Marido and me alone. I burst into tears. I still don’t know why.

I, too, shined my father’s shoes.

We went on vacation in mid July and – now we’re done.

There is nothing to look forward to.

Even vacation didn’t have all that we wanted. That first photo of the water? It’s of the same dock as the header photo for this blog. But the front half of the dock has been washed away. Lake Superior doesn’t care about what people build.

We had our vacation, which, even without half of the dock, was lovely, but it’s over. And now there is nothing ahead of us but winter and death.

Honestly. That’s what it looks like from here. Winter. Cold. Then death.

 

When you can’t tear down that wall, you go around it (figuratively, not literally)

Can we all agree that the greatest tragedy possible is when a man has to wait to use a public restroom?

Of course it is! What? A LINE FOR THE MEN’S ROOM? What kind of monster would ever think this was a good thing? And if it ever did happen, we would want men to be comfortable while they waited, right? Hence the chairs outside of the men’s room at this theater. No chairs outside the ladies, though. We are made of stronger stuff and don’t need the be comfortable while we wait.

Hahahahaha. I joke.

It’s not a tragedy if a man has to wait for a public restroom. I mean, in theory, it’s not a tragedy. We don’t know what it looks like when men wait because it never happens.

Unless we take over.

Which is what a few other women and I did at the airport in Albuquerque recently.

The ladies was closed for cleaning. The two family restrooms were in use.

There was a certain degree of urgency: the need to pee plus the need to catch a plane.

And the ladies was blocked.

So I did what any rational person would do.

I asked the man who came out of the men’s room if it was empty. When he said it was, I told the other women waiting that I would stand guard if they wanted to go in if they would do the same for me.

In the spirit of solidarity, they agreed. And our missions were accomplished.

Marido was stunned when I told him. “You BLOCKED the men’s room?” he asked.

“I blocked it from MEN,” I said. “It was being used.”

What else was I supposed to do? I needed to go.

Are we women really supposed to wait to pee and men are never supposed to wait? It’s time. We all wait or none of us wait. Potty parity.

Also, it was warm enough that I actually wanted ice in my water, which has not happened in like thirteen years

I had to go to Charleston for work, which, all things considered, is not the worst thing, although leaving Wisconsin in June seems like a bad idea. I wish I could have gone to Charleston in say, February, when winter here has gone on so long that a person might start to google, “Is it a crime to strangle people just for breathing too loudly in the dark cold that will not end and why do I even care about living when there is nothing on the horizon but ice and despair?”

But anyway. I had to go to Charleston with a bunch of co-workers who are from up here, which means they did not know what pimento cheese was and they did not know what fried dill pickles were, so I took the liberty of suggesting that we order both of them.

They thought they were OK but apparently not great which was fine with me because I ate most of it after I had given everyone a completely fair chance.

And then I got to have shrimp and grits which were delicious of course. It was a ton of food, as you can see, so I brought some home, even though I had forgotten to take a Tupperware with me –

what? you don’t take your own containers to restaurants?

I try to remember to bring a Tupperware with me when we go out to eat because restaurants give you way too much food and even though I would be delighted to eat it all in one sitting, it would not be wise.

Marido and I went to the chile cookoff in Milwaukee a few years ago. I calculated that we would be getting a total of 48 ounces of chile samples, which is a lot of food. (That’s three pounds of chile, in case you don’t remember any of this stuff. And for my international readers who use a logical measuring system, that’s about 1.4 kilos. No matter how you measure it, that’s a lot of food.)

I took several small Tupperware containers with me. I was worried people would laugh at me, but I was even more worried about wasting food or overeating.

I should not have worried.

I should have known.

As I scooped chile samples into the containers, people around me said, “What a great idea! I wish I had brought containers!”

I was with My People.

So I brought leftover shrimp and grits home and got two more meals out of it and it was delicious.

And my co-workers did not know what this was and asked if it was fingers.

 

You asked, I answered

I prefer the second recipe.

You can see I have updated it with my Great British Baking show by the gram information. I love my little food scale – it’s so easy to just pour flour and sugar into a bowl. Fewer dishes! More accurate!

Not written because I know this part by heart is that I often double the filling. It makes them gooey, but that’s OK – you just eat them with a spoon.

You might not need all the sugar – the recipe as written is very sweet. My co-worker Matt has been giving me rhubarb. It’s a new variety that’s not as tart as the School That Is Old Rhubarb, so I cut the sugar in half for his.

My grandma cooked and baked for us. I don’t think I ever arrived to visit her not to find cake, bars, cookies, or pie waiting. She would gather raspberries from the brambles by the railroad tracks and freeze them in old Cool Whip containers. When she had enough, she would make raspberry bars for us.

She had a crabapple tree in her yard and would put up crabapple preserves, which were delicious.

She made poppyseed roll and kolaches and pupaki. She informed me that I was not Czech, I was SLOVAK and there is a difference.

She made strudel and she made bread and she taught me how to make them as well. She taught me to make pie – “Don’t work the crust too much!” she warned. “It will get tough!”

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I worked on perfecting my strudel. (I didn’t have a lot to do when I wasn’t at work.)

I used the recipe in Joy of Cooking because I didn’t know by feel how much of anything to use. But my strudel wasn’t working. I wrote to my grandmother and sent her a copy of the Joy recipe.

“You need to let the dough rest longer than 20 minutes,” she wrote back. “A few hours at least. And put a little bit of vinegar in the dough.”

She was right. By the time I left Chile, I made an awesome strudel. I still do, although I more recently, I have been working on pie. (Yum. Pie. I need to write about pie. I will do that.)

I didn’t want much from my grandmother’s house after she died, but I was very happy to be able to get her strudel cloth. Every time I make strudel now, I think of her.

She has passed her legacy on to her family. Below you see the rolls we made for her funeral.

 

 

Because my uncle’s nickname is Ole and he loves rhubarb and he kinda started it

I know I said I wasn’t going to write about the funeral, but I lied.

I sat next to my uncle at the lunch after the funeral.

I told him I had brought rhubarb bars and asked if he wanted one. “I made them with Granma’s recipe,” I said.

Oh yes he wanted one. “I love rhubarb!” he said.

He asked if I felt like the layer between death and me is disappearing, which yes, I do feel like is happening.

Then he said something about how he is the layer so it’s even worse for him.

That’s when I decided that given these facts

• It’s after a funeral
• It’s about rhubarb
• His nickname is Ole

it might be OK to him tell the Ole/rhubarb/funeral joke, which I wrote about a while ago in this post.

No. Not just OK.

Required.

Ole is on his deathbed. Pastor Inqvist has been to visit Ole and to give him the last rites. After a cup of coffee with Lena, the pastor left.

Ole is upstairs. He is waiting to die. Which is boring. But what else does he have to do?

Then he smells this delicious aroma from the kitchen.

It’s rhubarb bars – his favorite.

“Lena!” he calls. “Lena!”

But she does not hear him.

He calls again.

No Lena.

He has to take action. He tries to sit up, but he is too weak. So he rolls out of bed, falls to the floor, rests, and then starts crawling: out of the bedroom, down the hall, to the stairs, down the stairs, one by one, to the kitchen.

He gets to the kitchen and slowly and painfully pulls himself up to the counter.

As he is reaching for a warm rhubarb bar, Lena walks in with a basket of clothes. She sees what he’s doing, drops the basket, and runs to him.

Ole looks at her in gratitude.

She slaps his hand and says, “Ach, Ole! For shame! Dose are for after da funeral!”

He loved it and made me tell it to my other uncles.

 

When your husband asks, Have you MET your family?

Marido and I had to up north recently for a family funeral. I don’t usually like to write about this sort of thing because I feel like this is not my story to tell and I feel awkward when people extend their sympathies to me but not to the people more directly affected – I feel as if I don’t deserve the sympathy in the same way my cousins do.

But I am not going to write about the funeral. I am going to write about food.

This is the second funeral we have attended in two months. Sadly, I have lost an uncle and an aunt. My uncle was 89, so his death was not unexpected, but my aunt was only 71, which does not seem that old at all.

We planned to drive up on Friday night and then come home right after the funeral, which was planned for 11:30 Saturday morning.

Which – leaves us with the problem of food.

Not that food is hard to get up north, but – what were our options?

Me: Should we go out for lunch after the funeral?

Marido: Why?

Me: Because it’s a five hour drive home! And I will be hungry!

Marido: Why would we need to go out to lunch? Won’t there be lunch after the funeral?

Me: Ummm. I don’t know.

Marido: And you don’t want to ask.

Me: No, that would be the height(h?) of tacky, I think. My cousins and my uncle are burying my aunt. They have far bigger concerns than lunch.

Marido: You are seriously worried there won’t be lunch?

Me: Maybe.

Marido: Have you met your family?

And then I realized oh yeah. He’s so right. When has there ever been a family event where there has not been a ton of food?

And there was food and as we do in Wisconsin, there was milk to drink, and it was lovely to see everyone, even on such a sad occasion.

My people look for any chance to get together. (Including funerals. Which are sad but still, we get to see each other.)

Marido thinks it’s a big deal to have people over for supper and thinks it’s a little weird that I make brownies for new neighbors and food for friends who have babies or when there is a death in the family.

He thinks it’s odd to write condolence notes: Nobody sent me a note when my parents died. Nobody helped me when my parents were sick. Nobody brought me food.

Me: Maybe because your parents didn’t form the reciprocal social relationships that lead to that sort of interaction.

He was annoyed when he tried to call me and I had my phone in airplane mode: What if there were an emergency? Then how would I reach you?

Me: You would call Maggie (our next door neighbor) or Ken (our catsitter). They both have keys to the house.

Marido: I don’t have their numbers!

Me: Then I guess you need to get them.

I am coming to realize that one of us grew up in a completely bizarre home.

I don’t think it was me. I. Whatever. I am descriptive instead of proscriptive when it comes to language.

Isn’t taking food for babies and for deaths normal? Isn’t writing condolence notes the right thing to do? Isn’t having people over to eat or having people stay at your house if they are visiting your city normal? Isn’t it normal to have a party that’s just a party and not a fundraiser for some politician I don’t care about?

(NB If you ever have a fundraiser at your house, do not make any effort with the food. Get the cheapest veg tray you can from the grocery store and don’t worry about it. Cooking all the food from scratch does not mean you will get more money. It just means you do more work for the same amount of money.)

(Even more important NB: Don’t have a fundraiser at your house.)

Me: So… What kind of social interactions did you parents have when you were a kid? Did they have friends? Did they know their neighbors?

Marido: They had some friends they would go out to dinner with, but people didn’t come to our house. That’s why I get so stressed when you invite people to dinner. I think the house needs to be perfectly clean for that.

Me: The house should be clean all the time, not just for company.

Marido:  Having people over is extra cleaning work.

Me: It shouldn’t be. The house doesn’t have to be perfect all the time, but it should be walk-in clean. That’s how I want it and I am just as important as company. Did they have parties?

Marido: No!

Me: Did people stay with you?

Marido: No!

Me: Did you stay with other people when you traveled?

Marido: No!

Me: What on earth did your parents teach you?

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe I am making this too complicated, but social relationships are not unidirectional

I told you I would write about rhubarb and now I am doing it.

For those of you in the south, I am sorry.

But by the same token, almost nobody up here knows the joys of collard greens or okra.

Here is how rhubarb happens:

You know someone.

People who pay for rhubarb have no friends or have no sense. It’s like paying for Black-Eyed Susans or kittens – if you look hard enough, you will always find someone who is giving them away.

(I myself am digging up a bunch of purple coneflower this afternoon to take to work tomorrow to give to co-workers. It’s taken over my garden but I can’t bear to put it in the yard waste.)

You get rhubarb by knowing someone. For me, that someone is a co-worker who left a few pounds of it in the break room a few years ago. By the end of the day, it was still there, so I felt safe in taking it all home.

A few weeks later, someone left another bunch. Again, I waited the prescribed amount of time not to be a greedy pig and was able to walk out with it.

The next day, I left a note in the break room:

Whoever is leaving the rhubarb, thank you and give me your name. I will make you some rhubarb bars.

Which of course was not the right thing to do because the last thing someone desperately giving away rhubarb wants is more stuff made of rhubarb. They just want to get rid of the rhubarb and will force you to take it, as you can see in the video below by the brilliant Charlie Berens.

But what they do want is chocolate. 🙂

As does the person who left this in the break room:

Which Marido and I turned into this:

And which is why I spent yesterday evening making brownies that I will deliver to work tomorrow to my fish dealer and my rhubarb dealer. It’s all legal tender in this state.