Archives September 2024

When you go to a restaurant, they serve you food that not only tastes good, but it is aesthetically arranged on the plate. This food styling is important. The above photo is of a gorgeous dinner. As I am writing this, the photo looks a little blurry, but that may be because my cataract surgery isn’t for another month.

The meal above was made and plated by my husband, who follows the directions on the meal subscription box faithfully, right down to making the food on the plates look exactly like the photo on the recipe. Exactly.

We subscribe to three meal boxes per week. This means that three meals are delicious, look just like what Ina Garten would make, and I don’t have to make anything. Unfortunately, the other four meals are my responsibility. I have been making dinners for 54 years. For 48 of those years, the. meals were mostly good. They were always totally edible. But here’s the thing: I have never liked cooking. I took my responsibility for producing meals seriously, as I had two children to keep healthy and growing. We had salad at every dinner.

Once the kids left, what little enthusiasm I had for making supper dwindled to near zero. I began to rely on a few “no brainers.” Spaghetti with Rao’s sauce. Sandwiches. Turkey pot pies. Pizza delivery. After a few years of this, my husband became weary of the same old meals. I became angry at him for this, and so I announced my retirement from the daily grind. We subscribed to the meal boxes and he took over cooking on those nights. Those nights are heavenly, because we get dinners like “Turkish Goulash with Lime Rice,” “Tostadas with Guacamole and Lime Crema,”  “Roasted Garbanzo Beans with Artisanal Salad,” and the like. Many of the recipes include various sorts of beans, but we don’t mind. The fiber helps the meals “move along,” if you catch my drift.

My nights are a totally different kettle of fish. I use that phrase advisedly, since I am not a fish fan, so I don’t make fish. Except tuna salad sandwiches, which are always good. I have no culinary imagination, I resent being in the kitchen, and thus when putting the food on the plates, I just schlep it on there, with no thought to the presentation. Presentation be damned; let’s just eat the food and be done with it.

Night before last, I watched as my husband held a sprig of parsley over his head and dropped it gracefully onto the side of a portion of Poached Chicken Breasts with Lemon Sauce. It was beautiful. He took such care and pride.

The next night, it was my turn.

The change of seasons gives us a jolt that we need. Summer is over, although it is still so damn hot out, but we have to blame climate change for that. Fall is fall, no matter what the temps are. So everybody in the burbs buys mums and pumpkins. We look forward to wearing sweaters (I don’t–since menopause, I wonder how any woman can wear one; they are so HOT). The other things people do in fall:

• Make all sorts of recipes utilizing squash
• Wear socks with their Birkenstocks
• Think about roasting a chicken
• Get one last pedicure
• Consider growing a beard
• Take the kids to get lost in a corn maze
• Ride around looking for “the foliage”
• Try mulled cider one more time, but it’s still awful
• Order an inflatable figure
• Break a tooth on a candy apple
• Sit around a fire pit, even if it’s 70 degrees out there
• Put nuts in a bowl with a nutcracker, yet nobody eats them
• Trip on a root while hiking
• Make chili
• Stock up on lip balm
• Stop shaving their legs
• Visit a “haunted house”

Next up, winter. The season we love until the holidays, and then it just gets depressing…

Old houses. They are full of character, they hold stories in their walls. They have drafts. Bats can get in. But they are built from a time when craftsmen took pride in their work. Walls were thick, floors were beautiful wood. Big, Santa friendly fireplaces. Large rooms.

We lived in an old house for thirty years. The center hall, wide and welcoming, was big enough for actual furniture. The kitchen had a kitchen table, not an island. It had a butler’s pantry. It was such a superb home for raising a family. We loved that house.

It had drawbacks. The laundry was in the gloomy basement. Two flights of stairs down, and then back up again, lugging the heavy basket of clothes. The closets were small, and nobody in 1912 thought that folks needed to “walk in” to a closet. Some of the windows were painted shut. House cleaning was a day long affair; it was a big, old place. Dust. So much dust. But it was homey, lovely, and our family dropped roots there.

Now we, the elder empty nesters, live on the top floor of a brand new apartment building. We had no idea how much easier it would be to live in a modern place. There are no drafts. The laundry room is off my closet–no lugging! For the first time in my life, I have a huge kitchen island, so much counter space. I can walk in to my closet, and dance in there if I want to. The windows in every room are gigantic. The sunsets we see from our living room are spectacular– high above the city–pink, orange, and purple. We never saw a sunset at the old place; there were too many trees.

There is a skyline! I always wanted to look out and see a skyline! We have a big balcony, so I have flowers, but there is no lawn maintenance. We can walk to restaurants. We can watch the Dayton Dragons baseball games from the balcony. Fourth of July fireworks are incredible.

We know lots of people who still live in their family homes. As they age, the prospect of moving to a smaller place seems overwhelming. Too much stuff to get rid of. All of that packing up. Selling a house. So they sigh and hope that their children will be fine doing all of that “when the time comes.” They stay put until perhaps the moving won’t be an adventure, but instead a miserable relocation to a “facility.”

We are so glad we decided to have an “adventure” by moving from the burbs into the city. It was a life refresher. We have new friends, a diverse group of neighbors, and did I mention the sunsets?

Get out of that house, empty nesters! Before it’s too late.

Harriet Busby spent her entire life doing the right thing. As a child, she spit her cherry pits demurely into her napkin, and then placed them at the side of her plate. When her brother let the cherry pits accumulate in his hand, Harriet tattled on him. Harriet was not afraid of reprisal.

When Harriet grew up, she found the habits of her neighbors shocking. Harold Batts left his garbage cans out in the open, and this resulted in a raccoon infestation. Harriet called Critter Control so many times they recognized her voice.  Her backdoor neighbor, Winnie Smales, left the bathroom curtains open. Harriet was forced to inform Winnie that her *ahem* privates were not so private.

Harriet never married. She came close with Robert Dodd, but he had the unfortunate habit of sucking on a toothpick after dinner, and that was a dealbreaker for Harriet. When they dissolved their relationship, Harriet got rid of the jade green ceramic toothpick holder that adorned her kitchen window sill. She never really liked it, and it was not at all valuable. She chucked it, along with the toothpicks, into the trash without a second thought. However, she did miss Robert’s company in the evenings. After dinner especially, when Robert would sing “Are You Lonesome Tonight” in a soothing baritone.

Harriet could never understand why her nieces never sent thank you notes for the ten dollar checks she sent them on their birthdays, so she stopped sending them. Their father, Thomas, who was six years Harriet’s junior (guilty of the cherry pit etiquette breach), left Harriet a huffy message on her land line, declaring thank you notes extinct. He told his sister that “text” thanks are what is done these days, but since Harriet didn’t believe in cell phones, she was the one in the wrong.

Harriet remained steadfast. The world was full of ill mannered, selfish people. Harriet stuck to her guns, judging those in her neighborhood, at church, and especially those churls at Kroger who banged Harriet’s heels with their shopping carts.

Then, one Saturday, after a solitary Friday night in her recliner, Harriet had a Eureka moment. Life was getting shorter and shorter, Harriet was getting older and older, and the lonely days and nights stretching in front of her turned her blood to ice.

Harriet looked at herself in the mirror. Pale, undistinguished. Hair that barely held a curl. The beginnings of under eye bags. Were those jowls? She stifled a sigh, pulled open the hall closet door, and took out her maroon cardigan.

The speed limit was 35 mph, but Harriet floored it on the way to the Goodwill store, where she bought a brass toothpick holder.

The rest is history.