Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

“Sydney, do you want more tea?”

“Well, I have a full mug sitting over here already.”

“Sydney, is our marriage going to be like that mug of tea, forgotten, pushed away, left to languish in utter obscurity?”

[Pause]

S: [laughing] “One wonders what you use your brain cells for.”

E: “What??”

S: “There are one or two subjects on which you expend all of your eloquence, which seems to me to indicate that you’re not particularly interested in showing attention to anything else.  It’s just those one or two things.”

Apparently Sydney’s not into worrying our marriage like a loose tooth.  *Sigh*  But it was nice to get him to laugh.

Erin

Late this evening, having come home from a slew of reading groups, I sat down to my computer to check my email.  Not thinking, I clicked on the file sent by an old friend to what seemed to be all of the people in her address book.  I noticed only in passing that it was titled “halloween,” and then pulled up a power point sequence.  It was a game: find the red dot in each picture that appeared and click on it.  This being a tiny red dot, I was furrowing my brow, looking hard and moving quickly through the pictures (i.e., not reflecting on the point of this exercise, the theme of the power point, etc.), when an image appeared right out of “The Exorcist” and a scream emitted from my computer.  It was awful.  I yelped, ran over to Sydney with a litany of “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” trying to get the picture out of my head.  Not funny.  Let me repeat: NOT FUNNY.  If this story made you laugh, enjoy it, but don’t be cruel to people who, like me, have too active of imaginations to live comfortably with an entire storehouse of awful images in their brains, ready to pop out at inopportune moments.

Erin

A new addition to our garden produce this year has been a crop of sweet potatoes.  What I did not realize was that sweet potatoes are generally most successful in hot places.  After they are harvested they are supposed to be “cured” in a place that’s 85-90 degrees, with high humidity.  As in, the kind of environment that would cause most produce to rot.

Where, in late-October New York, are we going to find 85-90 degrees?

Our small bathroom is the warmest part of our house, and it got a whole lot hotter with the addition of a small heater.  Now our livingroom is 65 while our bathroom is almost 85.  The sweet potatoes do indeed seem to be liking the temperature, and I can’t say it feels awful to have warmed towels after a shower!  And besides, it only has to last a little over a week.

Erin

The last couple of weeks have been weird.  We’ve both had plenty of work to keep us busy, but for several days in a row last week we seemed incapable of getting anything done.  My more-frequent-than-usual lapses into a late-evening nap on the couch made me suspect we were both fighting off a flu bug.  But, of course, not being productive prompted us to stay up late, which then made us unprepared to start anew the next day, which meant inefficient work, etc.  Man, that’s a nasty cycle to get into.

We’re slowly taking hold of our work again (followed closely, we hope, by more sleep and better food and such), but right now it’s something of an arduous climb out of the pit.  So we’re hibernating, trying to get things back on track.

Erin

Today we made a quick trip to Canada.  Sydney’s been having some trouble renewing his Canadian passport, and, what with his trip to England fast approaching, he’s felt a bit more pressure to make sure it gets done, and done quickly.  After some frustrating calls to officials, he decided to make a run to Canada to deal with officials in person.  The officials in Ontario were much more helpful; an hour of waiting and talking and Sydney was able to submit his application.  While it’s not guaranteed that everything is all set (his student status is a bit tricky, he doesn’t have a citizenship card handy, etc.), having it submitted with an official’s okay is a big step forward.  We should hear whether it worked in about two weeks!

Erin

Speaking of watermelon . . .

Sydney snorted when I brought home a watermelon a couple of years ago and prepared to cut it open in the kitchen.  Watermelon, it seems, are best eaten outside, when sitting on the benches in our yard wielding a large kitchen knife.  There you can make all the mess you want, enjoy the good food in the fresh air, drop the seeds all over, and as for the rinds . . .

Apparently Sydney’s idea of disposing of watermelon rinds is to break them into appropriately-sized pieces and then throw them across our yard, across the road, and into the trees on the other side.  Sydney may be an academic, but he’s also a farm boy, so there’s much winding up of the arm and, admittedly, an impressive whine as the pieces goes whizzing past my head.  The former tomboy in me is jealous.

So our watermelon-eating these last few months has meant much throwing and seed-spitting and laughter as cars go by, moments before we throw another piece of rind behind them.  It’s a lot of fun.  Our house is on top of a slope, so we get a great pitcher’s-mound effect.  I have a few things to learn to be good at throwing, but most of our pieces end up in the brush on the other side of the road.  A few pieces hit the power line and drop straight down near our yard, causing much laughter amidst the explosion of juice, and some pieces slip in my hand halfway through the throw and end up all over the place.

Country entertainment at its best.

Erin

• We ate our last watermelon today.
• In happier news, we dug up some sweet potatoes today. They were gigantic. Quite a few of them were over 2 lbs. apiece. One was a good foot long. So it appears that one can grow sweet potatoes this far north.
• We also had some large regular potatoes, with the largest one weighing in at just a hair under 2 lbs.
• I’m gaining weight.

– Sydney

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, three hundred dollars would buy you a really good mule.  The men in Faulkner’s stories are always swapping mules for a figure around $300.  I have gotten the impression that these men are much more confident that their mule is worth $300 than they are that their wife is worth that much–no offense to the wife.

Nowadays, nobody knows what to do with a mule, much less what it’s worth, and the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is approaching $30,000, a good deal more of which is paid by the groom than in years past.

Erin

When I was a kid I used to pepper my mom with questions about words I read.  For a long time she produced, incredibly, definitions as if she were a walking dictionary.  At some point my mom gracefully handled the transition from kid and adolescent questions to adult questions by responding, “I don’t know.  Why don’t we look it up?”  Thus, she remained perhaps not all-knowing as I first thought, but almost as good.

When I married Sydney, I knew I married a font of knowledge.  In our house you will often hear calls of “Sydney, how does the problem of evil work?”  “Sydney, what’s the name for the plant with bright yellow flowers that we bought last spring?”  “Sydney, how do the wood grains in my furniture correspond with the pattern of the rings on the tree before it was cut?”  I realized I had become accustomed to having a walking encyclopedia when Nelson visited last year.  He could answer anything I wanted to know about cooking, but when we were roaming around town and I had asked my fourth (unsuccessful) question about the species of tree we were passing, he reminded me that knowledge of trees was not a Penner-wide specialty.

Today, however, I managed to stump Sydney.  I asked him how to pronounce “lath,” and heard him say, “There’s no such word.”  I may not know everything that he does, but that didn’t keep me from responding, “Yes there is.  Now how do you pronounce it?”  He clicked away on his keyboard for a moment and then said, “Are you telling me you know a woodworking word I don’t know?”  Yup, folks, it happened.  And I’m posting it for posterity, even though the background in this post should leave him looking pretty good.

Erin

Those of you who knew me growing up know that I come from a meat-and-potatoes family.  My dad, the one who got off work early, picked us up from school and almost immediately threw steaks or chicken on the grill to get the baby birds to stop screeching for food.  But Sydney grew up in a house almost entirely devoid of meat, with a large vegetable farm at hand.  You can imagine how different our conceptions of diet might be as a result.  Thankfully, neither of us really knew a lot about cooking, so we did basically start from scratch, and four years of college dining hall exposure had weaned me from meat to a large extent (“You call that meat!?”).

I had watched a fair number of young female vegetarians at college, however, so I was a bit worried that vegetarianism meant a spoon of white rice, iceberg lettuce, and a diet soda for dinner.  Those girls never looked very happy eating that; who could blame them?  But Sydney doesn’t resemble those fragile girls whose bellybuttons and vertebrae touched between “meals”.  So I assumed there must be something I was missing.

Yes.  Over time Sydney and I have cobbled together a cooking repertoire that satisfies my two basic food desires: eat a lot and eat a lot of fruit.  Potato and tomato casseroles with heaps of basil, fruit and yogurt smoothies, baked squash filled with raisins and walnuts, home-made pizza with leeks and basil pesto, cauliflower curries, etc.  As in, hearty food with lots of flavor.  Who would have known?  I was reminded of my former ideas about “vegetarianism” the other day when I visited the doctor and he asked what I ate.  When he learned that I was basically vegetarian, I got grilled.  Remembering those caved-in girls from my college days, I can see why.  But, though my diet isn’t perfect (no, my major sugar cravings haven’t magically disappeared with marriage), I was pretty satisfied with my responses to his questions.

So, score 1 for Sydney, and also 1 for the former skeptic who is now publicly admitting that Sydney’s path has been a good one for her, too.  Now, if we could just figure out how to cook fantastic food without it eating up all our “work” time . . .

Erin