The Brussel Sprouts War

The Brussel Sprouts War

They lingered over Sunday morning breakfast, since the sun had decided to show itself and now the rooms were sunny and warm.  With the last sip of warm coffee, she asked “could you pick the Brussels sprouts today, so we can have them for thanksgiving?”  Because of the sudden dip in temperature and the light dusting of snow on the deck, they knew it would be an optimum time to pick the Brussels. Thankfully, the late season deer –marauders had not taken a liking to the plants and so left them alone.

He headed off to the garden carrying a worn canvas bag and wearing the faded and torn winter work jacket that she longed to throw away. He was anxious to get this chore over so he could get the wood pile stacked and ready for winter. Strong winds ruffled the chimes from every direction around the house.  She busied herself with laundry and clean up, putting off the graphics job she had to do today to meet Monday’s deadline.

It wasn’t long before she heard the door slide open in the kitchen.  She walked out to find him standing there, dripping dirt and holding bundles of long, curved stalks, dark green with frost and laden with the tiny cabbages. He laid them on the floor.  They stood and stared down at the stalks, each lost in their own thoughts about the next step.  Quietly, she watched his nose drip onto the kitchen floor.  He suggested freezing them right away.  She felt resentment towards the damn things lying on the floor.  At the same time, they’d never had such a crop as this, and of course they must be grateful and not waste them. She went to google how to deal with “frostbit” Brussels. She heard him clomping upstairs. In five minutes time, they both reappeared, she with her printed pages, he with his advice from a site he’d googled.  “What?  Why? With all the things we both have to do, why would you go and look up the same thing?”   “So I don’t have to get into a pissing contest with you about what to do” he yelled loudly.  And then “you know what?  You do whatever the F you want to do.” And he stormed out the door. 

Later, as she soaked the baby cabbages in salt and water (as instructed, to draw out the dirt and worms)  she mused over Brussels sprouts.  There had only ever been one person in their family that seemed keen on “those baby cabbages” as he called them. And he wasn’t even family…or was he? And her Mother served them when he was there for dinner, usually accompanying ham.  While he ate them with gusto, her sister and she struggled, she gagging on the mushy, watery mouthfuls that smelled like skunks laying dead in the road.  At least thirty years or more had passed since a Brussels sprout entered her kitchen.  She never served them to her children.  Yet, her son in his adulthood years, had declared them his favorite vegetable, “those baby cabbages.”  Yes, had even used those words.  And then, last year they’d found their way into the garden, who knows why.  And she learned how the fresh incarnation is truly a world apart from the mushy mouthful, and she’d sliced the tiny first year specimens, and sautéed them in butter and everyone at the Thanksgiving table last year was delighted, though her son was not there, nor the long gone mysterious family dinner guest.

At dinner, they ate in silence, the bright green reminders of the morning’s ugliness glowing buttery in their bright blue bowl.  She thought of her son, and she thought of him.



In any given day there exists a dandy bucketful of words, a plethora, if you will.  If one has a love of words, one likes to hear good ones, savor them, admire, maybe even envy the utterer of the rarely used word.  But too often, we are trapped in the verbal panoply of  the mundane, the plain ole well-meaning words.  Sure, they are important, necessary, linking thoughts and deeds and compliments and retractions and contractions and subtractions. They are clearly, plainly, without a doubt (but rarely indubitably) necessary in the day to day.

I have a friend who says there are some words that are just plain silly, that make you laugh just to say them.  For the life of me, I can now recall only one......noodle.  Pause for laugh. 

I thought tonight as I poured a ruby red glass of wine to prepare to chop vegetables... Montepulciano.  I said it out loud to feel it roll....it's a word that fairly slides off the tongue. It's sultry, it's smooth, it has flair, I think it dances the samba. 
I say Flamenco, like the red flounced dress of the woman

painted on the side of the building that my walking chum and I went over to see today.  The sudden chill and wind whipped around us, as we craned our necks to stare up at the old brick building where the new mural had magically appeared  since the last time we walked there. 

The words of today began to drop from my memory onto the scrap of paper by the phone.  In-cog-nito.......said with a soft but definite emphasis on the T.  Foreign, intriguing.    
Ruta-baga, a word as strange and ugly as the brown, heavy, gnarly vegetable yanked from the ground, needing the strength of three men. With its tangled, hairy roots encrusted with dirt, and it's top end distended like an elephant's trunk, it is as visually formidable as it is gastronomically challenging.  A couple of weeks ago, I left a rutabaga in a friend's breezeway when she was away, feeling like the bad joke about the woman leaving zucchinis in unlocked parked cars in shopping centers. ( Like who leaves their car unlocked anymore, really) Unbeknownst to me, she'd taken a picture of it and sent it to the Master Gardener at a local university extension office, who, as the story goes, was stumped. I'd forgotten about it.

Words like brazen, and faker, and knucklehead. The list goes on, but so many stories, so little time.....

"The moon was so bright, we were playing soccer in the fields, me and my brothers and sisters.  It was one o'clock in the morning, I think I was about ten, I'll never forget that" he said. Not only was the image of that memory so crystal clear, but the look on his face as he told me, made the story all the more warm and fuzzy. It may have been almost thirty years ago, but his face lit up as though the moon were shining thru his eyes with the recollection. I felt a deep rush of warmth, like someone had just given me an unexpected gift, a treasure.

"My Father rented a van that summer and determined that we would see all of Ireland instead of just visiting my two sets of grandparents, like we did each year. That particular night he'd pulled over to the side of the road, tired from all the driving.  He walked up to the farmhouse, knocked on the door and asked the people there if he and his family could camp out in their field."  Of course, they'd said.  "We kids had a blast."

We'd met for a simple lunch to discuss some business, this  young man and I. He'd commented on my sweater, the knit, the stitches.  I told him I'd gotten it in Ireland just a couple of months before, when I visited with my family. Probably I had that same misty-eyed look when I touched briefly on where we traveled and how I loved it.  And then, the stories were swapped, and a link, like the linked stitches in my warm sweater from the Aran Islands, was woven.  And we laughed and smiled at the good memories that  we had brought forth and shared. It was a good lunch.

I have eaten about 62 mini marshmallows.  I feel my tongue now coated with the powdery residue.  And my conscience coated with guilt and disbelief.  Yet I could not stop popping the small, spongy pillowed squares into my mouth as I responded to that email...........argghhh.  Put it aside; don't allow any mental room for that to hang out in.......think of something else.............

Tonight I got a "bob" from my favorite, very entertaining hair cutter - he is SO much more than just a haircutter, and of course he will tell you that........I like how my hair feels - kinda swingy and carefree; Mark told me, as he was cutting away, it's "kinda hip, cool, retro, youthful...."  Who wouldn't want this?  Of course, I mentioned how I'd been looking up his phone # a few weeks ago (but never called of course; I just happened to stop by this afternoon as I walked thru town back to work).  And when I was online, I'd found several u-tube videos of Mark doing his "shtick".  "yeah" he says "it's like Lenny Bruce, you know?"  I had to admit, there was a foul, blue note quality to it, but I told him that I had split a gut watching one about an old geezer friend of his Dad's who had a poorly fitted set of false teeth and claimed to have made love to 10,000 women............lo and behold, mark started doing the "shtick"  right then and there.  Sitting in the chair, the black robe restricting my windpipe, my hair combed all forward over my face like cousin "It", darned if he didn't start the story , complete with the very realistic whistle and schloppy ss'sssssss that the old guy had.  I was shaking with laughter, and surprisingly not at all concerned how this might affect my haircut - especially when he got to the part - and I knew darned well it was coming - how the geezer insisted that he'd made love to 10,000 women, but he never, no never, went "south of the border, down mexico way."  It went on and on, and he asked if I'd seen the one where he talks about his great aunt and grandmother talking about their constipation - "cause that's what old folks talk about!"  he declared.  

Then, he told me "get up, bend over, shake your hair all around. Good, good!"
"You see, this is a science, and I'm really good at it.  I knew you were ready for this.  You can't keep doing that 'layer me up' thing.  You have to change, go forward...I have skills...........I've been waiting; you weren't ready before.  But tonight I knew you were ready.  It's a science."  Love you markie...

 

The Last Rose of Kingston

The last rose of Kingston

outside the conference room window
Pink perfection demanding attention
poised against the green sapling tinged with autumnal yellow
In here, all are black, or blue, dots, stripes, diamonds,
Black…or blue
monochrome
metronome, mercurochrome
astrodome
Outfits for a business day
But wait, one rosy shirt smiles in the back of the room
Perhaps in tandem with
the last rose of Kingston
Outside the conference room window
And then…beneath the modesty panel
One pair of dingy white socks
Rest comfortably
atop their black shoes.