• the quotidian (2.27.17)

    Quotidian: daily, usual or customary; 
    everyday; ordinary; commonplace



    We’ve eaten nearly an entire pig and I still haven’t found a pulled pork recipe I like.
    Just the way I like it: swimming in butter and honey.

    Birthday breakfast.

    With caramel, chocolate, and pecans: it shouldn’t have been disappointing, but it was.

    An impulse purchase: have you tried it?

    Slipping.

    Wink.

    Why bother with a sofa if you have a horse?

    I always thought she had horns…
    (Just kidding!)
    He changed the brake pads.

    Not working.

    Buzz off.

    Outdoor bedroom.

    Flying his cheesy freak flag.

    A third teenager!

    This same time, years previous: old-fashioned molasses cream sandwich cookies, roasted cauliflower soup, Oreo, the quotidian (2.25.13), the quotidian (2.27.12), for my daughter, creamy garlic soup, and Grandma Baer’s caramel popcorn.

  • steer sitting

    “Guess what!” my older daughter said when I got home from seeing a play last Sunday afternoon. 

    “What.”

    “The steer let me sit on him while he was laying down!”

    On my camera I found photos of the steers roaming the yard (“They’re hungry, Mom”), and there was a large, squishy cow pie next to the front porch (lovely), but no picture of the steer-turned-sofa, so the next day when I looked out the kitchen window and spied my older daughter stretched lengthwise on the back of a steer, sunning herself, I snatched my camera right up.

    “Careful, Mom,” she said as I approached the fence. “Don’t startle him.”

    The steer, for his part, didn’t seem to care one iota that a human being was draped across his back.

    “Make him get up,” I said, bored with the statuesque blob of beef.

    Ever obliging, my older daughter began rocking back and forth.

    Nothing.

    She kicked him in the sides.

    Nothing.

    She kicked him harder.

    Nothing.

    She rocked back and forth and jabbed him with her heels and—

    Whoosh! The steer stood up so fast that my daughter nearly tumbled over his neck.

    For a couple seconds the steer stood still while visions of bucking beasts and emergency rooms flashed before my eyes.

    “Get off!” I squealed, but I needn’t have worried.

    My daughter had no desire to be catapulted facefirst into a cow pattie and had already vaulted off, landing squarely on her own two feet.

    This same time, years previous: the quotidian (2.22.16), the quotidian (2.23.15), the quotidian (2.24.14), birds and bugs, bandwagons, cream scones, the morning after, and Molly’s marmelade cake.

  • jelly toast, a love story

    The other afternoon when I picked up my kids from my parents’ place, my mother was just finishing up her bread baking. Four loaves of brown bread were cooling on the table—the fifth one, not quite brown enough, still in the oven—and the entire house was warm with the yeasty-toasty smell.

    “Here,” my mother said, handing me a children’s board book. “Look what I gave your dad for Valentine’s.”

    Whaddya know, she had altered the book, pasting photo cut-outs of her and Dad over the faces of the bunny rabbits in the story.

    “Look at this one,” she said, pointing to the next-to-last page. “I even got the collar just right!”

    When I begged the book for a couple days, Dad almost didn’t let me borrow it, but then he did…begrudingly.

    The story is pretty much perfect, considering that for years Dad brought Mom coffee in bed every morning, often with jelly toast, toast made from Mom’s homemade brown bread.

    And now we’ve come full circle.

    The end.

    This same time, years previous: lemon cheesecake morning buns, peanut butter and jelly bars, pan-fried tilapia, toasted steel-cut oatmeal, the case of the whomping shovel, blueberry cornmeal muffins, and tortilla pie.