Not my favorite time of year

 

With my brother, at his ranch

This time of year brings out my negative thoughts, so I’m going to put them all in this blog and get rid of them. I bet you share some with me. Tonight we set the clocks back an hour—very few people want to do that. I used to hear that it was for the farmers’ sake. But to my understanding with new farm technology, that extra hour in the morning doesn’t matter to farmers (someone correct me if I’m wrong). To the rest of us, standard time means it gets dark—and depressing—in the late afternoon. Truthfully, I don’t care about an extra hour of daylight in the morning. All it means to me is Sophie will wake up an hour earlier than I want her to. But I love the late afternoon sunshine. So there! That’s my first whine.

Second is that weekends in this season are all about football. Okay, I understand that the nation is crazy about watching young (and some not so young) men fight over a pigskin ball on a huge field. I am not intrigued, but I would be willing to be gracious about it, if it did not mean that regular news programming is cancelled. I am my father’s child, which means that I want to see the national news every evening, particularly in these times when both the international scene and our own House of Representatives is exploding. Football takes a distant second to the threats to our democracy, our climate, our world.

And then, tonight, there’s my green bean story: I am slowly learning to mark the “No subs” box when I order from Central Market, because I have gotten some really strange substitutions. Like skinny baby eggplant, when I wanted nice round ones to stuff. I have found a brand of frozen green beans that taste just like the fresh—they are easy to keep in the freezer and cook however many I need. One day I got instead a package of green beans to microwave, which didn’t do me much good because I don’t have a microwave. Last week, I got a pound of fresh green beans when I ordered frozen. Okay, I’m not above snapping off the ends and cleaning them, though Jordan tells me tonight that she doesn’t like them fresh.

Anyway this pound of fresh beans came in a baggie that was not closed in any way. Yep, you got it. I dumped it all over the floor. Had to call Jordan because the only way I can get things off the floor is to sweep, and I didn’t want to sweep the floor with the beans. She was all for throwing them away, but my Scots blood rebelled. So as she was carefully picking them off the floor, she muttered, “You better wash these carefully.”

Tonight I double washed them, first in a bowl of salted water—a trick I learned from my mom who insisted the salt scrubbed things clean. She used to clean mushrooms that way, which I think now was probably ill-advised, but I thought it would work with beans. And it did. The second water was much clearer. Then I blanched the beans for my dinner tonight. Then Jordan comes out to tell me she and Christian do want the leftover meatloaf I was having. So we’re having a delayed dinner together. She still doesn’t want the beans.

One complaint I can’t erase by writing about it: my big brother (and the only sibling I have) is back in the hospital with what he, a physician, would probably call old man’s problems. Please pray with me for a speedy recovery. As I think back over our lives, I realize how much each of us has shaped the other’s life. I wouldn’t have left Chicago without his prodding; he wouldn’t have moved to Texas if I weren’t here—not that he moved to be close to me, but that because of me (and my ex) he knew of the opportunities here for him. Over the years, we have been close, then not so close, then especially lately closer. Perhaps our golden era was when we were both single with kids in high school, and I used to gather everyone for Sunday supper—such treasured memories. I’m feeling a bit nostalgic tonight.