Growing up, we called it hamburger and rice. Hamburger browned in a skillet. Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice made according to the directions on the box. The two ingredients are mixed together and served with salt, pepper, margarine, and a squeezable plastic lemon full of concentrated juice.
My dad grew up impoverished and hamburger and rice, often without lemon, was a staple. Once he became a private in the Marine Corps, the meal became standard end-of-the-month fare. We continued to have it throughout my childhood and early adulthood.
When I left home, I continued to make it. It’s a favorite.
Livia had been up for hours already. She’d done a load of clothes, unloaded the dishwasher, and had been in the garden cutting daffodils to set in a vase on the kitchen table. Looking out the window at the sunrise it occurred to her she should be hungry.
Mornings without Greg were difficult and she was aware she filled them with activity to keep from thinking. But the sunrise caught her attention and she allowed herself to remember.
Sunday. Today was Sunday. Greg would be in the kitchen separating eggs, slicing chives, and grating gruyere. Opening the refrigerator to get the heavy cream, he would burst into song. Probably an aria she wasn’t familiar with. His love of opera confounded her.
Don’t even think about feeding me a beet. It’s not going to happen.
Tom Robbins is a favorite author of mine. Tom thought highly of beets. Let me just quote him for a moment:
The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…
So did my father, I think. Although I don’t remember ever seeing him eat a beet before that fateful summer. He may have initially planted them for my mother who liked pickled beets. Which are, arguably, the worst of all the beets.
I have written before about my dislike of vacuuming. It’s not just dislike, it’s a visceral hatred that suffuses all of me and makes my hair stand on end. Inevitably, the machine will clog, the belt will break, and I will end up cursing. Every time. Every single time. For now, and always and forever. This is true. I no longer fight it. I try to roll with the flow.
I am also not fond of putting laundry away. I don’t mind doing laundry so much, but right outside my laundry room door is an 11-foot old oak church pew. Fresh from the dryer clothes seem to end up there. And even if I do fold them, they tend to stay there. I often dress from the church pew in the hallway that is right in front of my windowed kitchen door. This is flirting with disaster. I am someday going to flash somebody.
Dusting also annoys me. I live on a dirt road. I have 3 dogs. I have laundry sitting on the church pew. I have dust. And it accumulates at warp speed. I often say I’m running a retirement for dust. Just as soon as I carry some of it out to the bin, a new crop arrives to take its place. It’s maddening. I can wield a can of Pledge for hours and admire my sparkling furniture and shelves, but by the next morning, it looks as if weeks have passed since anything has seen a dust rag.
Suffice it to say there is not much I like in the vein of housecleaning aside from making up a bed with clean linen sheets and a freshly aired duvet.
W. Va. Fur and Root 