Poor Richard’s Life of Leisure

All the greens we got from Mamie’s and all the turnips given to us by Deborah had to be cleaned and cut. I had packing to do before we head down south for a family wedding, so guess who had the job of cleaning and cutting? It was my job to season and sauté -- since I’m substituting healthy ingredients for hog jowl or ham, attempting to duplicate the southern soul food flavor without cardiac arrest. Now, Mamie can tell everybody that I not only had Richard do the planting and weeding, he also had to be my prep cook. I’m so spoiled.

Jack will receive a sampling of this fare. We’ll also share this vegetable wealth with Mamie, Josie, Adam, Deborah, and Charlie; and give some to our across-the-hill neighbors. The rest we’ll freeze for the hoards descending during the Christmas holidays.

Poor Richard; I really don’t think he knew what he was signing on for when he said he wanted me to bring “life” into his house. Richard had lived a life of solitude for forty-six years before I came along. Once I entered with my family and friends, solitude was not an option, and neither, I feared, would be his sanity.

It wasn’t enough that we spent our first ten years together with a revolving door of bawling babies, breastfeeding moms, and disillusioned dads coming through our home and eating at our table. His retirement years have only served to increase the amount of time allotted to nurturing “life” in our homes. I say homes because circumstances beyond our control led us to several moves. The first being when he became disabled enough to need a heart transplant.

The disability leading up to the transplant also transplanted us. I did allow him a small reprieve for his heart transplant, but our retirement home on the lake drew guests like fish draws flies. There seemed to be a party every week-end, and we still had a constant flow of the aforementioned babies, mothers and dads. I was in heaven; Richard was in shock.

Hurricane Katrina gave him his best opportunity to reclaim some semblance of solitude when the mermaids claimed our home for their underwater playground -- if he had only agreed to live in an RV. Now, I do understand that living in a thirty-four by twelve foot space with my mouth could be a bit confining, but at least it was just the two of us.

He said he was afraid that I’d start letting the grandkids have the RV beds, and he’d be sleeping outside in a tent if we didn’t move into a house. When we have guests, it’s true that we move out of our bedroom for them, but we don’t have to move into a tent because we have our RV “apartment.”

Now that we have a house in the holler, I’m thinking of having Richard install a revolving guest door -- but not until we finish harvesting and cooking turnip greens.