Summertime Love

On Saturday we cleaned and cleaned and cleaned, for three full hours we cleaned. The old man vacuumed every surface in our home including ceilings and walls. I scrubbed and scrubbed. Everything smelled of tea tree oil and vinegar. Then we cooked and cooked and cooked. We made tortilla soup and corn soufflé and a big bowl of pineapple. My parents came over for dinner and brought margaritas. If you think you’ve ever had a good margarita you are wrong, unless the margarita you are thinking of is my dad’s margarita. Peace I’m outta here

Anyway, the cleanest of houses causes such an uptick in moral well-being. We hung our towels outside to dry in the sun and now they finally don’t smell like mildew anymore. Turns out the sun is a useful tool, who knew Thomas Friedman was right about something after all.

The old man and I are good partners in all ways, thank god and knock on wood, but I really notice it during times like house cleaning or moving/unpacking. We go into a deeply companionable twin zone of silent, furious concentration. We don’t discuss what needs to be done, we both just start doing things and then everything gets done and then after hours and hours we step out of our trance and speak for the first time in eons and we say “good job honey.” EXCEPT, at some point, while locked in my zen-state, I lost the part of the Bialetti you put the coffee into. I washed the Bialetti–it was all taken apart and sitting in the dish rack like normal–but that part was gone. “Where is it?” my old man kept asking, “WHAT DID YOU DO.” We looked everywhere. Every drawer, every cabinet. We looked in the fridge. I looked in my office. Who knows where a crazy motherfucker such as myself might have stashed a Bialetti part while tripping in a house-cleaning meditative state? I went and dug through the compost, even. It was nowhere to be found. This makes me feel crazy but what are you going to do?

The next day I went to band practice for what felt like seven hours. The whole time, I kept thinking how excited I was to get home and eat the peanut butter cups I’d been saving for that exact moment. As we were packing up, I got a text from my husband that read simply: “I ate your pb cups.” I texted him back in a rage but the damage was done; the pb cups were never to be heard from again, and now there was no time to stop and get more on the way home because he needed the car to go to the George Kuchar screening. I stayed home alone watching “Fringe,” which, sidenote, why have none of you people ever told me to watch “Fringe” before? I am very disappointed in you. Anyway, I watched “Fringe,” ate spaghetti, and mourned my pb cubs. At one point during a gruesome scene I covered the snoopy’s eyes in total sincerity and not as a joke and I only realized how funny it was later when I remembered it.

When my old man got home he revealed with a flourish: PB CUBS and a kombucha. He’d gotten all the way home and then remembered. He drove BACK to the store to get them. My sweet old man!!!!!!!!!!!

FURTHERMORE this morning he got up and was messing around in the kitchen while I brushed my teeth and when I came out, what do you think I saw but the BIALETTI THING, returned from the dead!!! Apparently he’d gotten up and rooted through the entire garbage can until he found it. I guess I just threw it in the garbage like a MANIAC.

It’s times like these that I wonder what I bring to this man’s life, because surely it is not enough. He is the greatest. Love means finding the bialetti part no matter how many times I throw it in the garbage accidentally.

I drove to work with half a baguette sticking out of the coffee cup holder