A Sad Story about a Silk Shirtdress, with a Happy Ending

Saturday was a busy day. My family had to attend two separate parties. One was an event essentially for adults, involving elegant tidbits — smoked salmon, champagne, and cake; three children were present, my daughter among them, all beautifully behaved. And then from this, my husband swept up my daughter and whisked her off to a little friend’s birthday party back in our neighborhood. When he and I picked her up at eight in the evening, she was seated happily on a bench swing in the birthday girl’s backyard. She was with two friends, they were talking quietly and happily, dragging their bare feet in the grass as they swung lazily; the party was over, and everyone was tired. Goody bags distributed, the three of us wished the birthday girl a happy birthday one last time, and walked home talking about what a fine, full day it had been, with friends and food and cake and all kinds of wonderful things.

There were numerous bug bites involved, for me and for my daughter, as the result of all this party activity, and so on arriving back home there was much application of witch hazel and Aveeno anti-itch cream. (The Aveeno expired two years ago, but whatever.) I helped my daughter get out of her fancy dress, which is actually a size small woman’s silk shirt (trust me, it looks darling and elegant on her), and it was when I was unbuttoning it that I noticed the grease stains on the front. “Is this grease?” I asked. “Do you know what this is from?”

“I dunno,” my daughter said, frowning at her shirt.

“You had pizza, right? Pepperoni pizza? At the birthday party?” We all made some quick calculations and decided that though there was no proof, the odds were good at the numerous grease stains were pepperoni stains. It sure wasn’t champagne. And we know for a fact that our daughter is a total chazzer when it comes to pepperoni pizza.

So I laid the shirt on the kitchen counter and dumped about half a cup of cornstarch on it. I know that’s a lot of cornstarch, but hey: there was a lot of grease. “We’ll leave this to sit overnight and tomorrow I’ll wash it and we’ll see what we can do,” I said.

The next morning I came downstairs to find the shirt on the kitchen counter, lots of cornstarch on it, as expected. As not expected (but only because I just hadn’t thought it through), I also found a sweet little path of fucking disgusting white kitty paw prints. They were visible on the shirt (also visible on the shirt: a few little bits where Jackknife had evidently licked the cornstarch just to see whether or not it was poultry, beef, or fish, which it was not). The pawprints led from the shirt across the strip of dark grey counter in front of our double sink, across the counter around the jar of cornstarch (which, yes, I should have put away last night: sue me.) The pawprints meandered around my daughter’s very cool projects she made at summer camp (various do-nothing machines, some powered by batteries, some with water, some with magnets), back through the various do-nothing machines again, and then, my husband pointed out to me, there was one last pawprint — very faint — on the front of the one of the cabinet doors under the sink. “That’s where he finally decided to jump down, and he braced himself on the door for a quick second before landing,” said my husband.
“There’s no cornstarch visible on the floor,” I said. We all agreed that it was doubtless present, just in such fine form that it was invisible to the naked eye. I sighed heavily, surveying all the pawprints.
“I think the cat sneezed over here, too,” my husband said. “You can see on the shirt where the cornstarch is sort of sprayed around. He was sniffing the shirt and it made him sneeze and it blew the powder around.”

I wadded up the shirt and put it in the bathroom sink. I cleared all the do-nothing machines from the counter (along with all the other miscellaneous crap that’s accumulated there — crap accumulates like nobody’s business when it comes to kitchen counters). Then I took a dishcloth and some Dawn and I scrubbed down the entire kitchen counter. I rinsed it, and then I sprayed it with rubbing alcohol and wiped it down again. Finally satisfied that the counter was restored to a proper level of cleanliness, I took the shirt from the bathroom sink, brought it back to the kitchen sink, and began to wash it.

I suppose I could have tried to be more gentle with this shirt dress. It is, after all, a high-quality, delicate, silk article. However, I bought it secondhand for about three dollars, and life is short. So I got it sopping wet, squirted Dawn detergent on it, and started washing it. I washed and rinsed it three times. I wasn’t able to discern whether or not I’d gotten the grease stain out — the thing about wet shiny mauve silk is, you can’t really see schmutz on it, when it’s wet, because the fabric gets so dark, it’s just — it just looks like wet silk. I decided to take it on faith that whatever schmutz I was capable of removing, I had removed, so I gave up. I then wondered how to wring the water out of it without wringing it — I was worried about accidentally shredding the thin fabric — and immediately thought, “I’m in the kitchen: obviously, I will use the salad spinner!”

Five minutes later, I’d spun the shirt in the salad spinner several times, pouring out several tablespoons’ worth of water. It was sufficiently effective that I found myself muttering, “I bet people do this all the time and I’m only now figuring it out. I bet there are websites that talk about hand-washing your undies and spin-drying them in the salad spinner.” I turn out to be absolutely correct. You can do Google searches for the basic concept using a number of different phrases — “hand wash salad spinner” “laundry in salad spinner” “silk clothes in salad spinner” are good starts — and you get lots of hits. It’s clear I was way behind the curve on this one, probably because Peg Bracken never had a salad spinner.

The silk shirtdress dried on the balcony in the sun, and when I went to take it in at the end of the day, I inspected it carefully. All the grease had washed out, and the article had dried so beautifully it won’t need any ironing. Victory is mine. God bless the salad spinner: works wonders on greens, herbs, and your delicates and umentionables. (Of course, if my husband catches wind that I’ve been spinning my unmentionables in the salad spinner, he may have apolexy, so I might stick to the dryer for those. Officially.)

July 24, 2017 0

The Disappearing Liptauer Cheese

It has been a hot steamy week here in New Haven, and I am too old and matronly for it to’ve been hot and steamy in a William Hurt and Kathleen Turner kind of way (that’s a good movie, by the way, I should watch that again — Body Heat). I just mean, the weather’s been the kind of hot and sticky where when you think about what to make for dinner, you think, “I don’t really care as long as I don’t have to turn on the oven or the stove.”

We acquired an Instant Pot a week ago and we haven’t even been able to think about using it, not because it would generate so much heat, but because the thought of eating the kind of meal you’d make in an Instant Pot is so incredibly unappealing. “Dear God no,” was the basic vibe, when I said that maybe I’d attempt to make a barbecued chicken thing. And we all love barbecued chicken. But.

The name of the game this week has been Sandwiches for Dinner. Turkey sandwiches, mostly, assembled on these nice rolls I got at the store. Sliced turkey, tomatoes, maybe a little red onion or some pickle relish and some sliced American cheese — this is a perfectly good summer supper. But you need sides. If you just have sandwiches, the plate looks sad.

Can’t have sad plates.

We plowed through a bag of horseradish and cheese potato chips one night. I made a big bowl of roasted corn and black bean salad which was also a hit with some of us. Last night, I found myself staring into the fridge and going, “Sandwiches and — what?” when I noticed the bag of celery I had washed and trimmed and put in the crisper for future use. I meant to pack them in with my daughter’s lunches, to take to summer camp, but I had forgotten them all week. Which meant they were certainly up for grabs for dinner.

“Stuffed celery,” I thought.

But: Stuffed with what?

For about a second I considered pimiento cheese; it’s my standby. And I have roasted red peppers on hand, a whole jarful. But wouldn’t that be a little same-old, same-old? It’s hard to admit you might be sick of pimiento cheese, but we may have reached that point. I continued to stare into the fridge and I noticed the half-brick of cream cheese sitting there and I said, “Liptauer cheese.”

Liptauer cheese: something I have read recipes for a thousand times, and never made. Why is this? How is this? “This must be remedied,” I said, taking the cream cheese from the fridge and hiding it in the microwave (so it could soften to room temperature without being attacked by the evil cat, who will attack a brick of cream cheese, given the slightest opportunity, you bet your bippy).

I did some quick poking around. I know Laurie Colwin has a thing she writes about called Viennese cheese spread or something like that — it’s basically Liptauer cheese. Online, I found a ton of perfectly reasonable sounding recipes. In the end I turned to the Joy of Cooking and found a recipe sufficiently basic and unongepotchket (un-ongepotchket) that I was willing to take it on. I removed the strings from the celery and cut the stalks into shorter pieces and then I was ready to go.

Since the cream cheese was soft, this was a mixture I could, and did, assemble entirely by hand in about five minutes. I took a tablespoon of minced shallot (not because I was trying to be so fancy, but because I have a shallot sitting around; a more plebian red onion would be just as good), a tablespoon of good, fresh, sweet paprika, and a tablespoon of capers, and mashed and stirred them into four ounces of cream cheese. I took a taste. It was good, but it needed something: it wasn’t quite as potent on the tongue as I wanted it to be. So I added a teaspoon each of powdered onion and powdered garlic, and maybe half a teaspoon more paprika. Whip whip whip: done. It was perfect. I spread it into the celery and then put the tray of stuffed celery in the fridge.

When we sat down to dinner, there were, I believe, about 25 pieces of stuffed celery on the tray. My daughter, to my astonishment, took one bite and made a face: not for her. “But you love capers!” I said. “There’s capers in this?” she said, wanting to change her mind. But she looked again: No. Liptauer cheese is not for her. “Ok, well, the grownups will eat it all,” I said.

I ate my turkey sandwich. I ate some leftover corn and bean salad. I ate some bread and butter pickles. I went to the tray to get some celery. There were three pieces left on the tray.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “There are only three pieces of celery on the tray.”

“Is that a problem?” asked my husband, looking at me somewhat archly. “Well no,” I said, “but it means there’s not much for me to eat.” I received a sheepish look. “I didn’t eat lunch today,” my husband said, “I was really hungry.”

He ate 21.5 pieces of stuffed celery, people. (He finished the piece our daughter took a bite of.) In maybe eight minutes. Completely unobserved. It was like a jewel heist, except it was stuffed celery instead of sapphires.

I took the last three pieces for myself and ate them quickly. “I’m glad you like the filling,” I said to my husband.

“I think I might like it better than pimiento cheese,” he said.

I gasped in my heart.

“That might be heresy,” he admitted.

I’m making more Liptauer cheese to serve with dinner tonight; also a batch of pimiento cheese (because my daughter loves it). I’ll be buying more turkey today, and maybe some roast beef, and another tomato, and — you know, I’d better buy some more cream cheese, too, because I’m thinking I better make some with some pickles chopped up in it. You know, for variety’s sake.

I am going to go through paprika like nobody’s business. Penzey’s is gonna love me (or wonder what the hell is going on here in New Haven).

July 21, 2017 0

The Cricket on Livingston Street

Unfortunately for me I have a track record of being shat on by animals. The first time I can remember was in 1987, when I was walking down Chapel Street in downtown New Haven wearing a jacket that had belonged to my father. It was the jacket from the first suit he bought after graduating from college; the story was he had purchased it to go to his first job interview. It was a dark grey pinstriped suit. The pants were long gone but the jacket had become mine and it was, absolutely, my favorite article of clothing. I wore it every day for years. There I was, ho de do, walking down Chapel Street, and a pigeon shat on the shoulder of the jacket. I was in front of 1142 Chapel Street when it happened. It was a huge blob of white and yellow bird crap, and I remember I said, “OH FUCK” and spent a long time, when I got home, meticulously cleaning it off the delicate wool of the jacket. I tried to tell myself that being shat on by a bird is good luck, but who the hell knew. (I got the jacket clean enough that I would wear it for many, many more years after that. I no longer wear it, but I still have it.)

That was the first dramatic crapped-on-by-some-random-animal moment. There was also the time I was sitting on the deck at my father in law’s house, minding my own business, reading, and a flock of geese flew overhead. I looked up at the herd of squawking geese, saying, “Hey! Geese!” and at least one of them shat on my back. My husband and child found this uproariously funny. I, not so much. “You never look up when geese are flying overhead,” my husband gasped through his laughter. “Fuck you,” I said angrily, tugging at my shirt carefully, trying to get it off of me without getting goose shit in my hair.

I have yet to be crapped on by a dog or a cat. I cannot even recall that my infant daughter crapped on me. Maybe she knew it just would not do; I don’t know. She certainly never minded spitting up on me, and the first time she puked, at about 18 months, I will never forget: she threw up all down the front of the pretty dress I had put on to go out to dinner on a rare date night with my husband. But wild animals seem to see me and think, “Ah, THERE’s the toilet.”

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was walking down Livingston Street with my daughter — I was taking her to summer camp — and a cricket pooped on me.

“Look! A cricket!” I said to my daughter, pointing to my shirt, where this cricket had just landed on my shoulder.

“Aw! Cricket!” she said admiringly. My daughter is a serious, huge friend of bugs. She is a magnet for praying mantises and likes to bring them home for me to make little houses for them. I could tell she was already thinking, “Can we take him home?”

“Look!” she said. “It pooped on you!” She laughed happily.

“Aw, crap,” I said, realizing she was right. My pristine white poplin button down shirt had a tiny dot of green cricket crap on it. The cricket hopped off me and went to find something more interesting to do. “Great,” I said, peering down at my shoulder. The little green dot of crap would be barely noticeable to anyone, but my knowing it was there made the shirt unwearable.

“Guess you’ll be doing laundry when you get home,” my daughter said knowingly.

I sighed. “I was going to do laundry anyway,” I said. “It’s no big deal.” It’s summer. There’s always laundry to do.

So here I am, back at home, doing laundry. To be honest, it is so beastly outside, I’d rather be at home doing laundry than outside doing anything at all, unless being outside means sitting in a screened-in cafe patio drinking an iced coffee. But it’s pretty good right here: I’ve got iced coffee right here at home. And my iced coffee at home is better than any cafe’s iced coffee, because I have coffee ice cubes. And air conditioning. God bless clean laundry, air conditioning, and coffee ice cubes.

July 20, 2017 2

One Picnic: An Example

Because it is summer and because my life involves a lot of summertime picnics, and because I recently wrote a long piece about how to assemble a decent picnic without becoming suicidal, I wanted to share with my readers how I pulled off an excellent picnic yesterday. It was going to be a hot day and my daughter and I had decided that the agenda for the day would revolve around going swimming. We packed up our swim stuff into one tote bag, and into a smaller insulated bag, I told her, we would put our picnic lunch.

I opened the fridge. From the fridge, I pulled:

One tub of leftover spaghetti sauced with tuna, white beans, parsley, and garlic; one tinfoiled package with three leftover stuffed clams in it; one plastic tub of sliced pineapple.

I cut the pineapple into smaller chunks, transferred them into an insulated travel mug, put ice cubes on top of the pineapple, and closed the mug.

Into a Ziploc bag I put two forks, two napkins, and a little package of toothpicks.

I put an ice pack into the insulated bag, the pasta and the clams on top of the ice pak, the ziplock bag with the forks and napkins and toothpicks on top of that. Closed the insulated bag. The coffee cup of pineapple I just slid into the tote bag.

I grabbed our books, my phone, and my keys, and off we went. We got to the pool and headed first to the picnic area, where my daughter immediately spread out the tablecloth. Within three minutes we were sitting there eating and chatting happily. When we were thirsty, we drank from the cup of pineapple chunks. The ice lasted until long after we got home — we ate the pineapple, drank the juice, and refilled the cup with water several times over the course of the afternoon. Always had something cold to drink. Packing up took us about ninety seconds.

We got home and unpacking took about 90 seconds.

And then it was time to start making dinner.

July 11, 2017 0

My friend needs picnic help. I am going to try to provide encouragement. I may fail, but no one will say I didn’t try.

A number of my associates — and I myself, I have to admit, I am not exempt from this bourgeois shit — spend time in the summer at a local pool club which has what we might call a certain rustic charm. It’s bourgeois, to be sure, but as pool clubs go, it is rather… unintimidating. It’s not a place with a fancy restaurant attached to it where you call a staffer over and they bring you an iced tea and maybe a turkey club sandwich with extra mayo. It’s the kind of place where there’s a Coleman cooler of ice water over near the gate and a stack of paper cones to drink out of. There is a snack shack, and that means you can spend five bucks on a cheeseburger if you want to. You can also buy what are politely called “ice cream novelties.” If you want to.

As a rule, I don’t want to.

This has meant that I’ve developed a keen sense of what can be toted to the pool to have for picnic lunches and/or dinners. It’s not merely that I’m stingy, though I am; it’s that if I’m going to spend money on stuff like this, I want it to be genuinely good. And I mean no disrespect to the snack shack really: it’s not like they’ve got a real kitchen to work with. It’s a tough gig. But I’d just as soon bring my own food. Okay?

Admittedly: Not all of my friends share this keen sense. What’s more, many of my friends are, in addition to trying to feed themselves and their families, under what we’ll call gently trying circumstances (because you’ve got to schlep your food, and probably have it already cooked — not everyone wants to grill, believe it or not), facing the basic challenge of parenthood, which is: what the fuck to feed the children, whose palates are not exactly ranked with Jacques Pepin’s. Because man cannot live on SpongeBob SquarePants pops. Believe it or not.

So there’s the “nutritious” dining issue, and the “not hideously expensive” dining issue, combined with the “bring a picnic” issue. It’s rather daunting. Then to really up the ante, one of my friends confessed to me recently that she is extremely averse, herself, to the idea of eating sandwiches for dinner. She is not a fan of sandwiches for dinner. Personally I don’t know how that’s possible, but we’ll let that go and just accept the premise: No Sandwiches For Dinner.

So what can one serve at a picnic, for dinner, that isn’t sandwiches and doesn’t require cooking on-site on the grill? Whether or not they appeal to one’s children is another matter entirely, and one I will address shortly.

There are a thousand great things you can eat at a picnic. They taste especially great if you’ve been out in the sun and swimming and stuff like that for a few hours: your appetite is huge. There is a catch, though: they require you to have put effort into the matter before you left the house. It may take you as long as an hour to set up the picnic at home — and I realize most people don’t want to do that. However, the benefits are tangible once you’re sitting down at your picnic table.

OK, you do hypothetically have other options. You could go to the nice place near your apartment that sells takeout, and buy takeout. You could buy a pound of healthful, delicious grilled vegetables and maybe some seaweed salad and a bag of horseradish potato chips. That’s your prerogative. They’ll even give you little plastic forks and napkins and stuff. Cram the takeout containers into your tote bags, remember to bring a drink, you’re good.

But what if you don’t want to pay $10.99/lb for pasta salad and fruit salad and seaweed salad and grilled veggies, and you’re not willing to slap some PB&J on bread and call it dinner? Then you’re going to have to face an ugly truth, which is this: A good homemade picnic requires some effort.

In July of 2008, the New York Times did a big, multi-page spread, by Mark Bittman, listing things you could bring on a picnic. It’s a pretty good list, generally speaking. I actually tore the pages out of the paper and folded them up and shoved them into one of my Bittman cookbooks, for quick reference. I’ve got it around here someplace.

The thing about the Bittman List is, a lot of it is stuff you’d be eating were you making dinner at home anyhow — at least, this is true in my household. Panzanella is a standard summertime evening meal for us, because it uses up stale bread, tomatoes are at their best in the summer, and it’s easy to make. Bittman doesn’t like calling things pasta salads, but I don’t share this phobia, and so I’m willing to accept that there are a ton of sauced pasta dishes that are just as good room temperature or cold as they are hot, and I’m happy to eat them as pasta salads. (In other words, remember that pasta salad doesn’t have to be sad gloppy stuff, it can be happy, non-gloppy stuff; and it can even be happy and gloppy, if you’ve made a sauce that has, say, excellent ricotta whipped into the dressing.) (Be sure to take care with keeping these kinds of things cool — you do not want to give yourself food poisoning. In other words, pasta with tuna packed in olive oil, red onion, garlic, parsley, and white beans is one of the best things in the world to eat on a hot summer evening — but it won’t seem like such a great idea if your tub of this has been sitting around in the hot sun for five hours before you eat it and hence has turned into a festering tub of I don’t know what. You have to pack your picnic with a serious attention to the biohazard detail. So maybe skip the tuna and the white beans. But feel free to go for olives, capers, red onion, garlic, and parsley: these are things that can take a bit of a beating.)

Rice salads are also great for picnics. The same theories behind pasta salads hold for rice salads. However, cooking rice for rice salads is a little different from cooking rice to serve alongside a hot dish. If you’re planning a rice salad, cook the rice as you would pasta: fill a stock pot with water, bring to boil, and cook the rice in the boiling water for about 11 minutes. Drain through a colander and then — this is important — dump the rice out on a cooky sheet and let it cool for about 20 minutes before you dress it. Rice salad can be set up a thousand ways. Dice up any leftover vegetables you have on hand (the six cherry tomatoes in a bowl, the half a can of olives in the back of the fridge, the last four tablespoons of salsa in the jar, a stalk of celery, the leftover steamed broccoli), toss with oil and vinegar. This is rice salad. It can be made heftier if you add some protein (leftover diced chicken, beef, or whatever). It’s often nice to toss with some grated Parmesan or whatever hard cheese you like. All of this is a matter of taste. If you like parsley add parsley; if you don’t, don’t. My child believes no salad is really correct without capers. So I add capers.

I like to have a picnic involve more than one thing. I will raid the fridge to see what I can come up with. Things I wouldn’t do normally, like slice up some celery sticks to munch on, plain, I will do in the name of a good picnic. Prep the celery and pack it in a plastic bag with a wet paper towel (this rule also holds for carrot sticks). The last time I assembled a picnic, I was rummaging through the fridge and found a jar of pickled okra in the back — so I took a little Rubbermaid tub and filled it with okra, some black olives, some green olives, and cherry tomatoes. It made a nice little side dish, gave the meal a little variety.

My patron saint, Laurie Colwin, wrote an essay on picnics (in More Home Cooking) that made me realize that even I could deal with a picnic, it was just that I’d been thinking about them all wrong. And that dealing with a picnic didn’t have to mean special picnic-specific food; it meant adapting what I’d normally eat into a portable format. This is the key. What is it you normally eat? Figure out a way to carry that to your picnic spot. If the specific dish is not going to be portable in a reasonable way, figure out a variant form of it. Be willing to strike some compromises. Be willing to have things be a little off-kilter.

Your picnic can be bread, cheese — a cheese you want to be a little soft, like brie, can be perfect picnic food — some pickles, and fruit. This would involve buying a loaf of bread you like, buying cheese you like, snagging a jar of cornichons, and getting a bag of grapes or whatever looks good at the store. Your picnic can be a Fakes Elotes Salad (one of my own summer favorites) and a bag of potato chips and a pile of celery stalks. Your picnic can be a watermelon and feta salad, some slices of chicken breast slathered with fig jam on a baguette, and a little dish of olives. Your picnic can be cold leftover ears of corn on the cob, a bowl of cherry tomatoes with a thick salad dressing to dip them in, or maybe some pimiento cheese, and an avocado smashed onto slices of bread. Your picnic can be green pea salad and a few slices of ciabatta smeared with jam and layered with a sharp cheese. (It’s good, if you get the jam and cheese flavors right.) For God’s sake: leftover pizza, cold cooked veggies with a salad dressing to dip them in, and a cold drink — that’s a picnic! Don’t worry about dessert if you don’t want to. Buy some Oreo cookies for dessert, or break down and buy an ice cream sandwich at the snack shack. Whatever. I’m telling you: this doesn’t have to be hard. It just requires some forethought.

“But I’m no good at the forethought,” I can hear my friend wailing. But here’s the thing: I know she’s wrong. She is good at the forethought. She just doesn’t want to apply the forethought to food she herself will eat. To which my reply is: Why should you, my friend, have to suffer through a mediocre meal just because you’re not at home, but are, instead, three miles away from home at a club that has picnic tables and coolers of water waiting for you? You are worth the effort. A good picnic dinner is worth the effort. If you didn’t think so, you’d be picking up a burger at the Dairy Queen on your way home and calling it a night.

As for What Will The Children Eat: my solution to that is, when you’re cooking for the children at home, cook extra — a lot extra — and pack it into bags or tubs for the kids to eat later. If they’ll eat roasted sweet potatoes and steamed broccoli, then make two extra sweet potatoes and cook another head of broccoli to tote for lunch the next day. If the only protein they will eat is Swiss cheese, buy extra Swiss cheese and cut it up, wrap it up in wax paper or whatever, and put it in the cooler. Only you, the parent, know how to cater to your little one, so I leave that to you. It’s merely a matter of having extra on hand. If, on the other hand, the kid is a not-picky eater, then they’ll just join in with whatever you’re having, and life is a bowl of cherries. (Cherries are, by the way, excellent picnic food; pack them into a bag or a bowl with ice cubes, because sun-heated cherries make for a sad dining experience.)

The grownup picnic should be a genuinely enjoyable meal. I mean, despite the bugs, despite the sunburn, despite the fact that you feel a distinct need to wash your hair because the chlorine is eating at your scalp. A picnic meal shouldn’t mean lowering your standards; it just means altering your system. And if you’re the kind of parent who’s been dutifully lugging water bottles and the right kind of crackers for the last six years, to keep your child cool, calm, and collected, I know you can do it.

The last good thing about a picnic is this: if you’ve done it right, you will find that you come home with far less stuff than you came with. The paper plates go in the trash. Yes, you’ll have some Rubbermaid tubs to wash, some cutlery, things like that — but the bag that seemed so heavy as you left the house will weigh a fraction of what it weighed when you walked out the door. You can empty out the cooler and the tote bags as the kids go clean themselves up and put on pajamas and brush their teeth. And you can fall into bed feeling like you ate a good meal and that you’ve earned your exhaustion honestly.

Then the next day, you get to do it all again! Ain’t summertime grand?

July 2, 2017 0