Fourteen years ago, Mr. Handsome and I got married in my parents’ driveway under a black tarp, buckets of Queen Anne’s Lace at our feet, with fifty-some guests all comfy on metal folding chairs watching on.

I hadn’t wanted to marry him that morning. He had arrived the day before in his little red Toyota Celica (we promptly dashed to the courthouse to sign the marriage papers, last minute for everything as was—and is—our custom) and then busied himself stringing lights around the garage/barn (that he had helped pour the floor for on his first visit to my house the last summer). But come Saturday morning of August 24, 1996, I decided I didn’t even really like the guy.

I don’t remember what my last minute funk stemmed from. Perhaps he was acting overly goofy or arguing with me just for the heck of it. Whatever it was, I was suddenly excruciatingly aware that I’d be stuck with him (and his behavior) for the rest of my blessed life and I just wasn’t in the mood for it. But I knew I had made the decision to marry him in less stressful times, so I soldiered on, ever the martyr. And really, it wasn’t serious doubts I was having. I just didn’t, at that time, really, you know, like him.

By the time the wedding started, I liked him again.

We ate supper first, guests spilling over onto both porches and the yard, and then there were pictures and last-minute vow memorization. The service itself was simple—some scripture, some readings, a meditation, the vows, a few tears, and then a fierce hug as the sun went down.

Homemade ice cream and cookies followed.

It sounds like a small enough affair, simple and sweet, but my parents will tell you otherwise. For the seven-and-a-half weeks between engagement and wedding (we don’t mess around), they worked their tails off. To cope, they wrote up schedules and task lists for each month, and then, as the time drew near, for the week, and then, heaven help us!, for the hour. Here, let me read off some of what’s on the lists (thanks, scrapbook):

Beginning of August…

*house washing
*kittens (yes, a basket of kittens were part of the decor, and for the little cousins to play with)
*paint basket
*black board
*chairs
*windows
*hammock
*wash houseplants
*paint patching
*plan garage decor
*buy flowers to plant
*make lasagnas
*clean oven racks
*take down treehouse

Hey, look at that. I’m only up to the 14th of August—we weren’t to be married for another ten whole days…

*hang blinds
*bath tiles
*try corn? (we served fresh homegrown corn, off the cob)
*make granola and hide
*call about peaches (there was still regular canning to do)
*ice blocks
*lawn chairs?
*bleach shower curtain
*wash kitchen chairs and cupboards
*put calves into goat pasture
*take down fence for parking
*CORN
*trestle table on back porch
*beautify bathroom

And then for the 23rd…

*clean (didn’t we do this already?)
*tie dog and wash porch floors
*courthouse
*bring home lasagnas

My mother was so organized that come the day of the wedding, we all sat around bored.

She had arranged for friends of theirs, two couples, to come work the kitchen while the wedding was going on. She wrote out a two-page guide for them. I get an enormous kick out of her very neat penciled instructions. It goes like this:

3:30 Orientation

after 4:00
*put out butters
*heat corn
*arrange relish (carrots, celery, peppers, blk and green olives, cukes) and fruit (watermelon, grapes?) trays
*put out breads and cover tightly (braided bread, round dark, sesame, oatmeal wheat)
*put out soak pails
*check bathrooms
*thaw cookies on back porch

semi last minute
*set out drinks: tea, lemonade, water
*light kitchen candles and outdoor citronella candles

last minute
*toss salad (lettuce, chopped eggs, bacon)
*bring in lasagnas (girls will be baking these at Fountain Fire Hall and delivering them)
*set out ice

Very last minute: sing. Stay in tune and don’t bawl. (The four of them and my parents sang the dinner blessing, What is this place)

during ceremony
*check bathrooms
*wash spoons and whatever else there’s time for *prepare ice cream—3 freezers (see directions in containers in fridge)

She drew a little sign on the edge of the page with these words written inside:

*put sauces into dishes
*powder cookies (tea cakes)
*arrange all cookies on trays (chocolate raspberry bars, molasses cookies, tea cakes, lemon bars)
*set out cookies and sauces (strawberry, raspberry) on picnic tables along with small plates, napkins, spoons, pitcher of water with ice, stacked glasses

That was just page one. Page two was a map of the kitchen with lines and arrows indicating traffic flow, as well as a diagram of the kitchen table showing how the food was to be arranged.

Notes:
*Pails for used silver on kitchen stove and picnic table at carport
*trash bucket beside stove
*trash bucket beside picnic table
*extra corn on stove
*extra lasagnas in oven and on back porch, also the breads
*extra drinks on counter beside fridge
*ice for drinks in fridge
*ice for ice cream in freezer

And scrawled diagonally across the page:

Keep door to back porch shut as much as possible or guests will think they’re in West Virginia.

And so we were married.

Mr. Handsome and I, we are so totally different. Sometimes it blows me away how different we are. I always thought I’d marry a studious man, a guy who liked to sit around in the evening and discuss esoteric theology, whatever that is.

Instead, I got a tool belt-wielding, calloused-handed, down-to-earth, sharp-tongued manly-man. With emphasis on manly, as in manly-man.

I have no problem with how things turned out.

Still, being so different and all, it can be pretty hard to find stuff to do together on special occasions like, say, our anniversary.

Me: “Any ideas for what you want to do on Tuesday?”

Him: “I don’t know. What do you wanna do?”

Me: “I don’t know.”

Long pause, in which I think about childcare possibilities, movies, special food to prepare, whether or not we might enjoy going out to dinner, if we should spend the evening cleaning the attic or running the errands…. and Mr. Handsome thinks about the axle on his truck. It’s been giving him problems.

The silence is deafening.

Me: “Soooo, since there’s nothing we want to do together, how about I find free childcare and we hang out at home and then put a hundred dollars in my camera fund since we didn’t spend any money?”

Him: “Sounds good.”

At least we agree about not having anything to do together. So maybe we’re more alike than we let on?

Fourteen years is a long time to live with someone completely different from yourself. Fourteen years means we’ve shared a bed for…let’s see…WHOA! 5110 nights! Taking into account a handful of weekends apart, perhaps it’s only 5000 nights, but still, five thousand nights is a lot of nights. That means there have also been 5000 days and 5000 suppers. How about dirty supper dishes? With a super-low estimate of 35 dirty dishes, that would be 175,000 dirty supper dishes.

Suddenly I feel very tired.

Fourteen years ago, I married this man.

Despite our differences and the sometimes disheartening lack of shared interests, we have done an awful lot of together-living.

Together we have, in no particular order:

*bathed naked at a well in the middle of nowhere (Quick! Hand me a towel! I see someone up on that hill!)
*shared a single bed in a mouse-infested, HOT tin storage shed next to an evangelical church with a souped-up sound system
*made four more human beings (though I want to be clear that only I birthed them, thank you very much)
*fought
*sat through many counseling session, only a few of which were useful
*been lonely
*parented other people’s children for a couple years (i.e. foster care)
*fell on the floor laughing
*read out loud to each other (The Brothers K, A Severe Mercy, City of Joy, etc)
*cleaned up the kitchen
*experienced depression, ADHD, cancer, hemorrhaging, dengue, and an emergency c-section
*dug potatoes
*talked
*decided we’re horrid parents
*decided we’re superb parents
*decided we’re just plain old parents
*lived through a (small) earthquake and a hurricane
*built a house out of mud
*gotten lost
*enraged each other
*hung laundry
*cried
*renovated a house from top to bottom and inside out (the “together part” is used quite loosely here)
*hosted donut parties
*argued
*made hundreds and hundreds of quarts of applesauce
*dumped 40-plus quarts of home-canned peaches down the drain
*lived in two apartments and owned two houses
*had massive tickle fights, towel-snapping wars, and impromptu water battles
*shared countless late-night bowls of cereal

Speaking of cereal, Mr. Handsome brought me home a box of Captain Crunch today. We have a thing for it.

And each other.

This same time, years previous: Valerie’s Salsa and Canned Tomatoes and So why did I marry him? and How to make butter

We’ve started a new tradition: Sunday waffles.

It began last Sunday (it might appear to be kind of early to declare it a tradition, but you gotta trust me on this one—it’s a tradition fair and square, hallelujah and amen) when we swung by our friends’ house on the way from church to drop off their weekly egg order. The family—both parents and two of the nicest teenagers I know—was outside at the picnic table eating their Sunday lunch of waffles.

They hollered for us to join them, the father beckoning us over with huge sweeps of his arm, calling to us in his thick German accent, but we declined. We were eager to get home to our work-free afternoon, and besides, I’m cautious about unloading six hungry appetites into unsuspecting laps as it could do a person in. It does me in and I’m not unsuspecting.

Almost immediately, the entire family vacated the table and surrounded the van. They hung in the windows and opened the doors, the better to chat with all of us. When I next turned around, the Two Nicest Teenagers In The World were handing out napkins and wedges of Nutella-smeared waffle to my kids. When we finally drove away, the whole car smelled of melting chocolate and buttery waffles.

I spied an opportunity to teach a lesson on manners and promptly seized on it. “Kids,” I yelled, over their backseat ruckus, “Kids! Did you notice what they did back there?”

“Yeah! They gave us waffles,” they shouted back gleefully.

“It was so kind,” Miss Beccaboo added in a sugary-sweet voice. (These days, she’s big on the word “kind.”)

“Exactly,” I said, warming to my speech. “They not only offered us food, they came over to the car to give us food and talk to us. That’s what you do to make people feel welcome, you go out of your way. Now remember that.”

“Why don’t you make us waffles for lunch?” Yo-Yo asked as soon as I paused to draw breath.

The car rocked with shouts of Yes! Let’s! and Please, Mama, Pleeeease!

I hesitated. Sunday noon isn’t the best time to make a meal that takes any amount of time, and it’s usually when I rid the fridge of the week’s leftovers, but as our church lets out earlier in summer, the kids (and parents) weren’t quite at The Point of Melt Down, and the leftovers would still be there on Monday… But then there’s the issue of serving my kids a meal consisting of just starch and sugar, completely devoid of greens. I don’t usually do that. But hey, we had a freezer full of fruit (when are we going to use it up anyway?) and I could make the waffles whole grain—

“Alright,” I said, and the car rocked harder.

The meal was a roaring success (though I learned that a double batch of waffles is not enough) and everyone left the table supremely happy. We all agreed Sunday waffles would be our new family tradition.

This Sunday I mixed up the dry ingredients (a triple batch) before church. Once home, I bustled around the kitchen cooking waffles, whipping cream, thawing strawberries, and making a blueberry syrup. Sweetsie was so excited about the upcoming feast that she could barely contain herself. She was everywhere at once, being more helpful than was necessary, and when I tripped over her one time too many and banished her from the kitchen, she just giggled.

The kids take the adornment of their waffles very seriously. They can eat all the fruit they want, but they are only permitted one scoop of whipped cream (I’m exempt from that rule). Yo-Yo and Sweetsie eat theirs straight up, but Nickel makes heart-shaped waffle sandwiches stuffed with cream and strawberries and Miss Beccaboo uses hers as icing.

When lunch was over, there was only one waffle left. Sweetsie so stuffed herself that she collapsed on the floor in a heap, groaning.

Next Sunday I just might break out the jar of Nutella that they don’t know I have. They’ll go wild.

Whole Wheat Buttermilk Waffles
Adapted from the little recipe booklet that came with one of our waffle makers

The absence of sugar is not a typo.

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
½ cup white flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons butter, melted
2 eggs
1 ½ cups buttermilk

Mix together the dry ingredients. Whisk in the wet ingredients.

Preheat your waffle maker and cook according to the waffle maker’s instructions. (I oil the waffle maker lightly and only once in a while, and I probably wouldn’t even need to do that as it never seems to have any trouble sticking.)

For waffle variety: this is another great waffle recipe. It can be almost completely assembled the night before and is 100-percent whole grain and sensationally delicious.

This same time, years previous: Earthy ponderations, part two and Cold Curried Corn Soup

The morning after the refrigerator debacle, I was sitting at my desk clicking through my morning tour of favorite blogs when Julie’s post caught my eye. She was writing mostly about apple-red raspberry pie, but it wasn’t the pie that got me, it was the ball of red raspberry ice cream sitting alongside the pie.

As I pondered the recipe, I remembered the couple boxes of mushy, juicy red raspberries that I had hurriedly stuffed into one of the basement freezers in midst of the previous evening’s frenzy. That did it, I decided. Red raspberry ice cream was the way to go.

So I went.

I did not grow up with red raspberries. In fact, my mother was very outspoken in her distaste for the fruit. “They taste like Pepto-Bismol,” she’d say, screwing up her nose and smacking her lips, pretending to taste the foul medicine. “Now black raspberries,” a beatific smile relaxing her face, “they are something else. Black raspberries are far superior.”

Black raspberries are pretty incredible, I’ll admit, but over the years I’ve grown to love the red variety, so much so, in fact, that given a choice between red or black, I’m not sure which I’d chose. I kind of have a hunch I’d go with the red because they’re so … red. And because they’re tart and they go well with so many foods, adding an often much-needed color/flavor boost.

(I think my mother’s opinions regarding the red raspberry have softened somewhat. While she and my father still don’t have any of the bushes on their property, she did fall head over heels in love with the red raspberry-rhubarb pie. We spent phone conversations discussing that pie.)

I’ve made different red raspberry ice creams before and they always involved pureeing and then straining the fruit to remove the seeds. This ice cream doesn’t mess around with any such nonsense, and because I happen to like the seeds, this appears to be the only way to go.

If you add the fruit earlier in the mixing process, the ice cream will blush pink all over. I opted to go the swirl route, waiting till the ice cream was as stiff as I could get it before spooning in the crushed berries. (Actually, I didn’t wait for the ice cream; I was running around upstairs overseeing the kids’ room clean-up tasks, aware out of the corner of my mind that the machine was grinding away, probably for too long. It worked out in the end, though. The rooms got cleaned and I got my ice cream.) As soon as all the fruit had been scraped in, I shut off the machine and boxed up the ice cream.

I had some leftover peach cornmeal cobbler on hand (yes, I’ve made more and another one is on the kitchen line-up for today) and I kept fixing little bowls of warmed-up cobbler to eat with mini scoops of red raspberry ice cream. I think I did that a total of three times. It would’ve been four, but when I got home from my church council meeting the cobbler pan was shiny clean. I may have wailed. After pacing between cupboard and fridge for a good while, I finally settled on a plate of cheesy tortilla chips and salsa. The chips were good, but they weren’t cobbler and ice cream.

Red Raspberry Ice Cream
From Julie over at Dinner With Julie, not really even adapted

This is one of those ice creams that is best served up straight away, but it’s good after a rest in the freezer, too.

1 cup whipping cream
½ cup half-and-half
½ cup milk
½ cup sugar, plus 2 tablespoons
½ capful (½ teaspoon) of vanilla
1 cup red raspberries

Stir together the cream, half-and-half, milk, ½ cup of sugar, and the vanilla. Freeze in your ice cream maker.

While the ice cream is churning, mash together the red raspberries and 2 tablespoons of sugar with a fork.

Spoon the fruit into the machine in the last minute of churning, earlier if you want the ice cream to be pink all over.

Yield: 1 quart

This same time, years previous: Earthy ponderations, part one and Two morals and Oven-Roasted Roma Tomatoes