Ok. I'll admit it. We had camping food for dinner tonight.
It was a warm day, and I had been cleaning my house most of the day. Spaghetti didn't sound quite right. We had gotten rid of a bunch of furniture on Freecycle (awesome group!) so when I wasn't hauling furniture out to someone's car, I was rearranging what was left or vacuuming and dusting around where the old stuff used to be. Also, Will called and said he was going to be stopping at the gym on the way home from work, which I thought meant he would be starving when he came home.
The man loves beans. His momma raised him on beans and tortillas. So the man loves beans. As luck would have it, I had beans in my pantry. Easy dinner? Check.
I opened a can of baked beans and put it in a pot.
Then I defrosted some bratwurst sausage and chopped that up and put it in the pot too.
And I turned the pot on.
That's that.
Well, OK. I stirred the pot sometimes.
As I looked at my housewife's copout of a dinner, I decided it needed some rounding out. So I cut up some melon that I knew he probably wouldn't eat.
That was our dinner.
When he came home, Willy immediately went outside to the garage and started tinkering with some old kegs he got for his home brews. Once, before I got married, a friend told me, "Molly, you will probably never lose Will to an affair. More likely, you will lose him to some project in the garage."
I called out there, "Dinner's ready, are you hungry?"
No answer.
"Hey, do you want to eat now or....?"
No answer.
"Will?"
Finally, the response, "Yes, yes let's eat now."
I never know if he hears me and just forgets to say anything, or if he doesn't hear me at all. Either one happens all the time.
My friend was probably right.
He came in, washed up, and we had dinner at our recently new dining table WITHOUT a couch next to it, looking out the window at the sunset and listening to our evening chorus of birdies.
And you know what? It wasn't bad. AND I even got compliments on it.
Willy said, "Beans make everything better."
(He didn't eat the melon)
For anyone who knows Willy, this is such a Willy thing to say.
