Susan called her mom for Mother's Day and spent half the phone call talking to her dad.
He asked her if she were a history buff (she's not a buff anything) and did she know of the Pulitzer prize winning historian David McCullough? Susan's dad was quite surprised to find that she did not, her knowledge of historical authors being limited to whoever put together the Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, which is an entertaining book regardless.

Susan's dad told her that David McCullough's new book was a collection of speeches he's delivered over the years entitled 'An American Spirit' and he had recently been discussing it on Charlie Rose. Susan thought this sounded like the blandest collection of uninteresting OMG who cares but, she is rarely disappointed in her father's choice of reading material, and she likes Charlie Rose, so she said she'd watch the interview later that evening.

She GTS-ed David McCullough on Charlie Rose and sat enthralled for almost an hour by this series of interviews. Most exciting was his description of the Battle of Brooklyn, in which General Washington & his amateur army of mostly New England farmers got the crap kicked out of them, followed by their miraculous night time escape to Manhattan in which a providential fog is featured. Susan loved his realistic description of Washington as having never commanded an army in his life, who was out-foxed, out-flanked and out-numbered, who made bad mistakes & suffered terrible defeats but did not quit and learned as he went along.

Oh boy!

Memorable also was the story of the Christmas night crossing of the Delaware River with Washington's modest Continental Army, all in sad shape, who marched through the night and attacked the Hessians (well trained German soldiers hired by Britain) at Trenton.
And they won!
One detail stuck with her; the reports of bloody footprints left in the snow by the shoeless soldiers in that winter of 1776.

Eventually she got tired, bookmarked the interview, and went to sleep. The following morning Susan made a point to call her dad to let him know how much she loved the interview and to discuss her favorite parts.

That evening she climbed into bed with a book that was sitting around since the previous weekend when she brought it home from the thrift store. Blood, Bones & Butter; The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef begins with a description of the author's childhood home on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border.

Here is paragraph two from page one;

That part of the world, heavily touristed as it was, was an important location of many events in the American Revolutionary War. George Washington crossed the Delaware here, to victory at the Battle of Trenton, trudging through the snowy woods and surprising the British in spite of some of his troops missing proper shoes, their feet instead wrapped in newspaper and burlap. 

Susan has loved Rigatoni Bolognese for years. She even tried to make it herself the real way with red wine and letting it simmer on the stove for four hours. Susan personally finds it unnecessary to let anything cook on the stove for more than 40 minutes. And four hours? Didn't help. Another issue may be that Susan doesn't like to cook with red wine. She loves Cabernet, but not in her food.

Susan tried a few more times before giving up. It never tasted the way it was supposed to. She assumed the universe was keeping the secrets of the delicious Italian Bolognese out of her Irish-Polish outsider's grasp.

Earlier this week Susan brought together her work pals & her friend who talks to dead people for a spiritualist session. She did not accompany them opting to meet up afterward to find out how things went. Once all together, they talked, drank, ate, and some tried to pick up the check (Disclaimer: not Susan).

Susan ordered an appetizer version of the Pappardelle Bolognese and marvelled at the creamy wonderfulness, with a hint of fennel, that clung to the delicate wide noodles.

Jesus. She had to figure out how to make this sh*t!

Susan ate half the dish & took the other half home to scrutinize, and finish for lunch.

Two days later, she heated up the remaining portion of her obsession, searched for clues in the sauce, and wondered why it was so different from the versions she's made at home. When she was done she sat at her desk messing around on the computer. Scrolling through Instagram she saw something on @nytfood and read the accompanying recipe for White Bolognese.

WHITE Bolognese?
Gasp!
No tomatoes and no red wine!

She was back in business with the universe.

While waiting for her insulated bowl to freeze Susan made ice pops. She pureed the remnants of two pints of blueberries and added coconut milk, but not before she strained out all of the teeny little gritty blueberry seeds by pushing the mess through a very fine sieve. She's made blueberry ice pops both ways; by straining the seeds and by not bothering to strain the seeds, she prefers no seeds.

She added some simple syrup infused with lemon left in the fridge since her birthday when she made the last lemon cake she will ever attempt. After this she filled up the pop molds and shoved them in the freezer.

Sidebar: Two birthdays in a row Susan's made herself a lemon cake and both times she was disappointed, even though the cakes had lemon zest, lemon syrup poured over them and lemon icing. From now on when she wants a lemon cake she will make lemon curd instead & eat it with everything. Lemon curd is the way to go.

For a second set of molds she pureed more coconut milk + orange juice concentrate + a frozen banana + spinach and made green Orange Julius ice pops. 

Then she went to bed.

The next day she mentioned the blueberry ice pops and the green Orange Julius ice pops to her pal. During this conversation Susan saw there was a new voicemail on her phone. It was from her friend who talks to dead people, he called to say he was leaving the country for two weeks, was thinking of her and he loved her. 

She called him back. Before they got too heavily into conversation her friend (who talks to dead people) said Susan's husband had some messages for her and did she want to hear them. 

For almost 20 years Susan's friend (who talks to dead people) has periodically delivered messages to her which has made her a little blase about receiving them. Plus, she has her own collection of interesting coincidental things and isn't in need of anything from beyond. But, she's also not going to turn it down. 

He told her a few things, nothing that particularly jumped out at her until he asked;

'Were you doing something with blueberries recently?'



In anticipation of imminent sleepover company, a chain reaction of organizational tasks was put into effect by Susan a week ago. Sunday morning had her cleaning out the junk drawer in her kitchen. Any other day of the year Susan doesn't care about her junk drawer, it's a perfectly fine location for all manner of things that she either uses or should have thrown out long ago. However, since the recent gathering of the household screwdrivers and little tooly things she thought that the junk drawer would provide them with good centralized storage.

She emptied the drawer completely and began picking through the contents in which she found two folding hex key sets (think IKEA Allen wrenches) and a teeny little multi tool with needle nose pliers, a knife & combo bottle opener/screwdriver. This immediately made her recall an even teenier Swiss Army style knife that Cousin Lisa had given her years ago. It was an industrial gift* originally received by her brother promoting Lotensin, a blood pressure lowering drug, and it consisted of a knife, combo screwdriver/nail file and a teeny but sharp pair of scissors. Lisa passed on this petite and practical item to Susan as they washed their hands in the ladies room of a long forgotten restaurant.

For years Susan carried the little red army knife in her pocketbook, but eventually it made its way to the junk drawer & although not there now, she knew it was still in the house. Happily she thought of it and Cousin Lisa and continued on with her task.

She removed a package of wooden skewers from the junk drawer collection & brought them over to a larger drawer filled only with kitchen related items. Within this drawer sat an adjustable bamboo drawer organizer which Susan fiddled with in order to accommodate the slim package of skewers. She noticed that the width of the organizer was slightly more expanded at the front of the drawer than it was in the back. This difference was probably less than 1/10" but it caught Susan's attention, so she removed the organizer to see what was back there.

Guess.

Susan said Hello Cousin Lisa out loud to the empty room, smiled then dropped the little knife into her pocketbook.

FYI: *Industrial gift was the husband's term for promotional give-aways.

Fact: Susan thinks coincidental things are always related but conspire to look arbitrary.

Fact: Cousin Lisa liked ginger candies.

For years whenever Susan ran across a bag of ginger candies she would purchase them for her Cousin Lisa. Susan considered them to be foul little suckers, but in recent years she's developed a taste for them. The ones she prefers are different from those she would purchase for Cousin Lisa, but that's really neither here nor there, ginger candies taste like ginger.

Cousin Lisa also liked candied ginger, which is actual ginger that has been dried and coated in sugar. Susan had a candied ginger connection in her neighborhood & would periodically bring a bag of it to her cousin. That stopped the day Cousin Lisa graciously accepted a new bag and placed it in her kitchen drawer alongside two previous bags.

Anyway, the anniversary of the day Susan lost her beloved Cousin Lisa arrived and steamrolled right over our tender heroine. She sobbed for hours the evening before and when she awoke it appeared as though she was punched in both eyes. She took a hot shower, donned a new dress in homage to her eternally stylish cousin and headed off to work.

When Susan arrived she found something on her desk.

The husband of her office-mate had purchased it for himself, discovered it was not to his liking* but thought it may appeal to Susan and sent it in as a hand-me-down gift;

A bag of ginger candies.


*Gross was his description

Even though Susan just concluded the entirety of 2015 in the grip of double barrel grieving she's not going to say she had a bad year. What she had was a special year in which she was given the best from all the best people around her. Many were lifers, some were far away or brand new, but her legions of supporters all contributed significantly to Susan's successful first year.

She was afraid to let it go because she knew it would take her farther away from the husband. She felt comfort for those 365 days being able to think on this day last year we were happy...However, it was ultimately nothing she could hang her hat on. When that personal day of infamy came it was OK, fun even, filled with his meatballs & sauce and people to help eat them.

Susan will admit that she's been a real prizewinning m*therf*cking heavyweight champ about everything. Her mental fortitude keeps her moving forward, but her people keep her happy. A component of this has been a new job, one which she didn't even have to look for, she just had to say thank you then unwrap it.

In the interest of full disclosure, not everything has been all top form behavior during her year of grief. One particularly immature habit has been Unnecessary Procrastination Resulting In Unnecessary Consequences.

Self explanatory.

She gets exhausted quite easily so there has been a noticeable decrease in the amount of cooking and cleaning being done around the house. Plus she's more forgetful than normal, wasting time searching for cans of corn, her phone or the last thing she set down on her desk.

However, there are perks to Susan's enforced single status, such as double the closet space & the ability to make plans on a whim. If she feels like spending the entire weekend in bed watching Netflix, she happily does so. Who wouldn't love all that, right?

However, there are no perks whatsoever to losing her beloved Cousin Lisa. No perks at all.

Susan feels as though the husband lobs messages to her from wherever he is, most notably this one, but there have been others, one causing her to say hello out loud to him in the middle of her work day.  She likes that.

This past week Susan told her kids about a feeling she had, kind of like she was being nudged from beyond. It was nothing more than taking notice of two related things she overheard. The mere fact that she paid attention to it made her think it might be something more.

Stay tuned.

As a general rule Susan doesn't believe in coincidences, often she has found that the coincidental things have been related. This being established, Susan had an interesting coincidental thing happen the week after the husband died.

She bought a new clock radio and set the buzzer alarm to wake her up. On that particular morning she was already sitting up in bed when the buzzer went off. She hit the button to turn it off. Immediately the clock radio came on playing the final five words of a song she liked;

'I and LOVE and YOU'

Bam! it ended.

Susan did not set the radio alarm, only the buzzer. She sat in bed stunned, wondering if the perfect placement of a significant song lyric was a random coincidence or if she just got a message. She said out loud to the empty room Thank you.

Every morning for the next week Susan waited to see if the radio would come on after the buzzer alarm and it didn't. Eventually she reset the alarm and the experiment ended.

CLICK ON THIS LINK and scroll down to 5:11 to hear what Susan heard.