Throughout my day I’m bombarded with memories that make me feel inadequate. That how I do something is wrong in some way. One of these memories is of a conversation I had with my mother-in-law. It was completely in passing and I’m sure she never remembered it after the conversation, but I did remember it. I’m hoping that getting it out in the open will take it away forever.
My husband and I like mashed potatoes with the skin intact. It probably started with my belief that the most nutritious part of the potato was in the skin — or perhaps it was just laziness, but our preference stuck for many years. Once, either just talking to my mother-in-law or cooking with her, I mentioned that we never skinned our potatoes before boiling & mashing/whipping them. She seemed surprised, then made a scrubbing motion with her hands and said, “So, first you scrub them very well…”
I suspect she then went on to describe the process she imagined we went through to make these mashed potatoes with skin, but I was stuck at, “So, first you scrub them very well…”
Well, I thought, I rinsed them, yeah, but scrub? Not always. I made sure they didn’t have eyes, rinsed them, cut them into smaller pieces, boiled them with a clove or two of garlic & then whipped them with butter & milk. But I didn’t really scrub them. Why? Were there really bad things on them if I didn’t really scrub them?
So now, whenever I make potatoes of any kind that still includes the skin — mashed, baked, boiled — I think of that conversation and my stomach tightens. And I really don’t know why it does. I doubt my mother-in-law thought I served my family unclean food. I think she was just trying to imagine what she would do if she served mashed potatoes with skins.
Whatever the case, we have a lot of rice and pasta these days. No scrubbing there.
I had an interesting conversation, a number of months ago, with another wrestling mom, about the virtues and drawbacks of living in a digital age. She asked me if I thought that technology (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.) encouraged community or discouraged it. This is something I have thought about quite a bit because I spend a fair amount of time online, interacting with folks all over the world and have been doing so since 1998 or earlier.
I’ve discussed my life online in my about page, so I needn’t write about it again. To sum it up, I’ve been online since 1995 and have formed connections with folks from all over the world. Some of these connections were lasting, some were not. In so-called real-life, I’ve also made connections with folks from many different backrounds and places. Few of them have lasted.
I am a different person, in some ways, online and off-line. I’m much shyer in person than I am online, although being online helped me become less awkward in social situations. Back in the late 1990’s I used to visit chat rooms and learned how to join an ongoing conversation. I was able to take that to off-line situations where, instead of standing in a corner of a room at a party waiting for someone to approach me, I was able to approach people and join in conversations without feeling too embarrassed. I also learned the art of “small talk” something that had eluded me all my life.
As much as I think that social media (including texting) can be a good thing, I also think that it can take away from real-life community. I’m as guilty of the next person in that I check my email, text messages and even twitter & facebook updates while in the presence of others. Not so much friends, as my husband & family, but I have been known to be rude to friends that way too.
Once, shortly after getting a new smart phone, I spent most of the time IMing another friend while out with my friend, Joan. I think I was mostly showing off my shiny new phone, but I was completely out of line. The other day at book group I was checking email as I waited for my ride to get her coat, but I ignored the host while doing so.
I also have missed visits from neighbors during the day while working in my attic office. I cannot hear the doorbell up there, and although I am usually working — and 20 years ago would have had to be in an office instead of at home — I should interact with people during the day — especially if they take the time to knock on my door.
I think that most people can balance their online / offline time better than I can. It is something I need to work on.
So now, I’ll sign off and spend some time with my husband. After all here we are in a motel in the Hudson River Valley and I’m blogging and he’s reading while we wait for our daughter to be ready to meet for brunch.
As mentioned before, I like dreams about unexplored areas of houses. I’ve dreamed about new houses with labyrinth-like layouts and about finding secret places in our current house. So, when we discovered that we might have a secret room under our screened-in porch, I was intrigued.
Our house was built shortly after World War II in an area of Bethesda called Huntington Terrace. The street on which the house was built hosts several other homes that look similar to ours — a typical brick center hall colonial common in this area. What is unique about the homes is that the home directly opposite is exactly the same — a reverse mirror-image, but no two other homes are the exact same. Another unique quality of several of the homes was an excavated “secret” room under the screened in porch. At least two neighbors broke through the cinder block in the basement to find an extra 1000+ cubic feet of space. At least two others broke through from the outside and created outside storage.
When we first heard about the room under the porch we joked about opening it up and making a root / wine cellar out of it. We also joked (as did several of our friends) that we may find a body in the room. I didn’t really think seriously about it until we looked at the across the street neighbor’s extra room when the house was on the market. Dean went back at least once to look at the room and not long after that we called the man who refinished our attic (my current office) and asked if he could do the job of breaking through the wall and making a door to our room that we now were sure existed. He wasn’t so sure, but gave us a reasonable estimate price and said he’d call when he had time. Months went by, but he eventually called and said he could start work on a Monday in August.
In anticipation I snapped a few shots:
Basement where the door would goFrom the outsideShot of the porch
On Monday at 9:00 am sharp, Peter and his assistant, Eric, arrived to start work. They quickly set up and while Peter brought things in from the truck, Eric started chipping away at the cinder block of the laundry room wall.
It didn’t take long for Eric to chip through both sides of the cinder block. He asked for a flashlight and we took our first look into the room
Instead of 61 year old air we saw dry dirt. Peter and Eric both tried to push a crowbar into the dirt, hoping it was not packed into the space, but it wouldn’t give. I called Dean and told him the news. We didn’t have an excavated secret room. Instead we had a room full of dirt that hadn’t seen the light of day in over 60 years.
Peter and Eric did find air instead of dirt directly under the porch, but the porch is only about 4 feet above ground.
Dean did some musing for about a day and a half about how he and Andrew could excavate the dirt through the laundry room and out the basement door but calculations came to far too may work hours to make it a reality.
As you can imagine we were all disappointed. I thought I’d get a wine / root cellar. Dean hoped for some extra space so he could set up his workbench inside instead of having to store it outside under the addition. We’re over it now, but it sure would have been nice.
We wondered why some of the houses on our street had excavated rooms and others did not. I recently found an old Washington Post advertisement about our street and it seems that the homes on the opposite side of the street were finished first. I think that by the time the builder got to our house he figured that there was no need to remove the earth from the area under the porch. Little did he know that his decision would make some future owners kind of sad.
In hindsight I wonder if not knowing would have been best. It was always kind of cool to think that there was a room on the other side of the laundry room wall, just waiting to be uncovered. Now that we know it is just a space filled with dry old soil, it’s taken away a small, but delicious, mystery.
Clutch Cargo Lips 
