All posts by Dona

I Have Issues: Part 2 — Folding Towels

Musings, ,

Actually I’m pretty much over this issue, but since I had it for so many years, I’ll post about it.

My mom had/has a specific way of folding towels. I’m still not sure if I know how she folds them, but it is something like fold them in half (making sure the tag is inside), then fold them in thirds then in half again. When I’d help her fold laundry when I was a kid and teenager I’d never do it correctly. I tried, I really tried, but never once got it right. Once I came close — and was proud of my accomplishment, but I’d done it backwards and the tag was on the outside. My mom always got upset with me and at least once said she thought I was doing it wrong on purpose.

When I moved out of my parents’ house and was able to fold towels however I wanted to fold them, I still had my mom’s frustration in my head as I’d fold towels. At first I folded them the way I wanted to fold them, ignoring my mom’s voice in my head. Then I tried to fold them like she did. Then I wondered why she folded them the ways she did — after all she’d then have to unfold them in order to hang them on the towel rack. I then came up with my own method: Fold long ways in thirds, then in half or thirds, depending on the size of the towel. There — all I had to do was undo the last fold or two to neatly hang it on the towel rack.

But still, when the time came to fold towels, I got that familiar tight feeling in my stomach — feeling that even though I knew it was silly, there was only one way to fold towels — my mom’s way. And if I didn’t fold my towels that way I was somehow inadequate.

Once, during a parent-teacher conference a teenager’s mother complained that her daughter refused to fold towels the way she folded them and suspected the daughter did it because she was passive aggressive. I sure don’t think I was passive aggressive about the towel folding — I just think it was too complicated for me to remember — and it didn’t make a lot of sense.

My mom and I have since talked about towel folding, and she agrees that my method made more sense. I think she still folds towels her way — and that is fine. I rarely fold my towels the same way twice anymore — now that I use hooks instead of towel racks. In half, in half, in half is fine with me. I think it depends on where I’m storing the towels. I no longer get the tight feeling in my stomach that I did, even a few years ago. Not sure why it went away — perhaps I just figured out how silly it was to still be upset about such a minor thing.

Joe’s Best Friend

Pets,
Joe and his Best Friend

We have two cats, Joe and Halloween. Halloween is aggressively friendly (read needy), has a very large personality and has thumbs so she tends to be talked about more. Joe, on the other hand, is what I call a pillow cat. He lays around like a decorative pillow (he’s colored like a Holstein cow — so he’d fit in a room with a ranch theme quite well) and he loves to sleep on pillows. He doesn’t do much else but eat, complain if his food dish is only half full and use the litter box (or anything shaped like a box, depending on his mood — just ask Diane).

However Joe does have one personality quirk. When he was very young, perhaps still a kitten, he became attached to a small plastic creature that came with a game that one of the kids got for a gift. It is a 2-inch-tall  turquoise dragon(?) with a round ball in its belly that clicks when you push it. I think it was used as the spinner or dice in a game, but since the rest of the game is now gone, cannot be certain.

It has a tuft of hair on the top of its head and Joe picks it up by that tuft, much like a mother cat would pick up its kitten (or like a cat might pick up a mouse) and walks from room to room with it. He also knocks it around the hardwood floors very noisily at 3 in the morning. If we find the toy and click the belly-ball, Joe usually comes quickly (for Joe — running is not his style) to check out the noise. I think he knows what we have, because nothing else but food brings him to us that quickly.

Sometimes the toy is lost for months at a time — usually under furniture and when we get around to dusting under or vacuuming behind the furniture we find it and stop what we are doing to click the belly-ball for Joe. Then he plays with it for a few days until it gets lost again.

Last night I woke up when I rolled over on something solid and realized it was  Joe’s favorite toy. He must have found it somewhere and brought it to me in bed. I hid it under the pillow so he would not decide to play with it when I wanted to sleep. He’s been playing with it this morning, though — it was on the kitchen floor a few minutes ago.

So Joe, despite his unassuming demeanor, does have at least one quirky quality — one just has to find it among the dust bunnies.

I have issues: Part 1 — Potato Skins

Memories

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.