It never fails. The first night in a week when I am not sleeping on a floor and can get a little extra shut-eye, guess who comes home? At 1 am? I pretended it was just my brother knocking around the kitchen, but my brother wouldn’t come into my room, sit on my bed, and simultaneously blow smoke into my face and shake me, using a tone of voice one would associate with the house being just a tiny bit on fire.
“Sweetie, where is the sugar?”
“Lovely to see you as well. Must have missed the telegram announcing your arrival. We are out of sugar. G’night.”
“All I need is a bitty little spoonful.”
“Vivvie, you use a ladle…sweet holy mother, what is that smell? It’s like the walking dead! You reek of it! It…it’s…cheese, isn’t it.”
“Can’t get a decent cheese here. Weather is lovely, it’s possible to find an edible baguette, and the cheese situation is positively barbaric. The restrictions on importation are ridiculous.”
“Why stop at foul, why not bring home something illegal? Agh. There’s a tin of condensed milk in the fridge. Use that. Good night.”
The next day, after I brought home sugar and tea, I found that she’d rearranged my entire work space and ripped out the progress I had made on the fulled crochet bag. There was a note with various measurements, a rough schematic, and “spending summer in Scandinavia, promise to bring back herring cheese.”
For the record, herring cheese is on my “no thank-you” list, but that’s our girl for you. Why bring home, oh, a jar of lingonberry preserves or a brick of Finnish chocolate when she can bring back something only she will enjoy?
