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Posts Tagged ‘brain crumbs’

…and it’s all because of the folks at Lundberg Farms for making such tasty, tasty rice cakes. In particular, I cannot stop eating their Tamari & Seaweed rice cakes. What the fuck.

Additionally, I have also rediscovered my love for Knudsen’s Cottage Doubles. There are at least a dozen containers of these in my fridge as we speaking (strawberry and peach varieties only. Pineapple does not go well with cottage cheese IMO). And so I sit here at work almost every morning, eating Cottage Doubles and rice cakes.  I daresay I am eating far more rice cakes that I really ought to, but at the same time, I’m not eating shit out of the vending machine, so I consider it a fair tradeoff.

So far I can’t seem to get anyone else to join me in my food sickness. For now it’s just me, eating my rice cakes, getting nori flakes in my bra that I don’t discover until I’m getting ready for bed that evening. As it should be, I guess.

My Great Aunt Pearl was one of the neatest ladies I’d ever known. She had a passion for flowers and gardening and butterflies and dragonflies. Being outside amongst her plants, pruning the rose bushes or watering the zinnias, was her daily solace. It’s how she found peace and happiness in a life that she largely had not planned on leading or enjoyed all that much.

When Aunt Pearl and Uncle Bud met, Bud was a spry young sailor fresh off the boat in Seattle. Pearl was a lovely young woman born and raised Canadian, living in the Pacific Northwest, the love of her life. And now she had a second love, my Uncle Bud. They eventually married, and Bud was discharged from the Navy. Bud was raised in the small coastal town of Fort Bragg, where most of that part of our family came from. That’s where he wanted to raise his own family, and take up work with the local saw mill, just like his father before him had. Pearl wasn’t crazy about it. She never was. She had her preferences as far as how and where one should live, and Fort Bragg definitely was not it.

Bud promised her that one day they would move from Fort Bragg. That if she could just hold out for a while, everything would work out. Pearl loved Bud very very much, and so she agreed to the move, settling down in a tiny house that had been in the family for a number of years. There she raised her two children and cared for her husband, all of whom she still loved very much. But she hated living there. Every single day of her life, she hated living in Fort Bragg. At first she had the hope of Bud’s promise, that they would one day move out of there and someplace better. She eventually came to grips with the fact that this was never going to happen, that her life was now cemented in Fort Bragg.

And so she turned to her garden to keep her happy. Her love for Uncle Bud kept her there, and her love for her garden kept her spirit from dying. She never stopped being unhappy about living there, but she dealt with it. For love. Right up until the day she died.

My Great Aunt Pearl was an amazing person, beautiful both inside and out. She had a spark in her that although she hated her life geographically, she loved everything else about it. I can’t help but think of her as I go through the motions of beginning to face my own dilemma of similar proportions. The Boyfriend lives in Southern California…a place that I have, for the entirety of my life, been extremely vocal about in terms of my active dislike for it. I would almost say that I carry a borderline hatred for the entire southern half of this state.

Aunt Pearl hated Fort Bragg because it was small and quiet and remote and so far from her family. It was nothing like the cities and regions she’d grown up in. She believed that she would wither away and die on the Mendocino coast if she had to live there forever. My reasons for hating Southern California are the exact opposite, but the sentiment is still the same. I grew up in a small town and have always lived in areas that aren’t crowded or trafficky, instead enjoying a relaxed atmosphere and the opportunity to savor every lovely day. I appreciate the city and do visit San Francisco periodically, but I don’t have to live there or in any part of the Bay Area and that suits me just fine. Southern California is cramped and crazy and there’s always traffic. Life moves at a breakneck pace there, and you don’t get time to catch your breath. I know that if I live there, I will be slowly crushed to death by all of that. It will consume me until there is nothing left but the faint whiff of sarcasm and disappointment.

And yet, here I am, thinking about the fact that I will have to eventually squelch my feelings about SoCal for the love I have for another person. It’s a fair trade-off, for sure. And if Pearl could do it, so can I. Or can I? If I’m so sure I can do this, why does it eat at me? Every time I think about moving to anyplace in Southern California, it makes my heart sink. Rapidly. It makes me sadder than I ever thought possible. Pearl found her savior and her solace in gardening and my uncle. Where will I find mine? The Boyfriend, of course. But will that be enough? Or will I have to live the rest of my life pretending that I’m okay? If I’d known that being an adult was going to be this hard, I would have stayed a child forever.

But I can do this. I can. I have to. For me. For The Boyfriend. For Pearl. I can.