Cheese the Season Friday Round-Up

When I was a kid, my mother or her designee (often me) mopped and waxed the kitchen floor once a week. No one who knows me now would ever imagine I was raised this way. When my mom was a housewife, before she became the unpaid assistant manager of our family Ben Franklin Store, she did the wash on Monday, ironed on Tuesday, and so on. I liked it better when she left a list of household tasks for me to choose from, pricing each separately. Bathroom sink – 15 cents. Kitchen floor – 50 cents. She never told me to do anything. She just left the list on the table, and we settled up when she got home.

Yes, I mopped the kitchen floor today. I mopped it with wood soap, using a butter knife to scrape off bits of things, blemishes you could say. It’s been years since I’ve scrubbed the floor on my hands and knees and done what would qualify me for the full 50 cents. No one waxes a floor anymore, well, maybe the halls of Congress are waxed and polished. We used to assess the shininess of the kitchen floor. Was it a good wax job or not? But then we hand waxed our cars then, which I still do, maybe every other year, less now that I no longer own an extraordinary car. I do own a practical car that is okay-looking, but no one would care if it’s polished up.

I helped out at meal prep with Street Angels yesterday. My jobs were to put lids on little containers of canned apricots, slice pickles into sixths, put a big spoonful of tater tots next to the pulled pork sandwich in 155 meal containers, along with the aforementioned pickle and a packet of ketchup. Then I washed the table where we assembled all this and drove home. I try not to think too much about the folks who got this meal. I wish we could tape a hundred-dollar bill to each meal container so each person could go get a hotel room somewhere. Everything about homelessness is so not right. At the end of the evening, I snipped the last 1/6th pickles in half to make them stretch because we didn’t want anyone to go without a pickle. It’s that small and personal. Crazy.

Today, the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided that our insanely gerrymandered legislative maps are unconstitutional. The Republicans, who drew these maps over a decade ago and have enjoyed their role as little emperors ever since, are hysterical. I don’t get it. Fair play used to be so Republican. What happened to that? Getting ahead by merit? And unabashed they are, that’s what really gets me. No Republican is embarrassed by having so dramatically and brazenly disenfranchised thousands of voters. None of them even tries to pretend to be fair. You kind of have to admire that level of chutzpah, although that gives chutzpah a bad name, if you ask me. Anyway, it’s going to get rough over here in Wisconsin – lots of dueling Sharpies.

Christmas can be a bear. Not for me, because I’ve had some miserable Christmases and know how to macaroni and cheese my way through. But I know other folks – some of them friends and relatives – are in that place where they think everyone in the world is happy and cozy but them. You can’t tell someone in that mindset that they’re wrong, they’re too busy driving past houses lit up with Christmas lights on their way to the corner market to buy a six-pack. All you can say is this – Christmas is 24 hours, just like any other day. It comes and then it goes. Sometimes, it’s fun. Other times, not so much. It all evens out.

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Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash