This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You)

This song, performed by the Isley Brothers and featured on the Ann Taylor Muzaktrack for the month of February, replays itself constantly through my head. And I don't mind a bit. It's a great song. I can't sing it with the same soul, but I can dance to it in my head. I don't dance with much soul, either, but as long as I'm the only one who sees, it doesn't matter, does it?

So my determination to relax and let life happen as it will tooks roots during my sleep. I woke feeling much more peaceful, and after reading the "Do Not Worry" segment of Luke 12 I felt greatly comforted and much more refocused, and eager both to take one day at a time and to look forward to what's around the bend.

I've also rediscovered my taste for chicken salad. Hannah and Kirsten introduced me to it our sophomore year of college; it was featured as a main course in many a meal in West 397 at the good old Grove, when the thought of Bon Apetite sickened us and we didn't feel like changing out of our pajamas to cross campus to dinner. A bit of mayo, a touch of Miracle Whip, a sprinkle of black pepper and a dash of onion powder...spread on a saltine cracker....or four or eight saltine crackers...mm.

I can hear my sister's horrified "canned MEAT?!" Hey, it's cheap and it floats my boat. I remember the advent of the Y2K scare, when folks all over town were storing up water in 2-liter soda bottles and stacking their closets with toilet paper, and Mom bought and canned a pound or two of chunk beef. We've always had canned fruit, canned tomatoes, canned grape juice, all done at home on boiling summer and early autumn days, but we'd never ventured into the canned meat realm. I was mildly repulsed by the syrupy floating chunks of pinkish meat in glass jars, but when the first of the year 2000 passed and our computers still turned on, I shrugged and ate some of it when Mom and Dad were out of town and I was too lazy even for Rice-a-Roni or boxed mac and cheese. It smelled a little like dog food but the taste wasn't bad. (I don't relish canned beef very much, however. I think we still have a few jars in the basement, next to the unopened bottle of Cherry 7-Up featuring an enormous dead fly on the surface of the soda.)

So canned meat is one of those "Hey, I can do this" kinds of things.

Speaking of home-canned goods, Wal-Mart's Equate brand has a handsoap that smells exactly like peaches. Not the Bath and Body Works fruity headache horror that haunted the halls of my high school (hey, check out my alliteration), but the real, visceral, juice-running-down-the-fingers-itchy-with-fuzz smell of boiling peaches in our little kitchen on oven-hot August afternoons. I don't remember exactly how it was done, but it involved halving and peeling hundreds of garage-ripened peaches and stuffing them into Mason jars and simmering them in a huge pot till the lids sealed. The whole house smelled delicious for days, even though the fresh peach fuzz irritated my skin so badly my hands turned a mottled red. The smell brings back the memories so strongly that I had to buy the soap. It's the harshest stuff that's ever touched my skin, but it smells so wonderful I don't care. I don't know how Equate did it but they deserve a star for it. (*)

Time to dance my little hindquarters to bed.