Week of mysteries

Number One son, off to swing from precariously high ropes in an exercise of class bonding and character-building, also had his first exercise in eating around allergies away from home. Working together with another mom, we procured the menu to see if we needed to offer up different options, and the camp obliged. A wave of nostalgia swept over me as I read what sounded like a typical school cafeteria menu from my childhood, updated to this century: corndogs are still around, but there is now a soup bar; French toast still comes with bacon, but also with a strange-sounding “goop.” Number One obliged with a picture of it, and one of his classmates described it with the kind of ardor usually reserved for the latest heartthrob off the cover of Teen magazine. Apparently, some brilliant mind, weary of their shoes sticking to the floor at breakfasts served with syrup, figured out that they could mix said maple stuff with margarine and powdered sugar, creating a frosting-like mixture that would melt appealingly on the lost bread. In spite of its unfortunate moniker, it has become an institution at that camp. Mystery number one solved.

Number two involves the share box from Jubilee Farms, our weekly gift to ourselves. Usually, Wendy posts the contents of the box on the website Monday so we can email her to lay off the cilantro or beg for more rhubarb, that kind of thing. This past week, I was too busy (doing what, I couldn’t tell you), and as for Wendy, well, it’s May on the farm. I don’t imagine they’re getting a lot of sleep, and we didn’t even get the customary short note in the box letting us know about the contents. Which left me and Darling Husband scratching our heads about those white orbs: they’re much bigger than any radish I’ve ever seem, but awfully smallish for a turnip. No purply-turnipy tinge, but no pink either. If the farmers are too busy to pen a missive, I think, I shouldn’t bother them with vegetable identification queries. Darling Husband bravely volunteers to eat one. Salt shaker in hand, he takes a nibble: a radish, he pronounces, and devours it with gusto and sodium. Mystery number two, happily solved.

Now, good things come in three, and there was a third mystery I thought of to share with you while drifting off to sleep, but I simply cannot recall what it is. I have been racking my brains and driving my family nuts for days now: is it the mystery of how to cook raab so it looses its fibrous prickliness (still unsolved)? Is it the mystery of trying to find rhyme or reason in the budding teenager’s mood swings? (That one may require a trek up a hillside to a guru.) Perhaps I was wondering how many eggs Mama Robin is tending outside my office door (a sneak peek reveals four perfect blue eggs in a cedar-lined nest). But none of those trigger the aha moment.

If I’m lucky, it may come to me in the next few days, as I head off to slumberland or in the shower, which Darling Husband has equipped with a pad of waterproof paper. It seems he grew weary of being called to the bathroom to take notes, and applied the same ingenuity that led to the creation of goop. Until then, the mysterious mystery shall remain a mystery.