Two and a half weeks ago, my mom and I went to the grocery store. The few items we needed turned into several items the kids might want which then turned into a bunch of items I could use. We found ourselves in the produce section at the end of our journey to get a watermelon, grapes, bananas, and apples for the kids. This is when my mom asked her usual "Is there anything else you need or want or could use?"
I looked around. We had the basics and more food than could fit into the fridge. I was searching my brain for something else we might want, when my eyes settled on the huge selection of pineapple. We had just had kabobs and I do love pineapple, so I grabbed one. It was also an opportunity to teach my mom how you can tell if a pineapple is ripe, which I learned from a woman at the produce section the week before who told me to pull a leaf from the top and if it comes out easy, it's ripe. (If that is incorrect, you might wait a while to tell me. Read on.) We picked a good ripe one and finished shopping.
The rest of the pineapple's story that day was rather boring. We got home, unloaded the groceries, had dinner, packed up my mom, and sent her off to the flight where I traded her for a box of donuts. The next week, I got back to work, the kids got back to daycare/preschool, and we all got back into our routine. It also got very hot around here so we haven't been grilling much which means no kabobs and no specific reason to cut the pineapple.
Through all of this, the pineapple sat on the counter and kind of blended in with its surroundings. We maneuvered around it while cooking and doing dishes, moved it from one side of the kitchen to another and never really thought about finding a place for it. I noticed it a few times, on the way out the door in the morning, at the end of the day when I had already settled on a snack that was far less healthy for me. It was turning a little more tan and a kind of bright yellow on the bottom. Whenever I got around to cutting the thing, it would probably be half rotten.
Then, last week, after a long day at work when the kids were being heiny-heads (my new favorite descriptor as of three months ago), I decided I needed to get that pineapple off my counter and out of my thoughts. I grabbed a knife and began cutting, expecting the jump back at any moment from disgust at whatever kind of rot had settled in.
What greeted me was a delicious smell of fresh, perfect pineapple in a beautiful golden shade that was like sunlight made solid. Even the center was not too hard. This was, as Gordon Ramsey would say, the most AMAZING pineapple, and with each cut, I had visions of myself snacking on it in a state of utter bliss.
I should tell you that my husband loves to cook, and loves to learn new techniques. We had a set of crappy knives that he made better by watching YouTube videos on knife care. Not even kidding. Gifts are easy for him: quality pots and new kitchen gadgets make his face light up. The new gourmet knives I bought at Christmas last year sent him over the moon and he's taken care of them to keep them nice and sharp. Very VERY sharp.
"This is perfect," I thought. "This is the perfect pineapple and I'm going to make this crappy day that much better by sharing it with Aaron and the angels will sing and all the fairies will get their wings and I will grin like an idiot. Now I only need to make ONE...LAST...SLICE...AAAHHHHHH!"
I... embarrassed myself. To anyone else the cut was not that deep or that bad, but I didn't realize that cutting the side of my nail could bleed that much or that the juice of a delicious pineapple would sting that badly or that I could scream that loudly after the kids went to bed. Aaron came running in because he recently cut HIS finger (same finger oddly - the left ring finger which means we're soulmates or should take some kind of hint about our marriage).
I sent him away in supremely dramatic fashion. I needed a Disney Princess bandaid and some solitude to get over my disappointment, to wallow in the punishments that God dishes out when all you want in life is to feast on the pineapple that you neglected for a week.
Then I got over it and called Aaron back, but he was already in bed. I threw out the two ruined slices of pineapple and shoved the rest into a bag for the fridge. My finger throbbed, so I took some ibuprofen. I didn't get to write that night or the next because it honestly hurt that bad.
That was a week ago. The finger feels better, but no one's eaten that stupid sliced pineapple wasting space in our fridge. I think Aaron's grossed out and I don't blame him. A part of me thinks that I should eat that pineapple to justify the sacrifice of my finger and the typing I haven't done this week, maybe assert some kind of hunter-dominance over the conquered fruit. Another part of me thinks it's probably fermenting in there and I would get sick just by opening the bag which would be the ultimate defeat. I also realize that if I just throw the thing away, I'll be admitting defeat.
I'm at a point where every time I open that stupid fridge and see that stupid pineapple in that stupid plastic bag, I get a really bad cramp in my pride and I'm not hungry anymore.
I think it'll be a while before we have kabobs at our house again.
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