Probably shouldn’t start a letter this way but I have a confession to make. Actually, it’s quite a small one. I don’t need to tell you how lately we’ve been making adjustments to our eating and living to try to be more healthy and sustainable. You know I’m 100 percent for it. We’re in it together and I’m pretty much continuing to eat that way, even with you not here to cook. Back to the point of this, remember when we were talking about what we wanted to do when we’re in the States together visiting family mid-March or so and I said that I would love to go to an Ikea, I guess for comfort’s sake since it, though Swedish, has been such a part of our lives? I commented that one thing I wanted to get was a box of those inexpensive but nice candles they sell, those white and off-white ones that we’ve gone through by the score over the years. You said, understandably, that you’d rather get candles made from something healthy to breath as it burns and you weren’t sure about Ikea’s candles. I took the point and thought, well, o.k., why not? No problem. Scrap the Swedish tapers.
Here’s where the confession comes in. On Saturday after I dropped you off at the Sydney airport, I comforted the loss of you by going to Ikea which is a five-minute drive from there. Not that Ikea makes up for me losing you for these four weeks we’ll be apart, but it felt good being in such a familiar place, laid out precisely like any other Ikea you or I have ever enjoyed walking through together. I walked in the front door needing to visit the men’s room and I knew exactly where to go, the place was that familiar. So I’ve postponed the bad news long enough but by now you can probably guess: I bought a box of the candles. I don’t know what came over me except that they looked so familiar and I was craving comfort at that moment.
So let me tell you where I’ve been using them: Outside. Yep, I think that mitigates their possible unhealthy effect. Sunday night while grilling lamb, I had our two candelabras (both purchased at Ikea, of course) lit, the smaller four-candle model on the table and the larger, five candle version we’ve had since our children were little, on the wheeled table (also from Ikea) on which I place the various cooking implements and plates of meat and shakers of salt and dispensers of olive oil and other accoutrements I need during grilling. Those candles blazing on that porch draped with little, colored lights, inexplicably called Fairy Lights in Australian English, made for a pretty sight.
So this evening I was out there on the veranda again, after my shower, after appetizers (your chicken-liver pate again…so good, so delectable and almost, well, sweet…how can anyone not adore pate?) with a plateful of supper which consisted of more grilled lamb, more (my own) garden-fresh grilled potatoes, and (you’ll be proud), zucchini “noodles” made from (again, my own) garden-fresh zucchini, steamed and slathered with your wonderful pesto made from (once again, my own) garden-fresh basil. There I sat with that feast before me, the four-candle candelabra alight, and the latest episode of Downton Abbey on the Mac. Was nice but (once again, and this is my refrain) for the lack of you. Still, I’m finding ways to occupy and entertain myself even if they include possibly unhealthy candles the purchase of which, I’m happy to say, is the only thing I have to confess. Hurry home so we can enjoy candlelit dinners on the veranda the way they’re really meant to be: for two…for us two.
