Nine pounds of peas?!?!?

So a little while ago I was making potato salad for dinner (a sure sign of summer when there's potato salad and watermelon for dinner!) and I went looking for peas in our big freezer out in the garage. When I say big, I mean big! Donald likes to say you could store an entire corpse in that thing. Actually, if you stack them, you could store three. We inherited this freezer when we bought the house, and it seemed like such a cool thing to have. (That is, until we paid our first electric bill in Canada.)

Well, I hit the jackpot of peas. There is a bottomless supply of peas in that freezer--I stopped searching after the first 4 kilos. I don't mean to complain about abundance, but the fact of the matter is that I don't really care for peas. I like those little canned messes of bloated, oversalted, olive-colored things that pass for peas. They don't taste like peas at all. And I certainly never would have bought nine pounds of them. I'm going to have to figure out something to do with them, especially since we have future peas sprouting in the garden as I write.

Lately I've been thinking about those moments in life when we make a discovery that upsets our little apple cart. It may seem like a potential disaster, an irredeemable theft, or an insoluble problem. How often do we look back on those events later as gifts that we nearly rejected because we didn't care for the gift wrap?

I'm dealing with that now. Someone has indeed upset my apple cart and caused (to borrow a phrase from Grace Paley, RIP) "enormous changes at the last minute." My first impulse was to stand my ground and fight back for the principle of the thing. My second--and better--impulse was to accept the changed circumstances and look for the pony amidst the piles of @#$^.

Now I'm thinking of sending an anonymous gift to thank the person who has wronged me. I wonder if I can send peas through international mail??

;-)

Book report: Not a lot of time for reading as summer school begins and my three classes are launched. I am halfway through a quirky novel called Family Planning by new novelist Karan Mahajan. The title is somewhat ironic since the protagonist of the novel, which is set in Delhi, is an Indian bureaucrat who has 13 children because he finds his wife attractive only when she is pregnant. The oldest son, who bears the brunt of caring for his siblings, has asked the father why he and his wife keep having children. That question sets the novel into motion. Another light summer read.