Of Beets and Blood

Just after Jack was born, my mother came to stay with me for a week to do all those things I didn't need to do but would surely try and do if my mother wasn't here to stop me. She cooked and cleaned and played with kids and picked up kids from school and gave me the opportunity to do little else but sit and feed my baby.

One afternoon, while in the process of getting dinner ready, my dear mamma decided to rid my refrigerator of a few of its less than appetizing occupants, including a rather slimy bag of well past their prime beets. (We don't generally eat beets but bought them to try them out in the juicer, something I quickly vowed to never try again. The thing about beets is that it hardly matters what else you juice them with. All you will ever taste is beet. I don't care if they're good for you. Unless you have a recipe that makes them taste like something else entirely, I'm not interested.) They had been languishing in the back of the fridge far too long and really, quite desperately needed to be thrown away.

For whatever reason, my mother decided the trashcan was too good for those nasty things.(She must feel the same way about beets that I do.)  She decided those beets deserved ultimate annihilation. And so she chopped them into small pieces and fed them down the garbage disposal. After a few minutes, she came to find me in the bedroom. She stood sheepishly in the doorway, her fingers purple pink from beet juice.

"Jenny," she said, "I think I've broken your garbage disposal. You've got to come help me fix it. It looks like I tried to hide a body in your sink."

She was not joking.

When we arrived back in the kitchen, several inches of deep red water filled the sink, little bits of beet shreds floating on the surface. Oh, how I had to laugh. My Mother on the other hand, aside from feeling completely ridiculous, was sure she'd ruined my sink and was going to have a terrible time trying to explain things to Josh when he got home from work. I assured her if anyone would be tolerant when it came to garbage disposal mishaps, it would be Josh. After all, he was the one that tried to garbage dispose a pumpkin.

The stupid disposal had been acting up lately anyway, I told her, and we would probably be able to fix it with the plunger. Ha! So optimistic. So completely wrong. After a good twenty minutes of heaving and grunting and plunging, and a raft of completely inappropriate blood and body themed attempts at humor, we gave up. By the time Josh made it home from work, we had the kids nearly convinced that Grandma had skinned a squirrel for the soup she was making and the remnants of her work had gotten stuck in the drain.

It only took a few minutes to fix it for real. Josh did the thing that men do and took off a pipe here and unscrewed something somewhere else and filled my biggest soup pot with the most disturbing mess of bloody beet juice I've ever seen. But then, he pulled out the real troublemaker. A broken popsicle stick had been wedged sideways in the curve of the drain pipe just below the garbage disposal.

All day we'd been blaming the beets! True, it probably wasn't the greatest idea to put raw beets down the garbage disposal (though not near as ridiculous as putting pumpkin rind down a disposal, no?) but had we not had to clean out the beets, we never would have found the popsicle stick. And that thing had been causing problems for weeks.

I'm sure there is a life lesson in there somewhere. Sometimes stuff has to get really bad before it can get better? Sometimes... the bigger problem is one you can't necessarily see? Blended beet juice looks disturbingly like blood? That has to be the most important one.

(I love you Mom.)