Salmonella is for Wimps

I’m writing this furtively, hoping I can get it posted before she comes back in. Ostensibly, I’m cleaning the den, and I’m pushing the vacuum-cleaner back and forth with one foot as I type. I have to tell someone, and I hope the readers who stumble across this online will get it to the proper authorities.

I think my wife is an agricultural terrorist.

Looking back, I’m embarrassed that it took me so long to catch on. The clues were there for anybody to see. The only defense I can offer is that I lacked the context. I mean, it’s practically a stereotype that the first couple of years of marriage produces a few at-the-time-devastating-but-later-on-laughable culinary disasters.

“What’s in this Tupperware container, honey?” I call from the depths of the refrigerator.

“Open it and see,” comes the reply.

“I have. It didn’t help.”

She comes over and looks at the pink, rubbery, translucent mass, which I assumed was some sort of gelatin dessert that failed to gel.

“Oh,” she says. “That’s…uh…tuna, I think.”

I nervously place the container in the sink and back away, because it’s starting to react to the heat of my hands and is twitching slightly. She pats my shoulder and promises to clean it up. Later that night, as I’m snuggled down in the bed, I think I hear her on the phone, complaining to someone about something not being stable at room temperatures, but I assume I’m dreaming and ignore it.

A few years pass.

We’re in a new house, just grooving on being domestic. She’s tinkering in the kitchen, making a breakfast-for-supper meal of pancakes, bacon, and boiled eggs. I’m in the yard, picking up pinecones and playing with the dog. I start to head back inside, but the back door is locked for some reason. I knock, and she comes and opens it. I start to step inside, but she takes my arm and walks me back into the yard.

“Isn’t it a beautiful day?” she asks. “Crisp and clear; slightly cool. Which reminds me, let’s check the level of oil in the tank while I’m thinking about it. Over here. Away from the windows.”

I shrug and agree. We want to be prepared for the winter, after all. We check. It’s full. She meanders around the yard a bit longer, picking dandelions and commenting on the landscaping we’ll undertake next Spring. She kept checking her watch, but I didn’t think anything about it. Again, no context.

We finally go back inside, only to discover the kitchen is covered in egg fragments. The pot has boiled dry, and they’ve gone off like two little hand grenades. I’m dumbfounded, of course; starkly amazed that such a little food item can cover 150 square feet. My wife is laughing (in hindsight, it seems a little forced). “Let’s measure it!” she cries. “Or no one will believe us.” She sets me to work with the measuring tape, while she notes down distances and idly tries to calculate force, direction, and exothermic equivalents.

“Good thing it wasn’t an eggplant,” I joke, “or we wouldn’t have a house anymore.” She gets this distant look on her face, and my arrogant assumption is that she didn’t get the joke.

God help me. It was only a joke.

There have been a few other indications over the years. Little incidents that meant nothing by themselves, but appear to be part of a disturbing pattern. For instance, she insists on using all of the milk before the date printed on the side – anything remaining gets dumped - but has been known to keep vegetables in the refrigerator until long past usability. She sneers at canned fruit, opining that ‘you get more bang for your buck’ out of the fresh variety. An endearing sentiment that I assumed was based on vitamins being lost during the canning process. She follows any story of contaminated food products carefully.

Then came the incident this morning.

I’m pulled from sleep by a muffled thump. It sounds like a piece of furniture has fallen over in a distant room. Since my son has recently begun to try and climb tables, chairs, and shelves, I jump out of bed to see if he’s hurt. I take the direct route through the kitchen, only to find my wife standing in the middle of the room. She is looking around proudly, but when I come in, the look changes to one of confusion.

Our watermelon has exploded.

As we’re cleaning the walls, ceiling, windows, and floor, we’re theorizing about what could’ve caused this. My speculation is that the morning sun coming through the window heated up the melon, building up pressure inside. She scoffs and mutters something that sounds like ‘amateur’, but I’m too intent on getting pink goop out of the molding to pay much attention.

She made a call to her ‘brother’, laughing about the incident. But it wasn’t an ‘oh my goodness what a crazy world’ kind of laugh. It was more of a ‘we have done it long live the glorious cause’ kind of laugh.

Even so, I may not have been compelled to send out this message. This is all conjecture, hindsight, and possible paranoia. But there’s a newspaper clipping stuck to our refrigerator door now.

There’s a watermelon festival next weekend.