“I think I need to do yoga with you.”

Nine words out of my husband’s mouth on Friday morning, and I knew something was seriously wrong.  

I sit up from shavasana and give him a suspicious stare.  His eyes are glassy.  “I’m getting creaky like you,” he says softly.  “I’m feeling it up my back.”

He makes coffee, packs it into our travel mugs, and we head into the woods for our walk, but he lags behind.  I stop early and we sit down and pull out our mugs.  He falls asleep with his coffee in his hands. 

“Let’s get you home to bed,” I tell him.

“I need to make your breakfast first.”  

Making my breakfast is one of the many non-verbal ways Bob expresses his love.  I like salad for breakfast.  So he grows micro greens and sprouts in our window sills for it.  He selects vegetables for color and texture and makes a confetti of them over the greens.  He takes any leftover meats from supper and slices them thin in a fan off to one side, then artfully arranges thin slices of cheese on the other.  

In the cafe, he hides in the back and works as my sous.  And our breakfast salad habit, and all the love that comes with it, carries over there.  I work the griddle and range, preparing the omelets and home fries and sausage and bacon.  He adorns each plate of eggs with one of these breakfast salads — the same micro greens and sprouts, more brightly colored vegetable confetti.  He rarely comes forward to speak to customers, but one quarter of their plate has his special touch, his way of acknowledging and nurturing each person on a Saturday morning.  And as strange as it might be to get a salad on their breakfast plate, it rarely comes back to the kitchen.  You can’t not eat something with that much love. 

“I can make my own breakfast today,” I tell him as I help him up, then stay beside him as we slowly work our way home.  He says very very little.  We make it to the door and he falls into our bed. 

“Ok, you can make your own salad,” he says, before he’s fast asleep.

While he succumbs to his pillow, I crawl all over his body, pulling his clothes off and prying in all sorts of ways that he would ordinarily meet with horrified indignation.  I’m searching for the tick bite.  I find nothing.  Nevertheless, I call our family doctor.  She doesn’t argue with my assessment, and she moves fast, ordering a comprehensive tick disease panel, and prescribing antibiotics immediately.  It’s a rare growing season when someone in our family doesn’t fall sick from a tick bite.  

By supper, after several hours’ rest and a few hours on the first dose of antibiotics, Bob’s eyes are clear again.  And he’s once again lost his interest in doing yoga.

“I’ve been in pain for a few days,” he finally confesses.  “It’s feeling better now.”

“Why didn’t you say anything sooner?” I reprimand him.

His birthday had been Tuesday.  “Because I turned 65 this week,” he explained.  “I just assumed you get creaky when you turn 65.”  

His wry humor was back.  But tomorrow was cafe day.  “You’re going to cancel, right?”  Mom asked me earlier in the day.  “It’s just too busy these days to run it without Bob.”

“I can work,” Bob assures me.  But I remember our doctor lecturing me the last time he got a tick disease.  The antibiotics are deceptive, and Bob’s body needs time to rest.  Particularly in light of all he’s been through in the past year, I’m not willing to risk it.  He needs sleep, and lots of it. 

It’s hard to believe that the girls and I used to run that place alone while Bob went off to the farmers’ market.  I hated being there without him, but we had a simpler menu, and we managed.  But the cafe was one of the main reasons we gave up farmers’ markets.  Bob and I don’t like to be apart.  Especially in a kitchen.  We are a team there, dancing as we pass plates and call out orders.  I make the food.  He makes it pretty before we send it out.   We crank up our favorite blues songs and sing and shimmy our tushes as I shake skillets and he slices the breads and plates the salads.

I consider Mom’s suggestion carefully.  But last year, one of Ula’s friends, Jack, joined our crew.  And as good as he was in front, attentive to clearing tables, and swiftly learning our register, easily hauling bins of dishes to the back to wash…He was always watching Bob and me in the kitchen.  Jack admits to being a math geek.  He does calculus for fun, and is going to college in the fall to become a math teacher.  But one thing I’ve figured out about Jack, is that he cares about good food as much as he does calculus.  He likes to talk about the sear on a burger, to debate whether potato chips are salted properly, to carefully evaluate flavor and texture on a bagel.  In the year since I’ve known him, he has been on a quest to develop the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe.  Thickness, chew, chocolate type, butter quality (which, he insists, must be browned first), and salting practices are all variables to be carefully monitored.  

I had thought we might teach Jack to take over the kitchen when Bob went down to New York for treatment last fall.  But our days were too busy, we were too disorganized, and we wound up closing instead.

We made the classic mom and pop business error, failing to transition our knowledge to someone else, so that the work can continue in our absence.  

And now, here we were, in a pickle.

But we weren’t entirely unprepared.  Seeing Jack’s foodie side, at the end of the day, I’ve been walking out of the kitchen.  “You cook your own lunch,” I tell him.  “And make the girls’ food, too.”  

Bob showed him a few things about the ovens and the griddle, and he’s been experimenting with different burgers each week.

Since I knew we couldn’t afford to close on such short notice, I asked him to come back to the kitchen to help me out.  He readily agreed.  Still, I found myself dreading Saturday.

The orders come in fast, it’s a small kitchen, and there are a lot of menu items for two people to juggle.  When things break down, or there’s an issue with a customer or the computer system, there would be no Bob on hand to back me up.  

Early the next morning, the girls and I drove down in silence.  We were all pretty tense: tense about Bob being sick.  Tense about the day ahead.

And then something occurred to me. 

I don’t like my husband being sick.  I don’t want to have to work without him.

But this is just the stuff a girl faces as she gets older.  There’s a long haul between now and the end, and there will be more days when one of us goes down.  It’s written into the script of life that way.   The older we get, the more unpleasant health stuff creeps into the fabric of our lives. But we also get more certain about the things we love.  And I love working with Saoirse, Ula and Jack.  I love cooking breakfast for my community.  And one other thing I’d forgotten:  I love a kitchen adventure — the fast thinking and problem solving that has to happen when things start to go wrong.  It’s thrilling.  

 It would be pretty stupid to wreck a day that contained so many things that I love by fretting over the one thing I can’t control.  

I make breakfast for the kids, and we convene at the espresso bar.  Jack sits beside me and we talk through the geography of the kitchen, and what happens with each of the dishes.  The girls lean in and listen close.  I look up at them.

“This is a baptism by fire,” I tell them.  “You know what I need from you out front?”

“Manage expectations,” the girls say in unison.  That’s our mantra for bringing customers into the fold to help us keep it together.  When customers know what we’re up against, they don’t complain.  They’re part of the solution.

And then, 9 o’clock comes, and the doors open.  We’re off.  We stumble here and there.  I bring the kitchen to a stop when I have to if they need my help up front.  

Jack quickly learns the rhythm.  He doesn’t quite have Bob’s touch with the breakfast salads yet, but the dishes are blessed with his own version of  love: extra butter.

Bob texts me from bed, where he drinks coffee with the dogs ’til ten in the morning.  

And in the end, we all have a good day.

No.  It’s not just a good day.  It’s a great day.  The girls and I still got to do what we love to do on a Saturday.  Jack got to up his game in the kitchen.  And Bob got an opportunity to rest and take care of himself, without having to worry about the rest of us. 

And this week, I know there will be serious debates between him and Jack, about how, exactly, you put love into a salad.

 

Did you enjoy this?  You can help make the magic happen for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes.  Or, if it’s easier, you can also donate to support the podcast by sending a check to Shannon Hayes, ℅ Sap Bush Hollow Farm, 832 W. Fulton Rd, West Fulton, NY  12194.

And that’s a really important thing to do, because all of this— the podcast, the blog, the novels and books and the creative recharging that happens over fall and winter—   are a result of the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Katie Duberg & Kathleen Sellers.  Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you!