Every once in a while, the immutability of life’s intractable problems will drive me to a cleaning frenzy. Today was one of those days.
In years past, my efforts always had an easy focus: the perennial messes invariably left by my well-meaning yet often slovenly roommates. Nowadays, however, my cleaning sprees are a bit more challenging to direct. After all, it’s far easier to scrub someone else’s crusty pots than it is to, say, determine what to recycle out of the handwritten copies of my closing statement from that time I did Mock Trial in eleventh grade. Hypothetically speaking.
I don’t want to mislead you here. My house holds many messes that I could and should address — messes which, if we’re being honest, are both my spawn and my responsibility. (Read that last bit out loud. Kinda clever, right? I mean, at least a little, yeah? I’m not desperate, you’re desperate. Please tell me I’m funny.) However, today I was saved from taking personal accountability for these messes by an unlikely source: my roommates of yore.
Ok, well that’s really not fair. It was just the one roommate. Leroy, who moved out this past May, had a Costco membership that he used regularly and a shelf in the freezer that he used even more regularly. Any time he found a deal on meat, at least 75% of said meat would promptly end up wasting away in the freezer. (Likewise for various frozen vegetables, juice concentrates, fish, ice cream, etc.) To his credit, Leroy consumed a lot of this food before moving to Ohio, and we’ve managed to whittle down the stash even further in the intervening months. Nevertheless, among other things in our freezer, there still remain about six unopened packages of bacon.
Don’t ask me why Leroy had, at one time, greater than or equal to six pounds of bacon. My best guess is that, as a critical component of Leroy’s famous/infamous/not-morning-sickness-friendly jalapeño poppers, bacon was a near-instinctual purchase for Leroy, and even more so when found on sale. It’s not out of the question that he purchased several packages, forgot about them, and then shortly thereafter bought several more. I don’t know, and to be honest, Leroy probably doesn’t either.
Plus, it really doesn’t matter how the bacon got into my freezer — just that it did. Since I am categorically incapable of throwing away good food, the bacon (and salmon, and pollock, and stir-fry vegetables, etc.) have mostly just continued to languish in the bottom of my freezer, slowly getting buried beneath reusable ice packs and bags of breastmilk.
Until today! Marching into my kitchen with a confidence that only righteous anger and a holy mission can provide, I declared war on frozen bacon. I threw open the freezer door, retrieved a package, and set about extricating strips of meat from the lard-berg. (Note to self: Defrost *first* next time.)
Eventually, I had a jelly-roll-pan-full of mostly-intact bacon strips, just waiting for the oven to unleash their greasy goodness. (Yes, I bake my bacon — at least, when it’s a full package. I have neither the dexterity nor desire to pan-fry a pound of treif yumminess.) After a nearly unendurable length of time, I removed the pan and set it to cool on the range.
You may be wondering where my darling and ever-present son factors into this story, and the answer is, here. (Note: This is also the point at which Leroy stops being the villain and I assume that weighty mantle instead.) As usual, upon discerning that I was in the middle of a two-handed and potentially dangerous task, Borealis awoke with vigor and demanded that he be allowed to join me in the kitchen. Thinking, “What could go wrong?” (famous last words), I retrieved my wailing infant and let him crawl around the kitchen at my feet.
Still riding a high of pious vindictiveness, I was eager to clean up from cooking and thus solidly cement my victory over long-frozen meats. I shoveled the still-toasty bacon into a Ziploc bag and immediately discovered that a Pyrex would have been an infinitely more appropriate choice. Undeterred, I soldiered on in my crusade, grabbing a widemouth jar from the trash and preparing to pour liquid bacon grease from the foil-lined pan into the jar.
Some of you may see where this is going. I want to comfort you with the knowledge that God takes special care of children in general and of Bo in particular (probably to make up for his having me as a mother). This time is no exception, although the rest of this story won’t be a great read for the faint of heart (or faint of stomach).
Back to our regularly-scheduled feature. My son stood holding onto my legs and caterwauling deafeningly (not upset, just loud). I sculpted the edge of the foil into a funnel, then slowly tipped the pan so that the grease would trickle into the jar — at which point, the foil collapsed in on itself, sending a glut of bacon grease out of the pan and onto my infant son’s already-shiny pate.
“Baby no!” I yelled belatedly. He understandably burst into instantaneous tears. Though the pan had been cooling for several minutes, I feared the grease might still be scalding. Unsure how to tell, I grasped my son’s head in a move weirdly reminiscent of securing a greased pig at the State Fair. Warm, but not hot. I “dried” him off with the hand towel and scooped him up, having thoroughly secured the “Worst Mother” award and still uttering useless commentary like, “oh no!” and “bacon!”. Bo continued to cry, but I could hear at this point that he was crying out of surprise rather than pain. Just to be sure, I stuck my wrist into the jelly roll pan, which still contained about 80% of the original bacon grease. Like the Laodicean church, the fat was lukewarm. Thank God.
As Bo started to calm down, I was afforded a few seconds to analyze the situation. Somehow, even with the inordinate amount of gelatinizing fat still in the pan, bacon grease coated the kitchen. My son’s pajamas were that sort of slick translucence of ye-olde-pioneer-days oil-paper windows, as was my dress where it touched him. (Somehow it had entirely escaped the initial blast of grease.) My bare feet had already left some convincing swamp-monster tracks around the coagulating fat puddle. And the hand towel? Well, all I can say is that this afternoon, another little dish rag went to the big kitchen in the sky.
I’d like to say that I responsibly disposed of the bacon grease (in that dang widemouth jar, perhaps), but that claim would be patently false. Instead, I absorbed the balance of pan grease with the already-destroyed hand towel (sacrificing another rag for good measure), then tossed the towels, Bo’s pajamas, and my dress into the washing machine for the first of several wash cycles. The mostly de-greased pan went into the dishwasher, and the rest of the oozing slime was left to, well, ooze.
By this point Bo had calmed down, so it was time to spice things up again with a bath. Now, Bo usually likes bath time, but then again, bath time is *usually* with Daddy. Unsurprisingly, Mommy is not so great at bath time. One of my many deficiencies is in estimating — in this case, overestimating — the amount of soap necessary for a given cleaning task. I used enough baby wash to completely dissolve the bacony mess… and then I, like, tripled that. I exchanged a fatty problem for a soapy one. It’s very obvious now that I should have used the detachable showerhead to rinse my son of his 300% DV of soap, but at the time, I decided to instead forge ahead with some strange bath-time-meets-baptism in order to accomplish this rinsing.
Shielding my son’s face and tipping him backward, I started splashing water liberally against the insoluble dome of bacony-baby-body-wash-suds. Eager to show that he had learned something from the swim lessons featured in Drowning My Child, Bo obligingly tucked his chin and sucked in water. Undeterred by his drowning attempts, I continued splashing his sudsy scalp whilst he indefatigably kicked his legs, vainly seeking to regain his balance and return to an upright position.
Eventually, all the soap was either washed away or else absorbed into his skin, and bath time was thankfully at an end for both of us. Even better, Bo was so exhausted from the ordeal that he nursed and then took a nap. I spent this “free time” cleaning up the rest of the bacon grease.
Not long after, my husband came home. Noting the unusual silence of the house, he asked, “Is the boy sleeping?”
Worn out from the afternoon, I nodded silently.
“What did you all do today?” Taylor asked as he walked to the refrigerator. “Oh, it looks like you made bacon! That’s fun.”
Oh yes. “Fun” doesn’t even begin to cover it.