Grandma's Kitchen

Me: Grandma, I want to jump up there. 

Grandma: No, Uma. I’m working with food up here.

Me: What food? I want to see. Can I sniff it? I like food.

Grandma: It’s corn relish. You won’t like it. It’s people food.

Me: I like people food.

Grandma: You won't like this kind.

Me: I want to see. 

Grandma catches me in mid-air, washes hands, starts over cutting stuff

Me, gives Grandma a dirty look

Grandma: Uma, you need to go play. This isn’t a place for you. I put treats out for you, and you can go watch the birds through the window.

Me, sits on Grandma’s feet so she can’t move. 

Grandma, picks me up, moves me, washes hands, starts over cutting and chopping. We did this all morning. I tried all my meows. You know the ones, Mom and Dad. 

 

I tried the cute meow.

I tried the mad meow.

I tried the hurt meow.

I tried the pitiful meow.

I tried the long melodramatic meow.

I tried the someone stepped on my tail meow.

I tried the I have my neck stuck in the Kleenex box meow.

 

It didn’t work. I went to lie down on Grandma’s rocks and paints in the other room. She moved me off of that too. This wasn’t going well at all. 

 

Me: You put stuff all over the countertop and there is nowhere for me to jump up.

Grandma: uh huh. 

Me: Now the house stinks. It smells like vinegar and bad stuff. 

Grandma: uh huh.

 

Mom and Dad, you can’t smell it so use your imagination. Doesn’t smell like my food at all. I don’t think you will like what’s in those jars. I finally decided to go take a nap in the big green chair. 

Grandma finished while I was napping and she got ready, then went to the dentist but they rescheduled, so she came back. She grilled some big sausages on the BBQ and then put that stinky stuff all over them for dinner. But they smelled good. She even let me try a little bit of one of the sausages. And she loved me up a lot. A whole lot. I guess today was pretty good after all. 

 

So I wrote another Haiku:

 

Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow

Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow

Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.

 

And Grandma read it back to me:

 

Today was stinky

No getting on the counter

I have lots of meows. 

 

She said MEOW has two or 47 syllables in it, depending on how I say it. But we’re pretending there is only one.  

 

The natural order around here has been restored. I’m sitting on Grandma’s lap for the rest of the night.

 

Love,

Uma 

 

P.S. Grandma wants me to tell you that you missed all the zucchini. Zucchini muffins, zucchini salad, zucchini frittata, zucchini pancakes, steamed zucchini, stir fried zucchini, zucchini for neighbors and zucchini everything. At least there was no zucchini relish. She said “Ooof” to the zucchini.