Sally Breslin: My Life

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

SERIOUSLY, WE WEREN'T TRYING TO POISON OUR MOTHERS!

Last week I found myself thinking about Mother's Days of the past, back when my husband and I faithfully took our mothers out to dinner every year on their special day. My mother always jumped at any opportunity to go out for a meal, but my mother-in-law often hesitated before accepting our invitation.

“Are you going to be trying another new restaurant this year?” she seemed almost afraid to ask.

I honestly couldn’t blame her for her reluctance. For some reason, instead of taking our mothers to their favorite restaurants on Mother’s Day, my husband and I thought it would be more exciting and adventurous for the four of us to try new places every year.

Alas, more often than not, the results were pretty disastrous.

There was one restaurant north of Concord, for example, we’d seen highly praised in a dining guide, so we thought it would be the perfect place for a Mother’s Day drive and dinner.

The food turned out to be so terrible, I’m surprised my dogs didn’t report me to the SPCA when I brought home the leftovers in a doggy bag for them.

I’d ordered barbecued lamb that, without exaggeration, looked exactly like a pile of black raisins on my plate. My mother-in-law’s barbecued chicken-tenders were soggy pieces of chicken drenched in cold barbecue sauce poured straight from the bottle. And my mother’s turkey dinner was a mouth-watering piece of old bread with some sliced cold-cuts stacked on top of it, all buried beneath a layer of bright-yellow canned gravy.

I left there seriously wondering if we’d live through the night.

The next Mother’s Day, we tried a different restaurant, one that several of our friends had recommended.

“I think I’ll have a big thick steak,” my husband said as we pulled into the parking lot. No big surprise from a man who’d spent his life eating so much beef, I expected him to lower his head like a bull one day and start charging at people. But in all fairness, he also said the same thing about me and chicken. I ate it so often, he teased me about growing feathers and laying an egg.

At the restaurant, we were seated in a spacious booth and handed a single sheet of paper with five meals listed on it: Chicken Cordon Bleu, seafood pie, filet mignon, prime rib, and stuffed haddock. The prices were high enough to make even the Rockefellers develop palpitations.

“Is this all you have?” I asked the waiter as I flipped over the paper, hoping to see more (a.k.a. cheaper) selections on the other side. When our friends had recommended the place, they'd mentioned how great the meals like the sirloin steak and roast turkey were.

“It’s our special Mother’s Day menu,” the waiter said, smiling brightly.

“Where’s the turkey? The baked ham? The sirloin steak?” I asked, tempted to add, “Where’s the stuff we can afford, seeing we're picking up the tab for everyone today?”

“Oh, those aren’t Mother’s Day items,” he said.

Even though the price was closer to what I’d expect to pay for a whole steer, I settled for the filet mignon. My husband also ordered it. Our mothers opted for the stuffed haddock.

We placed our orders at 2:15. By 3:45 we had yet to see anything edible other than a basket of breadsticks, which we’d turned into a pile of crumbs by 2:30. By then, we were ready to gnaw on the basket.

“I’m getting weak from hunger,” my mother-in-law said. “If I had known this, I would have eaten lunch.”

“My stomach’s holding a full conversation with me,” my mother muttered. "I'm pretty sure it's thinking my throat's been cut."

“Well, at least we’re spending quality time together,” I said, smiling weakly.

Finally, after we had been staring for so long at the food on everyone else's plates at the tables around us, we probably made the people think we were about to leap up and attack them, our meals arrived.

Even Barbie and Ken would have starved on the portions on our plates.

My husband stabbed his piece of filet mignon, which was so small it resembled a square meatball, then held it up and said, “Is this all of it?” Before I could answer, he added, “Gross! Look at all of the white fat around it!”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Filet mignon doesn’t have white fat on it!” I happened to look down at my piece and noticed it also had some kind of gelatinous-looking white stuff wrapped around it. When I touched it with my fork, it fell off and landed on my plate.

“It’s a thick slab of bacon!” my husband said, as if he’d just solved a murder mystery. “Raw bacon!”

Granted, I was hungry, but not nearly hungry enough to eat raw bacon.

Even worse, there also was a mushroom cap accessorizing the top of the meat. My husband wouldn't have eaten a mushroom ("dirt-flavored fungus") even if he previously had been without food for a week.

No, make that a month.

The meals that had taken nearly two hours to be served took us all of ten minutes to eat. I still was so hungry, I was tempted to lick everyone’s plates.

“I wonder what they have for dessert?” my husband said. “I’m ready for a big slab of chocolate cake!”

“Odds are it’s not part of their Mother’s Day menu,” I said, frowning. “But I’ll bet you can get a nice tablespoonful of pudding for about $15.”

The next year, we finally decided to let our mothers choose where they wanted to go on Mother’s Day. That way, if the meals turned out to be another disaster, my husband and I wouldn’t be to blame or feel burdened with guilt afterwards.

Both Moms decided they'd prefer a nice home-cooked meal...at my house.

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Tuesday, May 13, 2025

DUCT TAPE! MY HERO!

The other morning, the first warm and sunny one in ages, when I opened the back door to let the dogs out, I came nose to nose with four huge hornets on the inside of the screen door. No kidding, one of them was so big, it must have been on steroids ever since it was in its larva stage.

I immediately slammed the inner door shut, nearly lopping off the nose on one of my dogs in the process.

I’ve been terrified of hornets and basically anything that possesses a stinger and wings for most of my life. So had I opened the door and seen the face of Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger staring in at me, I couldn’t have been more frightened.

Luckily, my house has two back doors, so I led the dogs to the other one, even though it’s not their usual “let’s go out” door.

But when I opened it, five hornets greeted me. I didn’t know whether the previous four were stalking me and had brought one of their buddies along with them, or if this was a totally different gang. Once again I slammed the door and then clasped my chest. My heart felt as if it were performing a bongo solo.

By then, my dogs were staring at me as if to say, “Forget about letting us out! We’re going to go pee on the carpet! It’s safer than getting our heads slammed in a door!”

My dilemma was how to go about making both back doors hornet-free. I felt panicky, like a hostage in my own house. How, I wondered, had those invaders even managed to get on the inside of the screen doors? Wasn’t the whole purpose of a screen door to keep pests out?

Inspecting the screens for holes, however, was out of the question. I mean, how was I going to check anything while those winged assassins were sitting on it? Short of renting a beekeeper’s outfit, there was no way I was going to open either of those doors again…at least not until after the next snowfall.

All of my life, my first reaction whenever I saw a bee or hornet flying near me was to run. I swear I could complete the Boston marathon in record time if a few hornets were flying behind me. But stuck in my house, there was nowhere to run if the hornets flew inside…other than out of the front door, where I felt certain there probably would be another dozen or so of them waiting to dive-bomb me. So, I reasoned, as long as I stayed inside and didn’t open any doors, I would be safe.

Meanwhile, my dogs were whining and crossing their legs.

If it hadn’t been for their urgent need to go out and my fear of having to answer to the SPCA, I’d have barricaded myself indoors indefinitely. But I knew I had to at least try to be brave for the sake of my dogs…and their bladders.

I didn’t have any bug spray, but I’d recently read that in a pinch, hairspray, especially “extra hold” would work if sprayed directly on any flying insect because it weighed down their wings and stuck them together (or something like that). I hadn’t used hairspray in years, but I thought I might still have a can of it lying around somewhere, from back in the days when “beehive” hairstyles were popular.

How ironic.

Armed with a flyswatter and a can of hairspray, I locked the dogs in the laundry room for their own safety. Then I crept toward the first door. My hand was shaking when I clasped the handle because I had no idea what I'd find on the other side. Had more hornets joined the original ones – a family reunion perhaps? Would a swarm of them engulf my entire head and turn my face into a mass of disfiguring lumps like the ones in those corny killer-bees horror movies?

Slowly I creaked open the door a crack and peeked out. Only two hornets were on the inside of the screen door. I probably should have been relieved, but due to my phobia, two hornets were two too many.

I took a deep breath, flung open the living-room door and unleashed a blast of hairspray at both of my enemies on the screen door. They remained sitting there. So I raised the flyswatter to deliver what I hoped would be a fatal blow. When I did, part of the screen flapped outward into the breeze and both hornets flew away.

It was at that point I realized the screen had come detached from the bottom and the right side of the door…before I’d even touched it. And not only was it detached, there also was a jagged tear in it. How and when, I wondered, had the screen met with so much destruction?

Two suspects immediately came to mind, and they already were locked up…in the laundry room. When I checked the other back door, that screen also had similar tears in it. I wasn’t surprised.

There was only one immediate solution to the problem…

Duct tape. My go-to hero for most of my emergency needs.

I became a crazed madwoman at that point – duct-taping every torn area on both screen doors. Neatness didn’t matter to me, speed did, because I had no clue when the hornets might return to seek vengeance for the hairspray incident, even if they had to walk.

When my duct tape started to run low, I also used some leftover pieces of painter’s tape in shades of blue and green for added protection. As a result, the doors ended up looking like…well, let’s just say House Beautiful magazine won’t be coming around to take photos of my place anytime soon.

I’m pleased to say I haven’t had a hornet on either door since. But I did notice the tape already is beginning to sag a bit, thanks to some recent damp weather.

So it's time to go buy a new roll…about the size of a monster-truck tire. After all, it never hurts to be prepared.

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Monday, May 5, 2025

SHOCKINGLY, TRIAL AND ERROR FINALLY PRODUCED A DECENT LAWN

When my husband and I first moved into our house, I vowed I would take care of all of the yard work myself – mowing, raking, planting, plucking, pruning, weed-whacking and even making a lovely rock garden.

I had big plans.

However, due to my fear of using anything with power, I decided to use only primitive tools. My first purchase was an old-fashioned push-mower, which was about one step above cutting the grass with a scythe. Anything thicker than a blade of grass (such as a dandelion) required me to mow over it 20 or 30 times before the mower either finally cut it, or the dandelion became so flattened out, it didn’t have the strength to pop up again. Sometimes I got so fed up, I just bent over and yanked out all of the stubborn stuff by hand.

So after a few months of struggling, I finally decided to move out of the Stone Age and climb the next rung on the ladder of lawnmower evolution. That step was an electric lawnmower. I figured that going from an old push-mower directly to a modern gas-powered mower would be such a drastic change for me, I’d probably end up accidentally de-whiskering the neighbor’s cat with it. So an electric mower seemed as if it would be a bit tamer and easier to control.

The clerk at the hardware store showed me a nice lightweight model. His sales pitch particularly piqued my interest when he said I wouldn’t have to worry about gas, oil or spark plugs, the way I’d have to with a gas-powered mower. And when he demonstrated that all I’d have to do was plug in the mower and press a little bar on the handle to make it work, I was sold. Too often, I had seen my neighbors, red-faced, short of breath and heavily perspiring, double over from hernia-induced pain after they’d yanked the pull-cords on their gas-powered mowers three or four hundred times without succeeding in getting the machines to do anything more than sputter, cough and die.

And with my luck, I was pretty sure if I ever tried to start one of those, I’d also end up sputtering, coughing and dying.

So I bought the electric mower and a thick, 12-gauge, 100-foot extension cord, then headed home to mow my lawn.

I loved the mower. It sliced through even the toughest weeds as easily as a hot knife through butter. Unfortunately, it also just as easily sliced through part of the extension cord when I accidentally ran over it.

From the moment I tried my new mower, I developed an instant hatred for that extension cord. For one thing, 100 feet of thick, outdoor-type cord felt as if it weighed about the same as a ship’s anchor. To keep the cord away from the mower, I tried slinging it over my shoulder, but it was so heavy, it made my knees buckle. So I had no choice other than to let it drag behind me.

I soon learned that dragging a 100-foot cord behind me had its hazards. For one thing, the cord slid through every disgusting thing in the yard or in the vicinity of the yard – from mud and dirt to doggy souvenirs and poison ivy. And when I turned around to mow in the opposite direction, the cord suddenly crossed in front of me and made me do some pretty fancy footwork...to avoid tripping over it and landing in the aforementioned mud, dirt, doggy souvenirs and poison ivy.

Because of the cord, it took me longer to mow the lawn with the electric mower than it ever did with the push mower. I spent so much time untangling the cord from around trees, stumps, rocks, branches, the porch's legs and my own legs, I forgot why I was out in the yard. And whenever I tried to fling the cord out of my way, it inevitably landed in a bush or over a low-hanging branch. I think I even accidentally strangled a squirrel with it.

Another problem was the only outdoor electrical outlet at our house was on the front side of the house, so I had to pull the cord around two corners to get it out to the back yard. And every time I pulled on it too hard, it unplugged. I walked back to that outlet so many times to plug in the cord again, I wore a path through the grass.

But at least that path was one place I didn’t have to worry about mowing anymore.

And maybe I had crazy bees in my area, but they actually seemed to be attracted to the humming noise the lawnmower made, because they kept buzzing around me as I mowed. Either that, or I accidentally knocked their nest out of a tree when I flung the cord into the branches.

But I stuck with the mower for an entire summer and I have to confess my lawn really did look good.

However, after ruining about six of the heavy-duty extension cords, I learned two valuable lessons: (1). It’s not such a smart idea to buy green extension cords when they are going to be used in green grass, and (2). It actually can be cheaper (and much safer) in the long run to hire someone else to take care of your yard.

To be honest, the fact that the electrical outlet on the front of the house suddenly stopped working after the last time I ran over the extension cord, and I actually felt a jolt when it happened, might…just might…have had something to do with my decision to get an entirely new mower...a human one.

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