Quesadillas and Smokeless Candles

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

A Tuesday at the office and a staff lunch to celebrate Ivy’s birthday.

Collette felt the baby start to kick that morning for the first time, which was an odd sort of feeling – like bubbles.

Meanwhile, Rose was off to yet another CLEP exam that morning at UMSL, on one of her not-as-favorite subjects: analyzing literature. She called Collette later in the morning to let her know that she had passed, bringing her three credits shy of completing her freshman year. And as reward, Collette decided to let her have off school for the rest of the week.

Then it was off to Chevy’s for lunches of chicken quesadillas, fajitas, and smothered burritos. It was a rather loud crew of seven at the table – where, as usual, there was a good deal of jesting.

Later in the afternoon, a package of smokeless candles arrived via UPS for the Advent wreath. Ivy, Rosemary, and Collette experimented with one of the white tapers to be certain that it didn’t really smoke. Collette lit the taper and Ivy held it. Immediately it began to smoke.

“Do you see smoke?”

“Oh, yes, I see smoke.”

“So much for that.”

“Well, wait a minute until the wick burns a bit.”

“Ah, there it goes.”

Ivy sat holding the candle several minutes, with all of them staring at it, until they were confident that it was not going to smoke.

“Now blow it out and see what happens.”

“Oh, yeah. Now that’s a lot of smoke.”

The air filled with a cloud of gray wisps.

“We’ll just bring snuffers and try it again.”

Then Rosemary scooted off to prepare food and attend to her guests who were shortly arriving – missionaries to Peru.

“Well, all I know is that they have mustard with their French fries down there,” Ivy was saying, in regards to Peruvian food.

“Never had French fries there,” Rosemary said. “Although there was raw seafood cooked in lemon juice. But it was still raw, so I don’t know why they said it was cooked in lemon juice. Maybe the lemon juice cooked it by itself…”

Then Ivy spent the next hour trying to arrange the elders’ Christmas party; she finally succeeded after a number of phone calls and calendar rearranging and left at 5:30, an hour and a half later than the cut-off. But this was typical – always too much work and too little time, despite the fact that some of it had been devoted to test-running smokeless candles. The life of a church secretary…