A MESS OF COLLARDS

I really love this new fridge---I find myself being really persnickety with wiping down the first drop to appear on the door, or giving a good polish to whichever glass shelf or other I’ve just removed something from.  (The mishap with the laid-down flat Rubbermaid gallon of home-cooked figs-in-syrup was a fluke, in which I’d obviously not tightened the big-as-a-saucer lid with my not-as-strong-as-they-once-were hands---that was a MESS, I can tell you, and we hope that will forever be the Worst Thing That Happened To the New Fridge).

But just the other day, I removed something from the top shelf, I remember---during which I must have caught another item, a two-cup Tupperware, knocking it out and down all those feet for a WHACK on the projection which is the freezer, and to the slate floor, where it popped open and went EVERYWHERE.   I just kept looking down around my feet, where the ever-spreading cloudy-green pool just kept spreading around my big old pink Minnie Mouse clogs, with big clots of blackish-green islands moving slow as icebergs as the liquid moved ever wider. 

I stepped ever-so-carefully for an old towel in the laundry room, dropping it like Batman’s cape to cover the onslaught before it fled beneath the fridge.  I just kept looking at the muddy-pool, with my only thought being the lovely pan of shiitake that Caro had made for supper a couple of nights before, but it just wasn’t quite right.

Neither the BLOB nor that slime so beloved of ten-year-olds and Kid's Cable shows has been such a noxious green amalgam of distasteful chunks and goo, and I just could Not Place what it really was.  Now, we call a pot of any kind of greens a "Mess" in the South, but nobody could have predicted this.

  

Haven’t we all had those surreal moments of surprise, as we are so caught off guard that we might interpret something as one thing, and then see a total something else as our eyes try to make sense of what it might be.    And then I knew---it was COLLARDS---the last of that big bowl with the wonderful pot likker that I’d made several days ago, and kept transferring the dwindling supply into ever-smaller storage.  

I got it all swept into the little short-handled dust-pan, down the disposal, with the floor cleaned, mopped and shined, then showered to get off all the splashes.  Just as I started to put my shoes back on, a strange look to the left one caught my eye, and I looked down to see a neat collard bow, sitting right up there like a $500 clip on a Laboutin.   

Appropriate décor for a country cook like me.   Just call me Minnie Pearl Mouse.