We ate chocolate chip cookies for dinner

bonus story: The Yellow Chair

Don’t judge us. We were just so excited that the toaster oven arrived. We’ve been operating without an oven since moving here - going on seventeen months. We have an air fryer that has a convection oven capacity but its fry/cooking basket is too small to really bake anything like cookies or a cake.

Actually we’ve been operating without an oven much longer - the oven in our apartment in San Francisco was out of commission for the last two years we lived there - our landlord left something to be desired when it came to repair responsiveness. There were two oven compartments - the big one, and a little warmer oven that couldn’t even fit a regulation half cookie sheet but could just accommodate a loaf pan. It was the big oven that broke, so if I wanted to roast or bake anything it had to be done in the little loaf pan.

The new toaster oven sits on the counter but it has more space than that little warmer oven did. It’s a beaut - an Italian brand. It has ten settings. And it came with a roasting pan and a pizza pan. First it had to be seasoned, then the h announced he was going to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. We had to go to the store first to get the ingredients. We waited til 8:30p figuring it would be cooler (high of 85F today) and also figuring it wouldn’t be crowded just 90 minutes before closing on a lovely Friday evening, which turned out to be true.

On the walk there we passed many apartments with the windows open to the mild night air. Warm yellow rectangles dotted the faces of the apartment buildings all around us.

I was excited to go to the store not just because cookies were in my future but because of The Chair.

See, there is this yellow chair at the supermarket. Well, there WAS a yellow chair, for the longest time. A modern take on a wingback, the most cheerful shade of yellow, even the h’s mom agreed it was a nice chair and I should definitely get it. I watched over a period of weeks as The Chair sat in a display area at the front of the store, the price of $229** falling week by week until it reached a nadir at $179 the week before Christmas. Since my birthday is also a week before Christmas, and since our anniversary is on Christmas Eve, I suggested to the h that a yellow chair would serve the trifecta of expectation where gifts were concerned. But by the time he agreed to go get the chair…it was gone.

But then it returned! It had not been sold, the manager had apparently put it back in whatever place is reserved for merch that just won’t sell in places like that.

Ridiculously it returned at it’s original price high of $229. Again, as weeks passed, the price dropped. No way was I buying it for more than $179. Every time we entered the store I searched the front display for the chair and checked the price. The h never once paused at the display but just marched into the store. I’d come running up to him in the bread aisle breathlessly reporting It’s down thirty euro!

Is it, the h would say in a perfectly pleasant voice.

IT IS! I felt confident that the price would drop again to $179 then lower, and I’d be there to snatch it up.

But then it disappeared again This time I was sure it was sold.

But then - you guessed it! - it has appeared again! It is clear that this time the store manager means business. There will be no fourth chance to buy it - this is it, you can tell by how the chair is priced - not $229, nor $219 nor $199; that’s right the manager just went for broke and priced it at $179 right out of the gate.

OH MY GOD IT’S $179! I hollered across the store at the h, who per usual did not pause with me to check the price of the chair but got down to the business of shopping.

I ran after the h. I may have skipped once. I was happy. That yellow chair was mine, I was certain. The universe wanted me to have it; nay, it was begging me to have it. I know because of the million thirty two times we have traveled the two mile steeply hilled round trip to the supermarket, it has been on foot. Sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the cold, often in the dark, once with COVID, always with both of us having a full backpack (sometimes two, wearing the second on my chest) and carrying a bag in each hand. It was a little much even without carrying a living room chair between us. I had thought, maybe if I wore a beanie, I could carry the chair with the seat on my head, something I was totally willing to try except this time we had a car! A car with an empty back seat that could easily fit the yellow chair.

Somehow, I have no idea how, I forgot about The Chair while we were going through checkout. I guess it was all the excitement of buying lots of heavy items (see: had a car) - oat milk, coconut milk, cartons of juice, chocolate milk (don’t judge), olive oil. We even got a 12 pack of those cute little bottles of Coke - something that is normally verboten not because of sugar or calories but how hard it is to carry.

The next time we go to the store we’re getting The Chair, I announced to the h. We’ll see, the h said. I showed him where I planned to put The Chair. The h agreed the yellow chair would indeed look good in the living room of the garden apartment. It’s the kind of chair that would look good in any one of the four houses we are renovating and while we have a lot of furniture making its way to us across the ocean in containers, we have plenty of room for one yellow chair. I said all of this to the h while I gave him a massage, his favorite thing, because bribery works. So how about it, I said. Compra a cadeira amarela se faz favor? But the h was already snoring.

I didn’t blame him - it’s been a big week of little improvements that make a huge difference in quality of life. The h replaced a window in the french doors that separate the living area from the laundry and casa de banho; fixed a crack in the concrete doorsill; planted sunflowers; installed kitchen cabinets and glass doors to the cabinets; installed a bathroom sink and tap and pedestal; kept all of our fragile fruit and nut trees in good shape throughout weeks upon weeks of intense heat. He painted the pedestrian and car gates at the foot of the driveway, and power washed and painted the walls bordering the driveway and the cottage steps, the garage and the fruit orchard so now the parts of the property the public walks by or can see from the street is fresh and gleaming, no weeds or chicken shit clumped in the driveway and on the calcadas, no ivy climbing the walls and strangling the trees.

The current lack of weeds is particularly noteworthy; the weeds were legion when we first arrived, often taller than me, dead ones interspersed with violently green ones, some with evil thorns or bristly prickers that required doeskin gloves to touch. We’d no sooner cut them all back when the winter rains came and boom, they came back bigger than ever. Another full day of cutting them back and the spring rains came and the weeds were so tall and dense and lushly green that parts of the property felt like a rain forest. Then the h, our workers Tiago and Paulo, and our brother and his wife Tim and Kirsten (the Alaskans) went at the weeds over the course of a week, the sound of chainsaws and weed whackers and leaf blowers reverberating across the five acres. The calcadas were scraped with shovels, a practice that keeps weeds from growing back as quickly or as large.

This time last year I’d make a point of scuffing rocks with my feet as I walked the long driveway, on more than one occasion scaring a rat out of hiding in the weeds growing lushly at the sides. Ugh what is it about the sight of a rat running that just makes the skin crawl.

The weeds were so dense in places, once, I successfully hid behind a clump and jumped out and scared Jake, who was walking by at that moment thinking right up until I yelled Boo! that no one had seen him skulking about in the back of the campo eating something he found on the ground. He was bug eyed with surprise, and I felt very contrite and gave him extra dog biscuits. One shouldn’t lie in wait for one’s loved ones.

Anyway - The Chair. By now you may have guessed, when we returned it wasn’t in the display at the front of the store; the display had been changed out for a back to school theme. Was it finally sold? Or is The Chair in “the back” somewhere? I could ask, but I’m not inclined to put myself through that if the h isn’t committed to buying it, which he has never really indicated, not even when his mom was agreeing with me that it is a great chair. Oh sure he humors me about The Chair, but that is just a diversionary tactic (note: he laughed outright when I read this aloud to him).

I’m not worried though. If The Chair reappears in the display window I will immediately go to the customer service booth and tell them I’ll buy it. I can always call an Uber to get it home, though once I carried a much larger chair for almost the same distance - a throne-like wooden and leather affair that I found placed next to a dumpster. I kind of like the idea of someone in the neighborhood spotting me at two different times carrying a chair home. She must really like to sit, they think as they watch me stagger past, my head hidden by the seat of The Chair.

The cookies were excellent by the way. The h forgot to put in oats so he’ll have to make another batch tomorrow oh dear. Almost as good as the taste is the smell - it’s been awhile since we’ve been able to bake, a vanilla scented house is a fine thing*.

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*for the h: a vanilla-scented house with a yellow chair in it is even finer
** all prices appear in dollars not euros because I am too lazy to find the combination of keystrokes to produce the euro symbol