Yesterday Summer descended upon us. We dusted off the fold out table, spread the gingham tablecloth and took dinner outside. Jonathan made Emeril’s recipe for mussels over linguine and I did as little as possible. Our loved ones joined us. It did not suck.
Seriously, people. Look out for my husband’s steamy mussels.
Every Sunday we have friends and family over, but the vibe was starting to get stale. It made such a difference to switch it up and move the party outdoors. Ah! To not hear the scrape of our chairs on floor tiles. Birds chirping. Wind blowing. Kids running around in between bites. Forget table manners!
I’ve been lobbying to get a permanent outdoor table and chairs for some time now. I think everyone agrees it’s necessary.
One of our all time favorite sights: watching Bigs finish her plate.
Smalls ate bread. Just bread. All that scrubbing and debearding and “les moules” pretension and she only ate bread. But she’s ready as ever for some Rififi thievery action.
So there we were minding our own business when birds started to congregate in the branches above our heads. Before we could say Jonathan Livingston Seagull- PLOP! Bird poop on the tablecloth right next to the artichoke antipasto. Guess they got the forget-table-manners memo. But at least it didn’t go INTO the artichoke antipasto because the two looked remarkably similar and we never would’ve known. Dodged a bullet there.
And so it seemed the natural thing to do was to put our napkins on our heads.
And of course that was when my husband picked up the camera. Probably to get back at me for opting out of the prep work. (Or any work this weekend for that matter.) Touché.
Despite the bird droppings it was a beautiful evening. We learned a lot. We learned that birds like food when we’re eating it in our backyard and not just in the park or on the beach. And we learned that we’ll have to factor an umbrella into our backyard budget. And we were reminded of what we have known all along but sometimes forget… that we’re really really really lucky.
