About Biscotti

I take a bite out of my biscotti and crumbs fly in four directions. Phil stares at me as if he’s never seen me before. This makes me uneasy. “It’s very dry,” I say, by way of justification.

“You’re supposed to dunk it in your coffee,” he explains.

Those crumbs flying from my biscotti made me remember yesterday’s baby squirrel.

The crabapple’s upper branches fill the second-story window over the desk where I allegedly work. Until yesterday, there were two bowed, slender branches with clusters of marble-sized green crabapples at their ends. Ha, I thought, the squirrels will never get those. Then I watched one of this year’s newbies stretch his body out on one of those branches, hanging by his feet from the upper, thicker section as the branch sagged under his weight, reaching those tiny green apples one by one, gnawing rapidly through them as he hung upside down, each bite sending pieces flying.

“Dunking it in your coffee softens it so it doesn’t do that,” my knowledgeable husband continues. He adds, helpfully: “Some of those crumbs fell in your lap.”

I look down. Pick them up and eat them. Unlike the squirrel, which wasted half of each hard, bitter fruit he ate.

“You’re going to shit for a week,” I yelled out the window. The squirrel went on munching.

“The trouble is, then you get crumbs in your coffee,” I point out.

“It’s a matter of timing,” says the wise man, demonstrating with a quick dip of his own biscotti.

“There’s still crumbs. It’s like the ten-second rule. No matter how quickly you retrieve that cookie from the floor, it acquires dirt. I know you like to leave the last swallow in your cup, but I like to drink my coffee to the last drop and can’t if it’s turned to sludge.”

I might have added that not wasting a swallow of coffee is only one of many repercussions of being the child of working-class parents who lived through the Depression, but I’m pretty sure I’ve told him that story one or two times already.

Fuller Park, on one of our few hot days so far

I lean forward to crunch my hardtack biscotti, so this time the crumbs land on the table. He’s still staring at me as if he doesn’t know who I am. “It’s like, after nearly forty years of marriage, discovering that your wife can’t blow bubbles with bubble gum.”

He’s reaching with that analogy, because I do know what you’re supposed to do with biscotti and it’s not a matter of lacking the skill. I’m just not onboard with the practice. Besides, surely we both gave up bubble gum a quarter century before we met? But all I say is: “I can blow bubbles; I blew a big one once that popped all over my face.” Wow. I haven’t remembered that for decades. Suddenly I’m ten.

Our coffee break is over. Back upstairs to find something for this week’s blog. Outside my study window those slender branches rise high, freed of their burden of fruit.

At 4th BBQ, one neighbor’s dog, Miles in staring contest with another neighbor’s cat, Mephistopheles.