Cranberries

Cranberries are huge in Russia. They're a food, a favorite infusion for vodka, and a storied metaphor for pretentiousness. In the nineteenth century, a (western) European writer traveled in Russia and wrote of noblemen on trains with cranberry sprigs hanging from their seats, or something like that. Only cranberries grow in bogs, not sprigs, so it ("klyukva") became shorthand for pretentious, ignorant BS.

I wanted to get cranberries yesterday to put in my oatmeal, but mom insisted that we had some. I found some last night, but they'd gone off. Mom brought some in this morning, and they didn't look good. Our disagreement over whether the cranberries were still edible turned into a screaming fight, because that's what mom and I do. She doesn't believe in agreeing to disagree, so she continued to escalate, and I'm frustrated by mom's general food-buying and storage habits, so I continued to escalate as a proxy issue. And so we found ourselves screaming over cranberries.

Then we made up and hugged. My mom put her hands on my waist and commented on how much fat she could feel. So we're back.