Lilac Colored Glasses

I’m settled in the kitchen, a pot of water just beginning to boil on the modern flat electric burner. The sun is still waking and the sky is a deep, dark cobalt, in limbo between night and day as I pick up the first freshly rinsed potato and slide the paring knife quickly beneath the rough brown surface.

In a way it’s soothing in its simplicity: peeling potatoes.
I’d always used a peeler until I moved in with CB who tends to use a paring knife (the peeler is actually rusty now) so I started using a knife as well. The peeler at the new crèche* broke the first time I used it (don’t get me started on the list of broken items at the new crèche) so today I brought one of our knives with me and was consequently struck by how positively “middle ages” I felt in the act of peeling these potatoes. I kept getting mental images of the La Laitière commercials from Nestle:

Only, like, I was actually do that sort of thing, I just don’t get the fun, uber-Dutch costume.

I mean, think about it.
Small pox has been effectively eliminated.
Cars now have computer chips and on board satellite systems.
The compostion of Saturn’s rings can be researched and analyzed.

And here I am still having to peel potatoes every morning for lunches.

As I was pondering this my hands continued to deftly rotate and peel, excising the occasional brown spots and I realized no mechanism could judge how deep to go to dig out a spudly blemish. No computer program could accordingly adjust itself to the contours of each individual tuber. Nothing can do that so well as a pair of human hands. And after all that deep thought and reflection I silently came to the conclusion that there will always be someone peeling potatoes.

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