My wife is in love, a new love, and it ain’t me.

You see, we’ve had a pressure cooker for as long as we’ve been married, but i don’t think she ever used it. Then, she bought a new fangled, high powered, Cadillac…er, Caterpillar bulldozer of a pressure cooker and fell in love. No, not with the salesman. The pressure cooker.

Since we got back from Scotland, the pressure cooker has been caressed by all sorts of food products and the loving hands of my wife damn near every evening. My wife loves to cook. With the pressure cooker, we have reached critical mass.

She has always loved to cook. She’s very, very good at it. She has somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,486,321,544 cook books. She has more cookbooks than i have novels and non-fiction books. Maybe not as many LP’s as i have but way too many for me to count both to prove a point. She watches every cooking show and cooking movie ever made. i eat gourmet meals at breakfast, lunch, hors d’oeuvres, and dinner (yeh, we have dinner out here in the Southwest corner, not supper like back home). i love every one of her meals. She is really good, even with stuff i’m not partial to, like chicken, brussel sprouts, and beets.

i still cook every once in a long while.  i grill steaks, salmon, a few other things. i am trying to make my grilled cheeseburgers a weekly event, but it ain’t taking real well. i smoke a turkey every Thanksgiving we’re home. i cook my own version of jambalaya i call okra with tomatoes and sausage. i cook a bunch of things my mother used to cook: meat loaf, turnip greens, biscuits, cornbread. Mine aren’t as good as Mother’s, but they are passable. When i was in my last Navy tour, i always got home first in the afternoon. When i retired (sic), i was either always home or still got home first. i cooked a lot then. i figured in her high pressure job in office interiors she needed a break when she got home. Then i realized cooking was a release for her and i stopped. This was accelerated by a brief period when we traded off, one cooking one night and the other the next night. When it was my turn, i could find all sorts of reasons to go out to eat. She stopped that. But now, unless i get a specific request, get the urge to eat something akin to what i used to eat back in Tennessee, or demand i grill the steak rather than some barefoot woman’s recipe for ruining a steak, Maureen cooks.

It was all still good until she fell in love with the pressure cooker.

Now don’t get me wrong. What Maureen cooks in the pressure cooker is superb dining. We had pork loin last night, and it was wonderful. But this love affair with the pressure cooker has some other issues. Initially, i had to be called when the pressure cooker had concluded pressuring, cooking, or whatever pressure cookers do. You see the pressure release latch is pretty difficult to…well, release. So Maureen would call me to release the pressure. No, not that kind of pressure: the pressure in the pressure cooker. But last night, she figured it out, and now, i don’t have to stop watching a ball game to release the pressure.

No, but there is another problem. You see, when the pressure cooker is pressuring, it has the need to release some of that pressure intermittently. This is when it emits the sound of orcs coming out of Middle Earth with exponential decibels. While this is occurring, Maureen lights off the thirty-year old vent fan in the kitchen at full bore for a reason i cannot fathom. i first noticed this when i scrambled out of my television watching lounge chair (Yes, it’s a lounge chair, not a recliner because my interior designer prone wife thinks all recliners are ugly and do not fit the family room decor) and hit the deck with my hands covering my head to avoid George Alley’s FFV, the swiftest on the line, “runnin’ down the C&O road/Just twenty-five minutes behind” as Lester, Earl, and the Foggy Mountain Boys used to intone. i mean the first time she lit off that pressure cooker and the vent fan, i thought engine ole number one hundred and forty-three was rumbling out of our backyard through the breakfast room headed straight for me.

Sadly, i don’t think this is going to end any time soon. She is still in love with that pressure cooker. But it’s okay.

i eat well, and last night, she told me she still  loved me.