For Howard, their home represented a place of refuge against a world that had ceased caring about his welfare when he was four years old. The smell of Anita’s cooking forged the strongest bond he had ever made to another person. His mother had plied him with CoolAid and cookies through his early years to keep him quiet and made dinner out of cans and jars when absolute necessity forced her to feed him something reasonably nutritious. Howard’s mother detested children and all the woes they brought upon a God-fearing house. If sex was a sin as she had been taught in her Bible class, then children were the Devil’s spawn. Surely the foul issue from their silky bottoms was a sign of the origin of their inequity. The supposed innocence of infants was only a ploy by the Devil to inure God-fearing women into accepting the Devil’s work. She knew instinctively that the rank odor of pee and poop were the Devil’s perfume. Diapers and the changing thereof were an acceptance of the Devil’s influence in the world. She had heard tales from other women of her church’s flock that some perverted men actually enjoyed pretending to be babies and shat in their dydees as if they were incontinent infants. There was no question in her narrow mind that such things were ungodly at their source. She had only given in to sin once in her life and Howard had been the result. She firmly believed that Howard was a divine retribution visited upon her for her sins. She was glad when the opportunity arose to foist Howard off on a near relative who needed extra hands to work on the farm. HHoward’s diet had improved once he had moved to the farm, but there was no love, no motherly concern to help him through childhood’s travails.

 

Anita was the first woman who had deigned to care for Howard. To him, Anita symbolized all that was needed by a man. Whenever Anita cooked, the inviting aroma of fresh sweet onions pan-frying and burgundy-soaked forest crimini mushrooms baking in the oven filled the family room with the rich fragrance of fecund forest soil in springtime. While Howard wasn’t big on bread, the smell of whole wheat buñelos caramelizing as they crisped to a golden brown in the oven made him slaver with anticipation. Howard would ask Anita several times each evening when dinner was going to be done as he sniffed his dinner of sirloin hamburger steaks browning in the skillet and Mountain King Gold potatoes baking to butter-like perfection in the microwave. Howard lusted after Anita’s potatoes. Anita had a secret to cooking her potatoes; she would wipe each of them carefully with the precious beef drippings garnered from the previous night’s steaks before putting them in her microwave. Then, just before they were fully done, when they had reached the stage of flaky softness that presaged the last moments before utter perfection, she would remove the potatoes from the microwave and gently squeeze them in a kitchen towel to break up the large fragments before they became overdone. Once the potatoes had been mashed within their skins, she would push in the ends with her fingers to finish the job and return them to the microwave to complete cooking. Anita’s potatoes always had the superb fully-cooked, creamy texture with the slightly nutty taste baked into the skin that is the hallmark of the best offering of a master chef to a man who enjoys beef and potatoes. It was a lucky epicure who was able to sample her culinary art. Howard felt that only someone truly blessed by God could eat her potatoes every day. The skins were soft and redolent with the aroma of baked potatoes and beef. Anita’s baked potatoes were heavenly. Even had other reasons not presented themselves to bind her to him, Howard would have married her for her mastery of the art of cooking potatoes alone.

 

It didn’t matter to Howard that the sheets and pillow covers were forest green, he never realized how his unconscious interpreted the symbolism. All Howard was concerned with was his work and his pleasures. The higher elements of correspondence with universal color symbols had never occurred to him. He was a chemical engineer, not an alchemist or a scholar of dead or forgotten knowledge. He was ignorant of the magick of the colors that Anita wove around him like a fleecy green baby’s blanket. For that matter, Anita was ignorant of the details of the arcane art of Earth magick too, she only knew what was right to do. She had been trained as a pharmacologist, and from time immemorial pharmacists had given their patients their concoctions without understanding the biological mechanisms that made them worthwhile. They handed their preparations to their patients only knowing their medicaments had provided relief to the greater majority of individuals who had come to them for assistance. Anita had done the best she could with the elements she had on hand. She would have done more if it were in her power. Anita wanted to make their home a happy and contented place for the both of them and did her best to see that everything was as commodious as possible.