Crazy??? Maybe Not!

My family tree is full of women named Ruth.  I was named after my mother's baby sister who died as an infant.  However, I had two other Aunt Ruths, and one of them, who had married into the family, was generally viewed as rocking off the edge of sanity.

Aunt Ruth was a high-strung, nervous woman, who never seemed as mentally agile as most of the family.  She and my uncle apparently enjoyed arguing...it was their relationship style.  He did, however, always get the best of her.  He used to threaten that if she died first, he would see to it that the hearse was put at the end of the procession to the cemetery, because she had never been any place on time in her entire life, and he wouldn't want her to feel uncomfortable at her own funeral.

Aunt Ruth had some bizarre habits.  If she invited someone for dinner, they needed to plan on the meal being at least two hours later than she had said it would be served. I once watched her fuss over every minute detail during those two hours, even though the meal was not elaborate.  When she wished to cover a bowl before placing in it the refrigerator, she did not use plastic wrap or foil or a lid.  Nope, she placed a sheet of waxed paper over the bowl and spent an eternity taking tiny tucks in the paper to crimp it to the edge of the bowl.

One of the things that caused people to think she was really nuts, was her insistence that when my uncle retired, she was retiring also.  She had never worked outside of the home, so her definition of retiring was that she was no longer going to fix dinner.  Since she began refusing to allow anyone into their home, I am suspicious that she may have also stopped cleaning.  I was not able to verify that, but she actually did follow through on her threat to stop preparing meals,  They went out to dinner every evening after my uncle retired.

My husband and I are now retirement age, and I'm starting to think she wasn't as crazy as we all thought.  I haven't yet tired of meal preparation, but I certainly have tired of the clean up afterward.  I have a dishwasher, and some evenings my husband is quite helpful.  But...I am definitely growing weary of dirty dishes.  I have pondered the use of paper plates, but I don't like to eat from them on a regular basis, and I would still have to deal with the pans and other utensils used to prepare the meal.

"Retiring" as defined by my "crazy" Aunt Ruth is starting to look like an attractive option.