Lunch

Janet Clarkson, The Old Foodie, whose charming blog has been enlightening us for years, is doing "Meals of the Day" this week and today's topic is lunch.

This put me in mind of a lunch I ate on Cape Breton, Canada, about thirty years ago. My husband Jamie MacMillan's family were all from Cape Breton, Mabou and Port Hawksbury, to be specific. In our first year together, Jamie and I traveled through Nova Scotia using our thumbs and went to Mabou to the house that Jamie's dad was born in and where his dad's sister Aunt Jean lived. One evening that we were there Aunt Jean took us visiting to a friend's house, Malcolm, the plumber, and his wife.

Malcolm grew up speaking Gaelic and in his adulthood ate three lunches a day. He had breakfast, then a lunch mid-morning, then dinner, and a mid-afternoon lunch, then supper, and then a lunch in the evening. His wife, hospitably offered us a "lunch" which included a cup of tea, cheese and crackers, a small cookie, a small piece of iced cake, and a piece of bread with butter. She apologized saying it was a "mean" lunch -- in the sense of "paltry" or scant.

It was lovely, and I had for that moment the sense that I was experiencing something fleeting as indeed it was.