Burritos and Garden Center Employees Who Smell Like My Grandfather

There’s a new, tiny, authentic Mexican diner in La Crosse called “Burritos House”, and that’s really how the name of the place is written—no punctuation, nothing fancy, just “Burritos House.” Which, of course, makes me wonder, How am I supposed to read this? Should I look at it as a poor translation meaning “The House of Burritos?” Could it mean “The Burrito House,” a place to buy burritos?  My favorite translation, which I choose to continue to imagine, is “Burrito’s House”—a tiny house owned by a giant burrito, ironically named Burrito, and he’s inviting us inside to taste his culinary specialty, you guessed it: burritos.  I like the cut of your jib, Burrito. (5 points!)

I was told by an outside source that before I tried Burrito’s specialty, I should definitely eat the seasoned pork tacos with the salsa verde. So I did.  And let me tell you: I would kill a man and knock down and old woman on a walker to receive another ethereal (5 points!) bite of something, anything, slathered with that salsa verde. Sweet fancy Moses.

[I washed it down with some delicious Mexican apple soda. Mmmmmmmmm.]

After lunch, I took a quick trip down to my favorite garden center looking for some new cilantro plants. I was helped by a sweaty employee in a dirty shirt who smelled like my grandpa. First the talk was just, you know, “D’you have any cilantro?” but then somehow turned into him and I traipsing around the garden center, and the sweaty employee telling me all the cool things about his favorite plants. 

Apparently his mother used to keep scented geranium bushes in the house, and whenever she had company, she would rub the leaves together and the scent would spread throughout the whole house.  Also, some fruit-bearing trees that are kept in really good soil in perfect conditions and are fed well won’t bear fruit because they’re too comfortable. They get too content and become lazy, so they don’t want to go through the work of bearing fruit. So what this sweaty employee likes to do is take a child’s plastic bat and start smacking the crap out of the tree’s trunk, and every time it starts producing fruit by the next season. I like this guy.

[I of course didn’t take any pictures while I was there, so here’s a shot of the four new lavender plants we put on the side of our house. Lovely, aren’t they?]

I’ll admit, I was in a rut this week. The “do something blogworthy every day” idea flew out the window and was replaced by a three-day pity party, in which I had nothing to blog about besides complaints, so I didn’t.  It's nice to know that, when the Gulf of Mexico is being destroyed, when it seems like more and more people hate each other every day, when personal problems eat you up, and all you'd like to do is fix all the world's problems...there's still Burritos House, lavender, and sweaty Garden Center employees who would like to tell you about nicely whacking trees with a baseball bat.