Meat Sweats
There are a few smells I associate with summer: freshly mown grass; sunblock on a precious child’s skin, wet from swimming but warming in the sun; and hickory smoke curling off a crackling barbecue.
My husband grills old-school. He swears by his little Smokey Joe and refuses to upgrade to anything larger, and especially wouldn’t entertain the idea of a gas grill. When he grills, it’s an event; that grill is filled up with meat, and the smell is sublime. He’ll walk back and forth between the kitchen and the backyard, grabbing tongs and hot pads and platters with a sly grin on his face; I watch him, trying to gauge whether the side dishes I’m preparing will be ready at the same time the smoky meat is deemed edible by the grill-master.
Once that meat is on the table, our stomachs are grumbling and we’ve been salivating long enough—I’m sure we look like a pack of wolves descending on all that protein. We like our sauces, too: I’m partial to Worcestershire, while my sons like various barbecue sauces ranging from mild to hot.
We’re not exactly a vision of self-control. Which is why, a few years ago, my husband half-jokingly pushed himself back from the table and said, “I think I have the meat sweats.” He wiped his brow for emphasis.
“What are meat sweats, Daddy?” my daughter asked.
“It’s when you have too much of this delicious meat and your body starts sweating it out!”
Our decision to downsize to a smaller home several years ago was so much like the meat sweats! We lived in a big house and we had a good life, but … we had too much. We were consuming so much goodness, and in the end, it made us feel a little sick.
It’s hard to explain too much of a good thing. My kids always want more of a good thing. They don’t want a playdate that lasts all afternoon, they want a sleepover after the playdate. They don’t want just a few pieces of candy from the candy dish, they want all of it. If you have a good thing, why stop at just enough?
Our life was giving us the meat sweats. We had a beautiful home, but we laid awake worrying about the next mortgage payment. We had lots of nice things, but we spent too much time cleaning, sorting, maintaining, and organizing those things. It took time away from the things that were really important to us.
If I’m going to continue with the grilling analogy—and heck, why not?—our little house is the little plate we bring to dinner. It holds just enough of that delectable meat from the grill. We can fill up the plate, but that tiny plate is going to hold just the right amount—no more. We’ll get enough, but we won’t make ourselves sick from over-gorging.
Best of all, if you’re not feeling sick from meat sweats, it means you might have room for s’mores.
