Hello, Internet.

My name is Willa. I spend my days sleeping, guzzling massive amounts of coffee, writing About Me pages that are far longer and more in depth than they need to be, and hanging out with my budliest of buds.

I have been informed that my About Me page must include an audio recording I made of a quote that’s meaningful to me (with background music I made in GarageBand), along with a visual I found for it, and a visual that I made.

The quote that I chose is “Let the sky rain potatoes”, which is a line from the play The Merry Wives of Windsor, by William Shakespeare.

The first visual I found for this is one that I just googled, and the source can be found here.

This is the visual that I made for my quote:

Now, I realize that this quote may not seem like the most meaningful quote I could have chosen. I had a plan to write down some thoughts about why potatoes are meaningful to me and then whittle down and edit those thoughts into a few concise sentences relating back to my quote. What I essentially ended up with, however, is an essay-length explanation of why I love potatoes that I decided not to cut down too much.

So, to put it simply, the reason this quote is meaningful to me is because I associate potatoes with positivity and happiness, which are things I wish were as abundant as the rain around here.

The explanation of why I associate potatoes with these things is as follows:

Let The Sky Rain Potatoes
Why an amusing line from a Shakespeare play is personally meaningful to me.

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Imagine yourself at a table, sitting down to the perfect Thanksgiving dinner. You may be with your family, with your friends, with someone else, or even alone; wherever and with whomever you feel comfortable. Imagine you are feeling perfectly content, and thankful, and warm even though the weather outside is cold. You look around at the people and things who are meaningful to you. You breathe in, and you can smell turkey, and gravy, cranberry sauce, and stuffing, and asparagus, and from the next room, you can smell your favourite type of pie. Around you, everyone chatters and laughs, and everyone around the table says what they are thankful for this year, and you are thankful for being here. Then, whoever has cooked this amazing dinner sets one last dish in front of you: potatoes. You smile, and dig in.

This is the kind of memory that potatoes take me back to. Being happy, seeing family, eating good food. Not always in a holiday sort of setting. I have fond memories of attending the hockey games of my parents or my sister, mostly to get a chance to eat the perfect fries served at the ice rinks where they played. Attending their games as a kid was part of the reason I decided to start playing hockey myself. Although I’m busier now, and their hockey games are often late at night, I still try and attend a game or two when I can, and I always order fries.

Aside from eating potatoes, I remember helping my grandparents to dig them up. They had a garden where they would grow various foods; zucchini, and pumpkins, and raspberries, and snap peas, and, of course, potatoes. We would visit my grandparents every summer, and every Christmas, and if we visited at the right time of the summer, my grandparents would be in the midst of gathering food from their garden to cook. The potatoes that they grew were purple underground, and ranged in size from that of a marble to that of a baseball, although they were much less uniform in shape. I would help dig some potatoes during the afternoon, and by supper time, we would be eating those same potatoes, along with other fresh vegetables. The taste was made even better by the fact that it felt rewarding to eat a dinner that I had helped prepare.

Sometimes, instead of us going to visit my grandparents, they would drive here and visit us. At the right time of year, they would come bearing food; maybe jams, maybe vegetables, and often potatoes. Sometimes the potatoes they brought would be shaped like something out of a sci-fi film, and a wealth of jokes about what exactly the potatoes looked like would follow.

In recent years, I’ve started doing more cooking for myself and my family; instead of just making my own breakfast and lunch and expecting dinner to be made for me, I’ve started trying to help more, and make dinner for everyone at least once a week. While there are a variety of meals that I enjoy cooking and eating, one of my favourite things to make is potatoes. There are a lot of different ways that potatoes can be prepared; baked potatoes are easy enough and help to round out a meal. Potato salad is great for summer, and makes excellent leftovers. Oven fries with salt and paprika make the entire kitchen smell amazing while they’re cooking, so by the time they’re done, they’ve made me super hungry. Cooking, much like digging up potatoes, is rewarding in the feeling of getting to serve and eat a meal you’ve made yourself. Not only that, but it’s fun to do. It can be calming, it’s usually not strenuous, it’s easy to do alone, and, to me, at least, certain foods, especially right out of the oven, smell and taste like home.

So let’s return once again to Thanksgiving dinner. As I write this, Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and I’ve heard much discussion of turkeys, family, and things that people are thankful for. This year, I’ll be sitting down to dinner feeling thankful for the plate of potatoes in front of me, and everything I associate with them. Looking forward to another year of meals to eat and memories to make, I have one thing to say:

Let the sky rain potatoes.