My husband, he putters. He never stops doing things around the house, whether it’s fixing bathroom faucets, or picking up my stray hairs on the floor, or digging weeds out of his mini garden. In fact, if not for his constant (anal, almost) obsession with the total annihilation of dust and ants and my wayward locks, I’ll be living in a cobwebby house, wearing moth-eaten underwear.

Recently, he has found a new way to pass the time on weekends: he makes cranberry juice. Not from concentrate, mind you, but from real cranberries.

According to Wikipedia, cranberries only grow in bogs in the Northern Hemisphere. Well, we must be in freakin’ Siberia because my mother has a lovely cranberry bush on her front yard, flourishing like it’s not approximately 3,000 miles from its appropriate environment. (It’s that, or we’re bog-people.)

Now, my acquaintance with cranberries have been pretty limited to the Ocean Spray cranberry-grape mixed variety that supermarkets sell at ridiculous prices. I’m extremely predisposed to UTI (I get it a couple of times a month – once, if I’m lucky), so I have no choice but to occasionally drink the damned thing. And not being a great lover of most juices, I hate it with a vengeance.

Needless to say, none of us could tell a cranberry from a Martian. It was the landlady who told us what it was, and naturally, we were skeptical. After all, we’re a long way from cranberry central, and it could very well be some sort of poisonous berry for all we know. Eventually, some brave soul (my mother) took a mouthful of berry and thankfully didn’t start frothing. Thus, The Husband’s cranberry hobby was born.

Apparently, the moment the berries start to resemble grapes, they’re ready to pick. And unfortunately for me, they turn purple every week. For the past couple of weeks alone, The Husband, bless him, must have harvested about 20 pounds of cranberries. Out of this haul, he has probably made about 15 liters of pure, undiluted cranberry juice. And though we share this yield with my mum and my sister, I end up having to drink most of it because of my condition.

Strangely enough, everyone from The Husband, to my mother, to my sister and her husband, to the landlady absolutely LOVE it – even without sugar, in my weird sister’s case. All of them have been consuming it with such gusto that you’d think it was nectar from the gods, while I have been forced to find ways to somehow bypass my taste buds when I drink it.

I’ve told The Husband maybe he should consider marketing ‘em cranberries. With the price of commercial and predominantly diluted cranberry juice the way it is practically everywhere in the world, it’ll be easy for him to find a niche and prosper. Not only that, there will be less cranberry juice for me to drink. Who says the world can’t be perfect?