H and M made their wedding getaway in style:
Better Than An Emmy
We’re not into TV, anyway, so having no Emmy isn’t a big deal. But here’s what N had to say to M last evening as we processed corn and listened to loud bluegrass music, at that moment Alison Krauss.
N pointed to the stereo and said, “Mommy, it’s like you.”
An Evening with Grandpa and Grandma
Festival Fun
Yesterday M and I and our band performed at a lawn music festival in town, and it was hot and fun. Being in our band is a highlight of my life, and after we got home I stayed up late ordering a sound system of our very own even though it cost us a house project or two.
But singing in the hot summer swelter wasn’t the only greatest part of my yesterday. Immediately after our set was up there was a “carry your spouse” race, with a first place prize of $20 to Cold Stone Creamery.
M dashed up to me. “Let’s do it,” she said. We lined up with the other giggling couples.
Did I want to win? You betcha. Unfortunately, ice cream, unlike perspective (as Hamlet says, “there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”), doesn’t qualify for magical mental to physical materialization.
In the first race I charged around a sun shade tent and back to the finish line, cutting off competitors, M riding me like a jockey on a thundering steed. We landed in third place.
Then the announcer said the top three needed to race again. I gasped for more air, took off, and we found ourselves into an easy second place, and then, in the last ten yards, pulled from a ten-feet lag to a tie for first place.
“Maybe you two couples will just have to share the ice cream,” the announcer said. I didn’t hear who made the final call, though: the charging steeds were to now be the jockeys of their poor wives.
Now, M didn’t have a chance, really. Never mind that her counterpart has a two-month-old baby and is shorter; her counterpart’s husband is much shorter and slimmer than me.
The race host said, “Go!” and I hopped onto M’s back. She gasped and groaned loudly, then did a fabulous job of making second place look worthwhile, stumbling across the finish line under my two hundred pounds of ice cream loverness.
Finally, there was one more greatest part of the day. When another band played “Twist and Shout,” N took to dancing in the muddy pool where she’d spent a large portion of the day. I was able to film just a snippet:
Trio: Twinkle-Jesus Medley
First Ice Cream Cone(s)
Trio: Mary Had a Little Lamb
First Trio
This afternoon when N sang “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” M and I joined in. We sang it again and again–in three-part harmony.
Sweet.
Ice Cream Social
For a while, we weren’t sure anyone would come to the neighborhood ice cream “meet and greet.” We’d invited a few of the closest neighbors along our road, bought 15 quarts of ice cream, picked strawberries, and cleaned the house.
So we sat on our front porch and looked at our creek side garden that I had only begun to weed and hoe earlier in the day, and waited.
At 7:15, with only fifteen minutes left in the invitation times window, we were getting excited about having all that ice cream and a quiet evening to ourselves when in our driveway drove neighbors J and S’s car.
During our visit, another couple came and went, but J and S seemed very glad for neighborly interaction. They’ve lived here for two decades and even went to the next-door church for 10 years, with nary an invite to anything personal. It’s not that they–or the locals–aren’t nice people. “They’re all very friendly, and they’d give the shirt off their back for you,” they said. “But you can’t break in.”
“And they’re all related,” they said. “So you have to be careful about who you talk about.”
They told us lots about the people around us, including this about our western neighbor who used to own our house and theirs and to whose spring we have rights (which we are considering exercising, against her will):
They bought their farm from a bank; the previous purchaser had gone bankrupt. The farm was where she had raised her family; she had sold it to the now-bankrupt purchaser.
When our neighbors were scoping things out while their purchase of the place from the bank who had received it back from the bankrupt purchaser was underway, our western landowner showed up offering to sell them the curtains in the house ($150 a set) and a few other things around the place. They didn’t pay her, of course, but said she could have the curtains, which are still bagged in their attic (it’s been 21 years).
For a while, too, after they moved in, she would stop by twice a week to get drinking (well) water; she said she could only drink that water (“It’s the best water anywhere,” she told them). The man across the street, noticing that she was coming by frequently, inquired, and said, “What? She never drank that water when she lived there. I’ll take care of that.” Soon she stopped coming by, and they haven’t seen her since.
(These were reassuring stories to hear, in that it was good to know that our frustrations with her denial of reality, persistent infallibility, and confident ownership of the community aren’t our fault.)
So we ate ice cream and strawberries and drank the lemon-mint tea M had made and had a neighborly chat until 10:30.
Sofa Flopper/Curb Hopper
