A Weekend in the Village

You know those little ceramic villages that people always put out around Christmas time? They put candles in the little houses, or they string some lights around them, and pull everything together with some fluffy cotton that is supposed to resemble snow. (If you ever spot real snow that forms strands and doesn't melt, let me know because I want to patent it.)

Okay, well, take your imagined little ceramic village and blow it up to life-size proportions. Now just add some trailers on the outskirts, a couple bars on the main strip, one stop-light, a chemical fertilizer plant in the middle of a neighborhood, and be sure that there are two churches within one hundred feet of each other. You are now envisioning the village in which my aunt and uncle (one of the two pastors) live.

This cozy little village is where I spent the weekend. It was a wholesome weekend. A weekend of football, Christmas cookies, homemade candy, church service, and euchre.* That's right, for an entire weekend, I reverted. I went back to the me who existed her junior year of high school--only slightly more liberal.

Some family friends came by for lunch after church, and as a gift for my birthday, I was given a wondrous treasure. It is something I will cherish all my life. I will preserve it and keep it in a lockbox, and never ever leave town without it. What is this gift? An 8x10 portrait of our dearest President George Dubya Bush.

I laughed so hard I couldn't stand up.

What did this same family friend do during church? The usual. Within earshot of others, he asked where the new tattoo was this time, adding that it was probably somewhere I couldn't reveal in church. I played along, only to realize that one of the parishioners I had never met had just heard me and was now bug-eyed. That's always fun to explain.

One of the seventy-something-year-olds in the church still believes that I have numerous hidden tattoos and piercings, and own and ride a Harley, thanks to the dear old family friend.

So what did I gain from my weekend in the village? Well, I got to sleep in a devilishly pink room (pink walls, pink quilt on the bed, pink pillows, pink babydolls, pink curtains, pink nightlight, pink cushions on the chairs, and the fuzzy, pink slippers I brought with me); I got to see a dead pheasant right before my uncle cleaned it (you know how those conservative villagers like to hunt); I got to look at a scrapbook my uncle made about his latest hunting trip to Saskatchewan (you know you're in the heartland when a man goes hunting in Canada for three weeks rather than taking a vacation with his wife); and I got to enjoy the cigarette that always feels the best: the I-made-it-through-the-weekend-and-now-I-can-go-back-to-being-a-liberal-heathen-for-two-more-months-until-I-run-out-excuses-not-to-visit cigarette.

Breathe it in, folks. It is good.

And if that's not your thing, I've also got cake, cookies, chicken noodle soup, chocolate-covered pretzels, and chex mix here--all homemade of course. That's what being a housewife is all about. God forbid you do anything but reproduce, cook, and clean. Come on now. What were you thinking?




*Those of you outside the region never seem to know what euchre is. It's a card game that resembles pitch. If you don't know what pitch is, then you're just out of luck because I can't explain it. Google it if you really care. I doubt you do. And I pity you if you google it just to spite me.