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Winning Christmas

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This is the year I was going to win Christmas. Our house would be just like my aunt’s house in Mississippi when I was growing up.   The house where you were afraid to touch anything.  That’s what good taste means to me—the ability to make everyone else feel that they’ve done everything wrong.  The feeling that you’re only supposed to whisper.   As a grandparent, thats just what I wanted. Just one year in my life, I wanted our house to be so fancy it made kids scared. With awe.   Except now I realize that the reason I used to decorate the house like crazy is the kids.  After waiting years and years and years to finally get rid of the kids, it turns out they were of some use at Christmas.  I decorated for them.  Basically I didn’t care what the neighbors thought of our house—I cared what the kids thought!  Who Knew?   Unfortunately, decorating is one of those housewife things that I feel competitive about. Just once I wanted to...
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Halloween

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We drag our fire pit out to the front porch and wait like spiders for small children to come to us.  At least, that's what it feels like at our house for Halloween.   This year Clay helped pick out our Halloween candy.  As many wives of retired husbands find, having dad come with to Walmart is an alien experience.  It's losing control, it's having someone pay attention to something you've had to do most of your life that everyone just assumed you would take care of.  The biggest compliment was from Billy at 15 or so: "Mom, I just noticed we never run out of toilet paper."  So sweet, so thoughtful.   Having a husband with opinions in a grocery store is like meeting someone from a foreign country and finding out you both have a few ideas in common.  Like chocolate being the only real candy choice.  I've always felt a little guilty about picking out only chocolate because it's not the cheapest.  I think I've probably felt g...
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We accidentally drove to Levan Thursday.  I say accidentally because we didn't know it was there, but we wanted to go on the old highway that parallels I-15 going south.  And like Brigadoon, it rose from the asphalt. And like Brigadoon, there was no one there.   It was 4 in the afternoon and we drove around the whole town and finally saw one old man out on the front porch of a really huge house.  Possibly four of the surrounding houses would have fit into it.  He waved, so we knew he wasn't a prop. Then we found another grumpy old man fooling around in his yard in the time honored manner of grumpy old retired men fooling around everywhere in the garage or the yard.  He decidedly didn't wave.  Clearly the man with the big house was happier with things.   Finally we heard the laughter of children and followed it.  It was like a horror movie where you hear the merry trills of children playing and you search around the empty buildings i...
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