It started on Friday, when Mel announced, "I have plans for us tomorrow."
"Is it a surprise?" I asked.
"Yep. It will be a cultural experience."
We headed out the next morning, full of excitement. Would we see a war reenactment? A historic homes tour? Tractor pull? Tribal dancing?
After an hour's drive, we came to Salley, SC, a tiny sleepy town* that was alive and bustling with some sort of festival. We piled out of the car. The smell of barbecue was in the air, from the several families who were tailgating.** We walked a couple blocks, arriving just in time for the beginning of the parade. A float of girls with tiaras rolled past on a hot pink float with a sign declaring them Chitlin Strut royalty. Our fearless leader had brought us to the 46th Annual Chitlin Strut!
"So, are you gonna try them?" asked Mel.
"Well, I feel like I have to, since we're here!" I was feeling adventurous. Besides, a friend I [used to] trust had told me that chitlins are delicious as long as they are cleaned thoroughly before cooking.
Mel bought two tickets, and we walked about half a mile to the building where we could trade our tickets in for chitlin plates.*** We had a choice between boiled and fried. We quickly decided that boiled pig guts would be entirely too disgusting. We figured that fried guts would taste like pork rinds, only chewier. (You see, our brains were already addled.)
We picked up our plates and looked for a place to sit. Mel peeked into a room with tables, but quickly ushered us to a bench outside. "Ugh. This bench is pretty dirty," I protested.
"We're sitting here," Mel insisted.****
We opened our styrofoam boxes and found a generous serving of the guest of honor accompanied by two slices of white bread and a couple of hot sauce packets. Time to dig in!
I took a bite, and suddenly my senses were assaulted. I looked at Mel in alarm. He looked how I felt. "Tastes like...pig barn!" I choked out.
"I can't...get past...the smell!" he spluttered.
Sad thing was, we continued to eat these things, willing them to get better. "Maybe this next bite of bowels will taste less like...bowels," we thought. It was as if we were sinking in quicksand, and the more we flailed about, the further we sank. To clarify, in that metaphor, quicksand = hog anus, and flailed about = ate more hog anus. Maggie, apparently the most reasonable of us all, wouldn't try them. Lily, with no sense memory of how pig dung smells, crunched away, unfazed.
The next time I looked at Mel, a cloud of gnats was descending on his lunch. "Hmmm..it worries me how quickly this is attracting bugs," he murmured. With that, we finally gave up and abandoned our remaining chitlins in the nearest trash bin.
We cleansed our palates with barbecued ribs, then visited the rest of the festival. As we strolled over to the craft booths, we passed behind the building where the celebrated food was being cooked. Three industrial-sized fans blasted the odor of pig mess at us. I fought to keep my lunch down. Mel went pale. It was just too soon. We pushed through our PTSD and made it through.
I learned many things on Saturday. Foremost, I learned that nothing will erase the memory of a delicious Thanksgiving dinner like a mouthful of hog entrails. It's a taste that can't be un-tasted.
In the years ahead, I must make peace with the fact that there are now several things I will be unable to do without nausea. Among them are:
Readers, I beseech you...please learn from our mistakes.
_____________________*First warning - No cell phone signal. They had lured us to their backwoods town and attempted to kill us with vile vittles, and there would be no trace once our families began looking for us.
**Second warning - people cooking their own food at a festival celebrating an entirely different food.
***Third warning - Long physical distance between paying for a food item and collecting it.
****Fourth warning - I thought Mel had steered us outside because the room was full, but he later admitted that once he got a whiff of the place, he knew we were in trouble.
We're working on her presidential thumbs-up:
I remember the glee I felt when Maggie started to draw, and I am no less delighted that Lily is starting to progress from scribbles. She draws mostly grim faces, but tonight she drew a fairly cheerful balloon. She even signed her name!
Arrangement in Gray and Black: The Artist's Mother
James McNeill Whistler, 1871
Arrangement in Green and Gold: The Cheesehead's Daughter
Melcher C. Petermann IV, 2011
Maggie started first grade today! Lily thinks the occasion merits jazz hands.
Lily thinks she's ready for first grade, too, but she'll settle for moving up to the three-year-old room at daycare in a couple of weeks.
Maggie and her new teacher. It's going to be a great year!
This is the jar that sits on our dryer, collecting pocket change. This is also the jar that fell on my foot a little over a week ago and broke my toe. Remarkably:
Today the girls and I took the jar to the bank to cash it in. We ended up with $96.98:
Dear Maggie,
On Wednesday, you turned 6! By my calculations, that’s at least halfway to sullen.
(Occasionally, it's more than halfway.)
My big girl, you are brave and always eager to try new things. New this year: bowling, roller skating, archery, Indian food, Kindergarten, short hair (just last week!), horseback riding (full size and miniature.)
You tried to talk me into letting you try pageants this year, and I demurred, saying that we didn’t have enough time or hairdressing skills. “Besides,” I said, “You’d need a talent."
“Like running really fast?” you responded. Not a surprising question. At first glance, you seem delicate, but you are definitely rough and tumble. It’s hard for you to play in the yard – baseball, Frisbee, fetch with the dog, whatever – without somehow working in a couple of dramatic slides. Grass stains and torn pants are routine. In the pool, you will jump in over and over, not minding a bit the time you spend underwater before surfacing.
On our recent flight to Wisconsin, at one point our plane dropped a bit – as my stomach leaped into my throat I grabbed your thigh on my left and Lily’s on my right with a white-knuckle grip. Lily took my cue and was appropriately alarmed, but you just laughed and laughed at the fun of it.
You have become much more quick to open up to people – particularly people with dogs. You’ve never met a dog you didn’t want to pet! You are still an animal lover, the more prehistoric or creepy-crawly the better. Over Spring Break, you volunteered to keep the class toad, and your other temporary pets have included several bugs, a lizard, a frog and a turtle. You have lobbied for a snake, but haven’t won that battle.
We started an aquarium for you last fall. You have lost interest in the pretty fish; your choices for the fish tank lately have been a snail and several bottom-feeders. This spring, we welcomed Petey. That dog follows you everywhere, always wanting to play.
Kindergarten was a big success. You hated the homework, which was understandable, but you loved learning to read. I can’t believe how much you learned this year, and that you're starting first grade in two weeks. You still want to be a paleontologist, and you weren’t impressed when I told you I studied English in college. You looked so puzzled and said, “So…you…learned words in English?”
First and last day of school - you lost one tooth and gained two knees.
You are more than three years out of the crib, and you still rarely sleep in a bed like a normal person. You won’t commit to one end of the bed or the other, regardless of what end the sheets are tucked into. You often prefer to sleep on the floor, but when you’re in the bed, it usually takes me longer than it should to find you in the morning. Sometimes you have every stuffed animal you own surrounding you as your “guards.” One day, you built a structurally sound wall of pillows, blankets and stuffed animals surrounding one corner of the bed and called it your cave. It even had a door! Since you had used all your linens in its construction, you had no pillows or blankets for a couple of weeks (bears don’t use pillows or blankets, you insisted) and the space was so cramped you had to sleep with your knees tucked up to your chin.
You make friends easily, and though you get along with everyone, you seem happier with one or two close friends than with a whole classful. We have been blessed this year with a new friend who lives just down the street. The two of you are inseparable, zooming up and down the street on your scooters and dashing back and forth between our houses.
You and Lily still have your ups and downs. You play pretty well together, but it’s not unusual for you two to scrap. Pretty much daily. I know we ask you to concede a lot, citing your big-sisterness and Lily’s ear-splitting shrieking ability. I'm so proud when I find you thinking about what you can do to make your sister happy—you even let her open one of your birthday gifts! Let's have more of that, please!
Oh, Maggie. You're not my baby anymore, but you are becoming such an awesome little person. I'm so delighted to be your mom. Happy birthday!
Love,
Mom
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
Betty Smith: Tree Grows in Brooklyn
This one is popular on "Books that Shaped Me"/"Favorite Books of all Time" lists. I'm reading it for a second time, and it's still not on either of those lists for me!
