Americana

Yesterday was the 4th of July, wasn't it?



My mom taped the flag from the newspaper to the front door and we had a BBQ.

It was a total Americana menu: hamburgers, hot dogs, bratwurst, grilled corn on the cob and zucchini, Doritos, watermelon, iced tea and lemonade, drumstick ice cream cones for dessert.



Those are some of the remains of dinner, a garnish plate for the hamburgers, a few pieces of grilled zucchini on a paper plate, and a pan of grilled corn with charred husks.

These two, John and Haley showed up with their parents, Katie and Xavier. (Xavier is the youth pastor at the church where my stepfather Marshall is the pastor.)



Lulu and Dolly were thrilled to have kids to play with and they all ran around like escaped convicts.

Not too long after John and Haley showed up, Leniah and Summer, two little girls who live nearby, rang the doorbell. This is Leniah.



I asked Leniah why she didn't show her teeth when she smiled and she explained that she doesn't like that her front teeth are jagged and too big and I told her that they looked fine (they did). Someone teased her about it, I'm sure.



The girl in the blue shirt is Summer. She is about the size of a matchstick, which I don't understand as she eats like a little Hoover. She ate most of a cheeseball on crackers while her sister chatted with my mother.

Summer and Leniah showed up pushing a baby stroller. They parked the stroller and went to play in the backyard with Haley and John. In the stroller was this:



That's Summer and Leniah's little brother Jackson. He's about six weeks old. My mom took him out of the stroller and he got passed around from her to Katie to me and back to Katie. After a bit, it seemed like Jackson needed some formula and perhaps a diaper, so I looked in the back of the stroller for a diaper bag and found this:



An Easter basket with some plastic horses and dinosaurs and two teaspoons. No diaper. No formula. If I ever had my own newborn to care for, I suspect my stroller would also be filled with things like this.

Summer and Leniah were sent to their grandmother's to get Jackson fed and changed. Oh, don't worry, they came back later to eat hamburgers and hot dogs and to demand to know what was for dessert.

I didn't take a lot of pictures, but I did get a few short movies of the kids playing tag in the backyard. I remember playing tag in backyards. It seemed like everything once.

When it got dark, we all went outside to brave the flying insects and watch the fireworks display from the backyard. We were too far away for it to be an exciting show, but there were a few stunners that cleared the trees. The dogs, of course, were mad and scared and Boo-Boo, the most experienced of the dogs, ran around barking and making sure that the fireworks didn't get too close. Poor old thing. She has bad hips and this morning she was limping around, so after I took a shower I ran to Wal-mart to buy her some buffered aspirin.



This is the "people greeter" at Wal-mart. Yesterday he wore a tall stovepipe hat with a red, white, and blue motif. Today he was wearing a hot dog and singing the Oscar Meyer wiener song. I asked if I could take his photo and he agreed. He told me that he has, I think, eighty-one hats and he wears a different one every day. He told me that for a while one of the managers wouldn't let him wear his hats but now there's a new manager who says that as long as they're not derogatory, he can wear his hats again. He told me that a lot of the truck drivers who stop there take his picture with their cell phones and send it to their friends with a note saying, "Look at the hat on this idiot."

The evening finished up too late last night for me to write anything worthwhile. I had enough energy left after cleaning up to wrap Dave's birthday gifts, make a card for him (which turned out pretty cool if I do say so myself), do some laundry and packing, change into my pajamas and fall asleep. (Yes, I do have to budget in the energy it takes to fall asleep.)

This morning I got up too early, had coffee (yes, real coffee, half a cup, mixed with decaf) and breakfast (a hamburger left over from yesterday), finished washing some clothes, showered and dressed, went to Wal-mart, changed the sheets on the bed, took some photos of my grandmother's embroidery work, made some photocopies, finished packing, and now this.