We don't have these where I come from

CousinFest teaches us so many things. Our first CousinFest in Asheville, NC, which is getting on for ten years ago now, taught us that sometimes even strolling violinists can be a real pain in the butt. CousinFest Knoxville, TN taught us that some people like their barbecue with vinegary sauce and some people like their barbecue with brown sugary sauce, but it's all sticky if it gets in your hair. CousinFest Shipshewana caused us to understand that even the Amish can be bought.

CousinFest Madison, IN alerted us to the fact that the number of times Susan will try to make you watch her wedding-on-the-beach-at-Maui DVD is slightly greater than infinite.

The most interesting thing we've learned by far from CousinFest in Bowling Green is that Kentucky has liquor stores with drive thru windows and beer coolers in their grocery stores.

"Doesn't this seem....counter-intuitive?" asked Carol several years ago as she peered out the window of Susie's car at the young man, a Matthew McConaughey swap-out, who was leaning out to take our order. (Sadly, there's no speaker, like what you'd find at McDonald's or similar; I was hoping there would be because I'd love to pull up and order a pint of Cuervo, a fifth of Triple Sec and an order of fries.) "Kind of like the state of Kentucky is urging people to drink and drive?"

"Better to sell it at drive-thru liquor stores than to have people doing home brew with stills," I said prudently. "That stuff can make you go blind. Or send you crazy. At least that's what I've heard," I added hastily as Susan and Carol looked at me and then exchanged a long glance as if some dimly held suspicion had suddenly been made crystal clear.

"I suppose they'd turn you down if you said, 'I'd like a cold six pack and crack that first one open for me,'" Carol mused.

Susie thought all of this was killing funny -- she hasn't lived in Kentucky long enough to lose her deep appreciation for the comedy offered by a drive-thru liquor store, but the beer cooler at the Kroger was a different story.

The first time I saw an entire aisle of the store devoted to one lo-o-ong cooler filled with every kind of beer imaginable, I slowed down my brisk pace through the grocery and came to a complete halt, goggling.

"What are you doing, staring like that?" asked Susan. "Come on, we have to beat that woman with that buggy that has about six months' worth of food to the check out."

"Look. Look at all that cold beer," I said, gesturing. My husband would think he'd entered Shangri-La if he saw this, I thought to myself. All beer, all cold, all the time.

Carol stopped behind me and did some goggling of her own. "Wow," she said. And then added, "Doesn't this seem counter-intuitive? Kind of like the state of Kentucky is urging people to drink and drive?"

"How do y'all buy your beer?" Susie asked, surprised.

"Warm," I replied.

"Well, eewwww! Why would y'all want to drink warm beer?"

"We don't want to drink warm beer," Carol said. "We buy it warm and take it home and put it in the fridge and wait for it to get cold before we drink it."

Susie frowned. "That would take an awful long time, wouldn't it?"

Carol and I both sighed sadly. "You could go to a package store," I offered. "But for some reason, they're considered a bit tacky. Like you're so greedy for drink that you can't even wait long enough to cool it off yourself."

"That's just terrible," said Susan frankly. "Y'all need to move down here where things are civilized."

"And where a larger percentage of the population is apparently driving around half-lit," Carol whispered to me as she followed Susie to the check-out stands.

"There's some civilization for you," I agreed, falling into step behind her.

As we were walking, I said, "Wait a minute! Why do we need to go to the drive-thru liquor store? Why don't we just buy what we need here and save ourselves a trip?"

Susie halted and turned around and gave me a funny look. "Because we need some tequila and Triple Sec for margaritas, 'member?"

"Yes, I know, but we could get that here and it might even be cheaper."

"Buy it here?" Susie asked incredulously. "We can't buy hard liquor here!"

"You can't?" asked Carol.

"No way. Not hard liquor. Southerners have their standards. Why? Can you buy hard liquor at the Krogers up where y'all live?"

"Sure," I shrugged. "And at CVS and Walgreen's and Wal-Mart, too."

Susan's mouth dropped open. "Y'all have got to be kidding me! I have never heard of such a thing! What crazy thing are you Yankees going to think of next? Doesn't it seem counter-intuitive to sell hard liquor in a pharmacy where someone can come in and get his prescription for painkillers filled and then buy a bottle of Jack on the way out?"

"Well, when you put it that way...."

Susan stalked on, murmuring things about Yankees and Northern Aggression and what-is-this-world-coming-to's under her breath while Carol and I followed meekly along in her wake like a pair of ducklings. We got through the check-out line and headed for the parking lot. Just before we got to the car, Carol grabbed me by the elbow.

"Make sure you wear your seatbelt," she hissed, nodding knowingly toward the state highway that runs in front of the grocery. "You never know who just got done at the grocery."

[In the pictures, Susan is giving the drive-thru liquor store guy the money for our little teeny bottle of tequila (we are extremely conservative drinkers) and then striking her famous tree pose next to the beer cooler in Bowling Green's Kroger.]

"My mother grew up in the Depression"

Back at my own computer, I have the ability to post pictures, so here's a completely adorable one of Carol and Susie just a-cookin' up a storm in the kitchen at Susie's house, y'all. Wait. Sorry. I don't know what gets into me, but a few days in Bowling Green and I'm typing with a southern accent.

This is the best place to find us during CousinFest, right there in the kitchen. There were a few summers when we went away -- Asheville, Knoxville and Amish country in northern Indiana the year that Susie and Doug got married in Maui, so she elected not to go with us that year as if she likes Doug better than us or something -- and we didn't have kitchens to cook in and all we had to do was sit around talking and then get up and go to restaurants when we were hungry, but that wasn't nearly as fun.

We are all cooks, really good cooks, if I do say so myself and cooking and eating and hanging around the kitchen drinking iced tea and talking about things like Hellmann's versus Kraft and how we all seem to have the same smile and Carol -- on the left -- and I have the same hair, but Susie, to your right, and I have the same eyes, but Carol has her mother's eyes, which are the same kind of eyes our shared grandmother had...those are the things we talk about. We talk about eggs and whether we can eat them devilled or sunny-side-up. And dogs, we talk about our dogs. Well, I mean, not about eating dogs, just in case you thought we enjoyed some kind of exotic Asian cuisine. Which we most certainly do not.

But one of the things we talked about most in the kitchen was the deplorable tendency that Carol and I have, according to Susie, to throw away, say, two small spinach leaves and a sliced cucmber left in a serving dish after dinner. I handed the bowl to Carol so that she could rinse it out and put in in the dishwasher, but when Carol turned on the faucet, Susan screamed, "WAIT!!!!! THERE'S STILL SOME SALAD IN THAT BOWL!!!!"

"No, there isn't," I said. Carol held up the bowl so that Susan could see the two very, very small spinach leaves and the lonesome cucumber slice clinging to the sides.

"Well, listen, y'all, my mother grew up in the Depression and there's practically a whole salad left in there. Scrape that out, Shelley, and put it in a Ziploc."

Carol and I looked at each other helplessly. "Susan, there's not even enough salad left in that bowl to feed a garden gnome," I protested.

"Isn't it going to just be a waste of a plastic bag to save it?" Carol asked reasonably.

"No, seriously, I'll eat it for a snack later," Susie said. She came into the kitchen and grabbed the bowl from Carol, hugging it protectively to her chest. "Remember, girls: 'Waste not, want not.'"

Carol and I are considerably bigger than Susie, who is just a little bitty thing. I know we could have overpowered her, taken back that bowl and washed the rest of that "whole salad" down the garbage disposal, but it was only Thursday evening and we hadn't heard a whole lot about wasting and saving and not wanting and the Depression at that point. By Saturday, it was a different story.

Over the next few days, we heard stories about growing up in the Depression when it came to scraping chip dip out of a Rubbermaid container, sunscreen out of a plastic tube and the dregs of the wine out of the bottle. When I smartly asked Susie if she had a really, really skinny little spatula with a very long handle so that I could scrape the sides of the wine bottle, she gave me a Look. When Carol suggested that Susie was born in 1961 and was almost two generations removed from The Grapes of Wrath, Susan tried to give her a paper cut with a dollar off coupon for Kashi Summer Berry granola.

With the refrigerator stuffed with different sizes of plastic bags of different provenance, none of them labeled and all of them determined to slide out on the floor when an unwary person opened the door, mealtimes became an adventure. We tried to find different ways to use up the leftovers without them screaming "LEFTOVER!!" at each meal, and those that refused to be integrated into a new meal in a new way, Carol and I silently introduced to Our Favorite Appliance, the garbage disposal.

"Look, Susie!" Carol would say excitedly, pointing out the dining room window to the ninth green on the golf course behind the house. "There's Kenny Perry!"

"WHERE!!!" Susie would yelp, bouncing up out of her seat and running to peer out the glass. "Oh my gosh, y'all, he is just the sweetest thing ever!"

While she was thus occupied, I'd take a moment to empty two peas, a piece of pie crust with a smidgen of pie still clinging to it and a quarter-cup of clam juice into the sink.

Later, I'd say, looking out the front door, "Oh, no, Susie! The neighbor's dog is pooping on your lawn!"

"WHAT??!!" she'd shriek, momentarily forgetting that her neighbors don't even have a dog. "Shoo! Get away! Stop it! Don't mess up my yard!" She'd zoom out the front door, giving Carol the chance to dispose of a half-eaten peach gone mushy and one spoonful of chicken salad on a plate covered with plastic wrap.

Carol and I deeply enjoy teasing Susie, but in spite of our wicked ways, we both admit that there's no better hostess. She may be a nut with the plastic bags and her stories of the Depression, but if you want more bath towels, an extra pillow, a foot massage, a bottle of water or a pep talk, there couldn't be a better person to ask for those things. And if you read those previous sentences and thought that I was sugaring up the rhubarb, you may be right because for all I know, Susie will get some time to read my blog and the next thing I know, she'll be on the phone calling me that name that starts with a B and is one syllable in Yankee and about four when drawled out in a Southern accent.

We can do that because we love each other.

Susan is so bossy

This morning we were all in Susie's beautiful kitchen making those Ziploc omelettes we made last year? And Carol and I were marshalled into action and set to chopping onions, cutting the cheese (yes, we giggled very hard and she shot us a baleful glare) and defrosting some ham she had in the freezer. She broke the eggs very professionally, using one hand and an extravagant up-in-the-air gesture that I found theatrical, yet somehow very impressive. I have to break eggs with two hands.

After Susie had the eggs all whirred up in the blender, she doled us each out a Ziploc bag with our names written on and snapped her fingers at us when she sensed our attention was wandering. "Now y'all listen up. I want you to hold open your bag and I'll pour in some eggs, then you go through this line and put what you want in your bag. Use up all that ham. And I don't want to store that strong onion in my fridge; eat that, too. And the spinach. Come on. Hurry up."

Carol, Meelyn and Aisling and I bumbled through the kitchen, choosing different assemblages for our personal omelettes while Susie yipped, "Squeeze the air out of those bags! We don't want them to float! Here! You need more egg! No, not you! C'mere!"

That's what we get for letting all the margarita wear off that girl.

On Friday evening, we all trooped up to the theater room to watch The Blind Side and it occurred to me, as she propelled me around the kitchen and took my plastic bag from me to drop it in the kettle of boiling water, just how much like Leigh Anne Tuohy Susan is. Which is, because Sandra Bullock's portrayal of Mrs. Tuohy was so adorable and funny, is actually kind of a nice thing to have in the family.

Even though Carol and I plan to pinch her shortly.

Notes from Cousin Fest '10

But no pictures! Because I personally live in the technological Dark Ages and I don't have a fancy phone that uploads photos! I know. It is really all very, very sad, especially since I long for the opportunity to text all my friends with all the ardor of, say, Aisling. Who also doesn't have a fancy phone. But boy, does she want one.

Carol, Meelyn, Aisling and I arrived at Susie's house yesterday right before lunch. We had a very nice drive down from Indiana and arrived in the Bluegrass State, emerging from Carol's SUV already complaining about how HOT it was. We brought everything in and got settled in our rooms and then came downstairs, complaining about how HOT it was, even though we were all sitting in the air-conditioned house. Occasionally, we'd lift our selves off the couch and go to the windows and stare outdoors, whining about the TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE HEAT.

Then Susie lured us to her car and she, Carol and I went to the drive thru liquor store and we came back home so that Carol could make the margaritas and then we were the three happiest people in Kentucky over the age of twenty-one. Meelyn and Aisling were still complaining about the heat, but it somehow didn't matter anymore.

Everything has been so much fun, except for the part where Aisling told one of those stories about our family that is usually kept in the family. You know what I mean? It was one of those stories that made me look like a person of questionable character and she told it in front of Susie's husband, who is completely unlike Susie, being a very religious member of the Church of Christ. But it's funny how a second margarita can make you not worry about that kind of thing. HAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!!

(Mom, when you read this, please substitute the phrase "Bible Store" for "liquor store" and "chocolate milk shake" for "margarita" and everything will be just fine.)