Two dozen roses from the grocery store thrown in a shopping cart with a card of apology. Strawberry-rhubarb pie. Pop singers not staying in their lane. Pop singers making their first appearance after a scandalous DWI at a middle-American venue and apologizing there first, because if the breadbasket can forgive you, everyone will forgive you. The girl silhouetted on truck mudflaps. Your stupid blue uncle asking you How many (off-color) x does it take to screw in a lightbulb? People who play banjos and accordions and the people who mock them, and yet both enjoying the same brand of beer. Unadorned prose. Bruce Springsteen’s underbite. Beloved death metal bands’ names artfully spraypainted on a rural water tower. “It’s a girl my Lord in a flatbed Ford slowin down to take a look at me”. Your drag or stripper name having everything to do with your first pet, because you have never cross-dressed or stripped but you be you. Pool floaties. Everything you shouldn’t’ve even eaten before it was put on a stick and deep-fried at the state fair. Pulling the yearbook out ten years later and saying Oh my dagnabbit, that was her?, etc. Saying dagnabbit. Rascal mobility scooters with bumperstickers. Sweatshirts with Pooh appliques. Selling your RV in the church parking lot across from the soft-serve ice cream place. The messy glory of “dip-tops”. Wild roadside asparagus. Little Mary’s grave. Ice cream socials. A hometown newspaper that still keeps you up to date on what the woolly worms predict about this winter. Watermelons floating in a tub of cold well water at the top of an Iowa hill, served to sweaty RAGBRAI bike riders. Modesty. Taking 45 minutes to say goodbye while hugging everyone in the room three times and yet you're all still somehow emotionally repressed. Miniature golf. Corn mazes. Slow moving oversized farm equipment holding up traffic. Mike Pence, who, let’s get real, saved our nation in a pinch. Unattended produce stands with handwritten signs pointing to the self-service cash drawers. Kids sitting on the peaked (and questionable) roof of a house, anxiously awaiting the start of the regional air show or fireworks. Ending sentences with a preposition. Ticks. Snowbirding. The extra zucchini abandoned anonymously at your front door.
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