Family Outing

It’s strange how we have our usual tussle just prior to going out somewhere. I spend too much time getting things done and caring for myself. He works to the last minute and thinks he’s going, looking like that. We ended up in the car, everybody looking just fine, at a very good hour and happy to be getting out. The sun shining warmly on a cool September day. It felt great. Almost like a Sunday but midweek. We were still tussling a little but only in a lighthearted banter kind of way. I should have known he said four. I didn’t hear any such thing. I heard “We’ll leave when you are ready.” “Oh yes,” piped up little Pipsqueak, “he said ‘aim for four’”. “Well,” I bantered back, “I should think five thirty is very close, and we are still bound to have a wonderful time.” And a wonderful time we had. We played mini golf. It is our yearly tradition to play mini-golf during Pipsqueaks first school break. We got all kinds of big numbers getting the little ball to go into the hole at the other end of the green mat. I bumped my ball carefully and it rolled down the green and plopped into the hole. We each had a hole-in-one. One each. But most of the time it took four to ten tries. I took some pictures. The little park was set up beautifully. It was on a farm turned into an activity, ice-cream, restaurant, park. Mini-golf, batting cages, driving range, ice-cream parlor/sandwich shop, restaurant, gift shops, petting farm. In the fall they have a corn maze and horse drawn wagon. In the warm months they have a barrel train for children to take rides and tractor pulled wagon rides. This weekend they will have a gathering of all things related to wool. There will be sheep and Llamas. There will be a sheep shearing. Long tents will be filled with vendors displaying their hand spun yarns, knitting machines, weaving looms, spinning wheels. It will be a colorful, interesting display. They come every year from all over the country. We love to go to it. We will be there on Saturday. Every year in October they have a pumpkin festival. It goes on every weekend. Kids come from all over to pick out a pumpkin. We grow our own pumpkins but we like to try the corn maze and Pipsqueak likes the barrel train.

We finished a round of golf and wandered off onto the grounds towards the ice-cream parlor. It was our dinner time and we sure did feel strange heading for the ice-cream before having dinner. It has been over three years since we ate our food in a paying establishment. No fast-food, no restaurants, for over three years. It was a brave decision but it was unanimous. He said, “We’re headed the wrong way if it’s dinner we want.” We headed the way that led to dinner and a beautiful walk it was. Baby oak trees lined the way. I got Pipsqueak to stand beside one, the one with the acorn, and smile for the camera. We didn’t feel bad going into the restaurant, we knew what to do, we’ve been in these places before, just not for thirty-seven months. It was a wait to be seated place. The decorations were all farm things from the past. We are particularly fond of past farm relics, so the place was a delight to see. It was built like a big wooden beam barn. The rafters were full of antique relics.

We sat at the table. He left his reading glasses at home so I had to read the menu to him. Pipsqueak colored a picture of a cow on a tractor. Beautiful coloring using four colors. We ordered and waited. We talked about how long it had been since we had eaten ‘out’. “We deserve to eat out,” I decided, “we’ve been very good.” We all had a laugh. A waitress brought a signature appetizer out to our table. I went to hand the plates around and one was very dirty so we stacked them back up and just ate off the serving plate together. The ginger cake was very good. The applesauce was thin and lacked flavor. The butter tasted off. I began to think about how we eat at home. How we grow carefully, pick and preserve. How we buy what we need with utmost care, the cleanest and the best. The flavor on the plate at home is rich and bold, without added flavor enhancers. Eggs are full of flavor without need for salt, potatoes are robust, meat is rich. The beans we cook straight from our own backyard are flavorful. It is hard to match that. We bowed our heads and blessed the Lord. We ate our food thankfully but I will have to say that the special part about that meal was not the food, but the idea that we were eating ‘out’. I had ordered a sweet potato casserole as a side dish. After a couple of tastes I began digging around in the little pan for the sweet potato part. The sweetness of it was not from sweet potato but from sugar, which was burning my throat. There were nuts which I love in such a pudding, but the sugar burned. I gave it to him for his dessert. He is used to sweet as he uses it in his coffee. I am not used to sweet. I don’t use sugar at all and what we use at home is a raw unprocessed sugar called ‘Sucanat’. I like my sweet potatoes with only their own sweetness.

After three years and one month of making our food at home, bread, tortillas, ice-cream and puddings, raising our chickens and tending our garden, drying herbs and freezing corn, beans and peas, I will say that, it is worth it, every bit.

Elizabeth Williams, writing exercise, 1,004 words.