So yesterday I wrote about the activities that took place in Virginia (swimming, boating)…essentially stuff that you could do in any part of the country. What I didn’t mention were the distinctly southern aspects of the trip.<\/p>\n
First…the food. Seriously, it doesn’t end. Randy’s mother takes southern hospitality to the extreme and is constantly offering you food.\u00a0 If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she was trying to kill me slowly with all of the carbs and oils and artery-clogging goodness being presented to me.<\/p>\n
In just 5 days of our trip she baked me two cakes (both triple cream or something….truly decadent), baked macaroni and cheese, burgers, and grilled steak. When she wasn’t preparing food for me, she was offering me food (M&M’s, cookies, chips, cheesecake, lemon pound cake). In fact, I don’t think 5 minutes would pass while we were inside the house where she didn’t offer me something. I could be in the middle of eating the cake and she’d say “Can I get you something else? Do you want some cookies?”.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And it doesn’t stop with her. Her sister, Enid, offered to bring me a piece of caked as I was still eating lunch. She came back with two pieces (one cheescake, the other that triple cream thing).\u00a0 Did I mention daily mac-and-cheese?<\/p>\n
Then there’s Randy’s father – who prepared home-made London Broil beef jerky. Since he saw that I liked it \u00a0he presented us with a whole new batch to bring home with us on our last day.<\/p>\n
Then there are\u00a0the guns. Yes, plural. Within minutes of picking us up, Randy’s father told\u00a0us about a shoot-out that took place at the end of his street a few nights earlier (just what I need to hear). But since guns seem to be such a day-to-day thing down there, he didn’t bother calling the police until the next morning when he found the casings on the street. Seriously? If I heard a gun up here I’d be on the phone before the smoke could clear (don’t guns produce smoke?)<\/p>\n
And there was the ever-present gun over the sink in the kitchen (a revolver? I don’t know the terminology). But the most unsettling part took place on the last day. The previous year, his father pulled out a rifle and sat by the kitchen window waiting for ground hogs. This year, as Randy and I packed up on the last day, his father pulled out the rifle, opened the kitchen window, and shot a groundhog strolling around the back yard.<\/p>\n
I think it was only the second time in my life where I heard a gun go off. And I don’t like it. It seriously, seriously, seriuosly is unsettling to me to be in such close proximity to guns. And I find it even more disturbing that this all takes place in a dense residential neighborhood (think Quincy or Swampscott).\u00a0 But it seems to unphase everybody else. Then again, Randy’s father’s neighbor was murdered last summer just after my last visit. And the other neighbor’s kids are in jail. I guess it’s just what they know (and expect?).<\/p>\n
I think I prefer living in what Randy calls my “little bubble” up here in Massachusetts. Let’s just hope gunfire never pops that bubble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So yesterday I wrote about the activities that took place in Virginia (swimming, boating)…essentially stuff that you could do in any part of the country. What I didn’t mention were the distinctly southern aspects of the trip. First…the food. Seriously, it doesn’t end. Randy’s mother takes southern hospitality to the extreme and is constantly offering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2491"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2493,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491\/revisions\/2493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}