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2002-06-03 - 11:53 a.m.

I could tell you what I'm supposed to tell you, or I could tell you the truth.
Thursday night, while I'm frosting her cake, I call me mom and proceed to lie about how upset I am she hasn't gotten her birthday present in the mail. Having disposed of the excess frosting, I am high on more sugar than I usually eat in a month.
So, I embellished.
A lot.
Roland stood there shaking his head and mouthing silently You are in so much trouble tomorrow while Mom comforts me that she's not upset her present is late and makes less than subtle hints she'd love for us to come visit.
Traffic is horrible and we make it to Mom's twenty minutes before she should arrive. I am frantically hauling the glider out to the barn to hide. Roland is trying to find somewhere to stash the cake and still get the truck moved.
Having failed to gain access to the fridge, he chases me out to the barn to discuss back-up cake storage options. I, who am panicking my mom will drive up any second and ruin the entire surprise, yell back Move. The. Damn. Truck.
Roland, from long experience, knows when I've moved to unreasonably panicky, so he sprints away and takes the truck to the nearby access road. I hover on the edge of Mom's two acre yard, screened from the driveway by a big pine tree, watching him try to figure out which fence to climb to make his way back unseen.
Eventually, he leaps the gate and sprints up the hayfield. We are sitting on the patio panting for breath when Buster, mom's half dashund-half Labrador dog, sounds the early warning bark of her arrival. Yes, dashund and black Lab. Looks just as bizarre as it sounds. He moved in after Mom found him trapped in the barn silo. The neighbors called complaining about the barking because an empty silo echoes extremely well. Anyway�.
My mom is trying to free my 22 month old nephew from his carseat when I say Did you get your birthday present yet? Mom spends about ten seconds trying to figure out how her car phone is talking before she realizes we're standing right behind her.
Thank goodness, she didn't drop my Ryan.
I get in big trouble for showing up without calling. She's thrilled, she loves me, she loves Roland, can I stay forever, how, how, how can I possible have come without letting her know? She has no food (what a lie) and hasn't dusted and �
My sister-in-law, Ginger, arrives and gets yelled at for not encouraging Mom to clean Thursday night.
(Stay with me. Cleaning and food become quite the theme here.)
But it's okay, because my brother left steaks out to defrost - Hid them in the basement � somewhere � which entailed Ginger and I attempting to locate where he put the raw meat in the dark cellar. If nothing else, it was a bonding experience. So we have dinner.
Ah, but steak is not sufficient. Mom and I go to the grocery store.
It's a compulsion with her. Children here. Children must need food. Must go to grocery store. Must buy the entire produce section to feed children who will only be here for four meals.
Roland looks frightened that mom's spices have frozen into a solid lump, but he manages to do a superb job grilling the ribeyes anyway. And, just because they are ribeyes bigger than my head, we must cook the starving children an extra one.
Or two. Sigh. Oh says Ginger. Thad's not going to make it. He's up on the tower.
Excuse me, did you just say my brother is up on a tower? Images of postal and guns flash through my head, but she seems so calm.
Yeah, they're practicing cliff rescues - you know - for the rescue squad.
Because that comes up oh so often?
Well, they did one in the past, oh, fifteen years.
What this really means is small boys never grow up.
Ginger giggles. That's right.
So we eat without my brother who's busy jumping off a tower.
I learn a new game. I bang something. My nephew Ryan bangs the same thing.
We play drums on the table and plates and bowls and get yelled at by all the adults in the room for pinging the crystal globe just to hear it ring.
What's the point of being an aunt if you can't be bad?
Saturday morning.
The note next to the pound of bacon she cooked for us to snack on, tells me mom has gone to the grocery store to get Communion bread and more food.
As we unload the groceries, I discover my morning will including making chicken salad and �clair cake and shrimp and �.
� and then, my brother tears across the back yard with Paul (his father-in-law's) $500 truck, a huge portable BBQ smoker in tow.
What the devil is he doing now? my mom demands, half amazed, half irritated.
I sigh theatrically. It's Thad. God knows.
She does the angry mom walk across the back yard. What are you up to?
My brother is a crappy liar. Thad says, I could tell you what I'm supposed to tell you, or I could tell you the truth. Which do you want?
At this point, I know Thad spilled the beans because from the kitchen window I see Mom start jumping around hugging him. Then she puts her hands on her hips and starts scolding him.
She storms back in the house and starts shrieking, both happy and irritated. Big trouble. I did what any child would do. I blamed Ginger, since she wasn't actually there.
Do you know what happens when you surprise a Southern woman with thirty guests? That's right, she hands you food to chop before you get a dust rag. Roland drew blower duty to clean out the patio and garage and hose down all the lawn furniture.
Meanwhile, Thad bounces into the house and announces I'm real good at making a fire in a wheelbarrow. Hickory smoke rolls across the back yard and hangs over the valley as my brother lives out the male fantasy of dousing logs with gallons of lighter fluid trying to create mesquite coals faster than physics allows.
We shut the windows and go back to making food from Mom's pile of groceries.
Ginger arrives with my nephew. Since she's the only person who actually knows the guest list, she continues to frustrate Mom by ignoring the rest of us and insisting it's just Thad's lifesaving crew buddies who are coming to dinner.
Bubbles may be the best way to inner peace.
Spend an hour blowing bubbles for a child who gleefully chases the bits of soap and rainbow across a sun dappled lawn while the dog exerts all his energy desperately to help.
It is also an excellent way to get soap on a dirty child, even if his mom won't let his aunt hose him down.
Thad and Roland retrieve chairs, tables and ice.
My brother, by the way, is colorblind. I mean that literally. Red and yellow chairs with pastel yellow and purple table clothes.
Ask me about the time his wife sent him to buy paint, cause nothing says love like a hot pink room.
Mom has moved to accepting, but pretending to be grumpy. I don't know what y'all are really up to.
Look at it this way, Mom. The last time you had a surprise party, my ex-step-grandmother gave you a goat. We're not giving you a goat. At least I don't think we are.
Ginger shrugs and escapes further interrogation by dragging Mom over to her present. I just asked the boys she screeches indignantly where that came from! She likes the glider. Ryan clambers up beside Nana and practices making it swing.
Rain saved the color scheme. We had to hustle all the tables into the big garage because it started raining half an hour before the party. Off came the table clothes and we just never put them back. We move the John Deere and rearrange the food tables by the workbench.
Yeah, I'm a closet redneck. My nephew's grandmother drives a tractor. Your point?
The party was superb. Mom got a few presents and loads of people to yell at for not spilling the beans, many of her colleagues from years past and present. I got to hang with Jenny, my best friends from childhood, and her husband Drew and my honorary nephew, Adam.
I didn't even try to count calories as we ate the hickory smoked BBQ and all the side salads in the world.
Sunday morning.
Mom is cooking lunch (because the piles of leftovers must be augmented with fresh food). The boys have hauled away the tables and chairs, when Mom asks Ginger to get the leftover BBQ out of the garage fridge. Well, Thad took it to the crew building.
What? Mom shrieks, sensing food she could feed her children has escaped.
He better not have. I'll skin him alive.
I think he sold it to some of the guys.
Sold my pork?
The upshot is Ginger gets in the car and chases Thad and Roland across town to get the pork BBQ back. Meanwhile, I'm left in charge of feeding Ryan, which I accomplish by giving him bits of food and saying It's okay Ryan. If you don't like it, you can feed it to Maggie (Maggie is Ginger's dog that now lives with Mom. Long story.)
Ryan, a very clever 22 month old, hurls the hated yogurt bar across the room to the dog. I give him another piece so he can do it again.
Then, we play on the patio when my nephew is fascinated by this swinging bench thing called the glider. His feet can't touch the ground, but he rocks back and forth to get it to move.
Eventually, the pork returns but the tea doesn't (don't ask) and we have lunch.
Roland and I make the long drive home (Evil. 81-N is evil on Sunday afternoon). Laundry is accomplished in between lying on the couch watching a Babylon 5 marathon and making milkshakes.
Of course, there were leftovers. If you want pork BBQ, I've got an entire loin that came home with me. After the great pork chase, there was no way I was escaping without food.

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