If a cow ever got the chance...

Spent Memorial Day weekend in Wisconsin with the parents. It rained nonstop; there was maybe an hour of broken sun total, all three days. I loved it, selfishly. My dad can't plant corn or soybeans or whatever he hasn't gotten to yet, because you can't plant in the rain, so there may not be much of a crop this year. They've gotten like seven inches of rain in the past week and he's worried the seeds are going to rot in the ground. (This is why my grandma opens and closes every letter with two paragraphs about the weather--it's professional gossip there.) So anyway, he couldn't do any work, so we went antiquing all day Sunday. He collects Red Wing pottery from the 1940s and '50s and has amassed this giant collection which is spilling out of the cabinets. He found a nice, unchipped Bob White butter dish, and I got a white Pyrex casserole dish with the avocado green daisy '70s pattern that for some reason strikes me as kitschy and beautiful (it was recently featured on the Food Network as an example of Kitchenware Mistakes of the '70s, which just about made me cry).

What else. It was quiet. In between thunderstorms my mom and I walked Gunnar the neurotic dog, whom my brother acquired from some guy up north who was going to shoot him (the dog) for being annoying. He (the dog again) is absolutely sweet and loving but has about a million different diagnosable personality disorders. He's never been petted because he won't allow it--starts jumping around and lunging at nothing and doing everything short of biting you to get you to stop (he's so not mean). I tried to brush him and he ran off into the woods, was gone for about forty-five minutes. They have to walk him on the leash because he chases the neighbor's cows when he's loose. Oh, and he's scared of his exercise yard for some reason. Also his cold-weather igloo.

Basically, I miss my family. It's been nine years since I lived there, and almost that long since I was there for more than three or four days at a time. I want to make blueberry cobbler for my dad and help my mom put page number headers in her paper and go drinking at the Silver Spur with my brother (didn't, this time). Nostalgia. When I actually lived there I was a pasty angry depressed youth who drew calendars in my notebooks of the number of months and days until I could leave. But that had to do with my high school and almost nothing to do with my family. Meh. When I quit my job (by fall of 2005 at the ABSOLUTE FUCKING LATEST, I'm serious man), an extended Wisconsin sojourn may be in order.

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