sweet goodness

Last week, I visited the Woodland Variety Store with my grandparents. My grandma grew up Amish, and I grew up surrounded by Old Older Mennonites (almost Amish). We've got this thing, my grandma and me. So whenever she gets a hankering to drag my grandpa out to my neck-o-the-woods to go to one of the beloved Amish country stores that dot the landscape out here, I hop in the van with'em. On this particular occasion we were going to a country store that we'd never been to before. It was the store's two-year anniversary and they were having a cook-out.

We perused the five short aisles of this store and managed to find some treasures that we couldn't live without, like this popcorn glaze. Oooo baby, it's good. It's like the easy bake oven of caramel corn. The hubby is in charge of all the popcorn makin so I'm not real sure how it works, but it sure is tasty.

Back to the country store: As the young man with the bowl hair cut and short beard is adding up the cost of our goodies, my grandma asks him if his name is Harvey and if that other lady is his wife, Gloria. He replies that he is Harvey, and that is in fact his wife, Gloria. They proceeded to chat in hurried dutch about their families. Apparently, grandma is related to him and the owners of the store. Grandpa and I meandered outside to grab a hamburger and some chili and then we sat in the car while grandma continued reminiscing. By the way, that's how you do a cook-out in Indiana in early March: go into the tent, grab the food and sit in the car to eat it. When grandma hopped into the car herself, I asked her how she knew that guy was Harvey. She said that she saw a little bit of her cousin, Leroy, in his face. That eighty-somethin woman is darn amazing. She's got at least 100 cousins and they all have bunches of kids; how on Earth did she pick this one out to be Harvey, whom she's never seen before. Oh well, her ways are mysterious, and she is such a lovely lady.  And on the way home, she mesmerized us with the story about the controversy between the Woodland Variety Store and the Rentown Variety Store. Grandma is so in the know about the Amish country gossip.