Like a lot of folks, I went home for Thanksgiving. I’ve lived in Greenville for a while now–we won’t go into how long, as that brings up troubling math problems related to my age. But somehow, the little town in North Carolina where I grew up will always be home.

Mom did what she always does–she made enough food to feed a small country. While we stuffed ourselves silly, we caught up on the ins and outs of each other’s lives… Dad’s acid reflux problem, my niece’s ear tubes, my uncle’s new red El Camino with the orange Firebird-looking thing on the hood…

And the latest on the group of women who bought my grandmother’s civil-war-era farmhouse.

My maternal grandmother passed away a little over two years ago. My grandfather had been waiting for her at the Pearly Gates for years, so their six-thousand-square-foot house was empty. It’s a gorgeous home, and it had been lovingly cared for. Our family had many years of happy memories there. It was an emotional thing, is what I’m saying. No one wanted to sell, but it was the only practical thing to be done. None of us needed a house just then, especially one that size. Though everyone hated to see it pass out of the family, my mother, aunt, and uncles decided to sell.

After a year or so, a group of women bought the house. My understanding was that they planned to use it as a shelter for abused women. Now, to say that this home (on six plus acres) in a rural part of a county that’s a hundred miles east of nowhere is an unusual place for a shelter would be an understatement. Whatever. They bought the place.

What The Shelter Women did not purchase, was my uncle’s house, which is next door and shares a driveway. We’ll call my uncle Harley, because he would not appreciate having his actual name on the Internet. The government, and all that.

The Shelter Women want Harley to leave.

They have told him, multiple times, that he cannot stay there, as the women who will be given shelter have been traumatized, and will not like having a strange man so close by–I’m paraphrasing, but this was the gist of it. Harley would be happy to leave if the Shelter Women would buy him out. They just want him to leave.

The Shelter Women have never moved into the house, but periodically they come by. I think my uncle watches for them, and maybe goes outside and acts extra crazy just for fun–maybe shoots something. (He once took out two squirrels with one shot.)

So, The Shelter Women showed up a few weeks back with a minister of undetermined theology. He didn’t speak English, and my uncle didn’t recognize whatever language he was speaking, but the minister’s mission that day was to exorcise the property.

Recently, The Shelter Women have become upset that my family didn’t tell them the house was haunted. Listen, my grandparents lived in that house for thirty years. My grandmother lived there for seven years by herself. There were no ghosts. (At least if there were, they were well-mannered and quiet.)

But the minister, nevertheless, went into the house with a bottle of what was presumably holy water.

Then, he walked all over the yard sprinkling and chanting.

Then they–The Shelter Women and the minister–came next door and asked if they could sprinkle Harley’s yard. He’s an easy-going guy, so he said, “Sure, why not?”

Then, they wanted to sprinkle Harley.

I think they settled for rubbing his head with some of the water in the bottle. What the minister was chanting is anyone’s guess. Hey, they can sprinkle Harley with whatever they want to, but unless they come up with some money, he’s not moving.

Poor Dad. With drama like this, his acid reflux got no attention whatsoever.

I really need to go home more often. And take a tape recorder. You can’t make this stuff up.

So, my very good REASON for missing Jazzercise all week (even though I now have clean clothes) is that I’ve just returned from a trip to another galaxy. Faith, NC, may as well be another planet for how different life is there. I forget this when I haven’t been home in a while.

Now, lest anyone think that I am ridiculing small towns, let me reassure all that I LOVE small towns, especially Faith. It holds a charm for me like no other place on earth. And, frankly, were it not for spending my formative years in Faith, I would no doubt be a normal person (how tediously boring!) without the neuroses from which I draw creative juice. It may not be necessary for every writer to be insane, but, speaking for myself, I would be utterly useless as a writer were I mentally stable.

I will tell y’all just ONE of the many interesting things that occurred during my recent sojourn. It involves squirrels, as many small-town tales do.

While I was growing up, my father shot many a squirrel. Along with rabbits, quail, deer–whatever. And we ate what he shot. Not all the time, of course, we had normal food as well, but, I confess that as a child, on many occasions, I had squirrel for dinner. My grandmother would skin, braise, and serve them with gravy, and usually rice. At the time, I thought absolutely nothing of it–it was a routine dinner menu. Although, looking back, I do recall that many nights Mamma had no appetite. And you can bet the farm she NEVER skinned anything.

While Daddy still owns his collection of rifles, shotguns, etc., the town of Faith has long since passed an ordinance against firing guns inside the town limits. For years, residents largely ignored this, but recently, some new folks have moved into town who tend to call the law, or, at the very least, walk over to inquire what is being shot at.

In recent years, squirrel has not been a dinner table staple, so this would not be an issue, except for the squirrels tend to dig up my mamma’s flowers. This makes her unhappy, and when Mamma ain’t happy…well, you know.

So, my brother-in-law bought my daddy a squirrel trap. Daddy baits this contraption with peanuts, and when a squirrel goes in, the door slams shut. When I arrived, on Monday afternoon, Daddy was aglow with the victory of a recent catch. He’d just returned from releasing the squirrel “out in the country” (which in and of itself is a joke, as Faith hardly qualifies as an urban area–I digress).

Late yesterday, as I was trying to catch up on email from Mamma and Daddy’s snail-paced dial-up connection, Daddy yelled from the kitchen, “Come here, quick!”

I went running. He stood pointing out the kitchen window. “Look, he’s going in!” A poor, unsuspecting squirrel was poking his head into the cage. He went for the peanut. As soon as the door slammed shut, Daddy went running out the backdoor. I followed him, aghast, as he proudly admired his catch. “Come on,” he said.

“What?” I looked at him in disbelief. Surely, he didn’t think I was going with him to relocate the squirrel. But he did. He put the cage in the back of the pickup truck. “Come on, you’ll have to help.” Under protest, I went, but only in case someone had to call 911 if the squirrel turned out to be rabid, or just plain mad about being caged and evicted, and bit Daddy.

Ten miles from my parents home, where Daddy reasoned the squirrel could not find his way back, my father pulled over, muttered at a women in the car behind us who was rubbernecking to see if perhaps he was disposing of a dead body, and released his captive. I stayed in the truck with the door locked, which was smart, because Daddy tried to open the passenger side door and give me an up-close view of the caged squirrel.

In a separate squirrel-related incident on Tuesday, my uncle, who lives outside the town limits, shot two squirrels with one shell, cunningly waiting until they were lined up, so he could take them out together.

Last night I kissed my mamma goodbye and drove two hours and fifteen minutes to the other side of the universe right after dinner–grilled hamburgers, nothing wild.

Peace, out…

Susan