Part IV: I'm from a Map Dot

Not really. I don't even think my [technical] hometown is on any North Carolina maps. It's not as beautiful as Staunton, and it's not as urbane as Alexandria, but I still feel the pull back to my home-home. It's a little town made up mostly of old farmland, none of the crops of which I can actually recognize, much to Lee's dismay.
Whenever we pass a field of crops in North Carolina, he points out the window:
What's that? he says.

Peanuts, I say.
They don't look like peanuts to me, he says.
Oh, hold on, I say. I squint harder. OH, duh. Those are soy beans.
And then we laugh. Because we both know I have no idea. Except tobacco. I know what tobacco looks like. And corn. But you'd have to be a pretty big idiot to have grown up in anything akin to rural life and not know what tobacco and corn look like, you know?

Sometimes I worry about Mary Bullock growing up in a time when technology is so pervasive, but I am really thankful for Skype. MB knows and loves my parents even though they live seven hours away.  Even when we haven't seen them for several months, she'll walk right into their house and plop herself on my mom's lap like she just saw her last week. Of course, that means that she starts making demands right away: Book read, Mooooooose. Book READ.

I've already mentioned the disaster that is my mom's sewing room, but sometimes it's kind of helpful that my mom has the tendency to save things. I remember five years ago telling her that she could give all of my old toys to Goodwill. So glad she didn't take that advice. What did I know, anyway?

See? Mary Bullock is clearly thrilled.

Actually, I've been meaning to get a picture of her with a xylophone for ages so that I can make her an ABC photo book. She doesn't have a xylophone of her own yet, which made checking off the X difficult. But now that problem is solved and I can move that back onto my [so far only hypothetical] list of projects to complete.

Next on the road trip in review: New Bern, NC: Home of Tryon Palace, MB's Uncle Derby [Kirby if you pronounce your K's], and the biggest mosquitoes in the history of mosquitoes.