Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [104]
It must have been a sight: eight to twelve of us packed around the dinner table, heads bowed over books splayed flat (somewhere a librarian cringes), the pages held open with one hand while the other dipped in and out of the corn, back and forth from bowl to mouth, the rhythm interrupted only when someone refilled a bowl or took a pull at their Kool-Aid. When your eyes are fixed on text, you tend to fish around with your free hand, and nearly every week someone upended their Kool-Aid. The minute the glass hit, Dad jumped up to make a dam with his hands in an attempt to keep the spill from leaking through the low spot in the table where the leaves met. For her part, Mom grabbed a spoon and scraped madly at the spreading slick, ladling the juice back in the glass one flat teaspoon at a time so it could be drunk. The same thing happened if someone spilled their milk. Sometimes when I wonder how my parents managed financially, I think of Mom going after those spoonfuls of Kool-Aid like an environmentalist trailing the Exxon Valdez with a soup ladle, and there’s your answer.
Now that we kids have grown and have kids of our own, “popcorn Sunday” has become the unofficial get-together night. There is no formal planning, you just drop in. Sometimes it’s just a handful, sometimes the crowd is big enough that an additional table is required. Often it’s brothers and sisters, but our friends and some of the neighbors also show up. For a decade after I moved back to New Auburn I lived six miles from my parents and rarely made it to popcorn Sunday. After I met Anneliese and introduced her to the tradition, she became the one who pushed for us to go more regularly. Now that we have moved farther away she is even more avid about keeping the date, and at least once a month she asks, “Are we planning on going to popcorn?” It makes me feel good, because I take it as a sign we have become quite solidly married.
Today the answer is yes, and Amy is tickled. She knows she’ll likely see her cousin Sienna, and they will race toward each other on the sidewalk to hug with such aggression you fear they’ll knock teeth loose. If her cousin Sidrock is there, she and Sienna will do their best to doll him up in clothes from Grandma’s dress-up box, and then they’ll all sit down at the play table and fight over who gets the green bowl and who gets the purple bowl.
We smell the popcorn as soon as we hit the porch, and when we step through the kitchen door it’s a relatively full house. Mom and Dad and Tagg are there, and a little girl named Gloria Mom is caring for on a temporary basis. Gloria has severe epilepsy syndrome and is sitting strapped in her rolling chair beside the Monarch woodstove with her feeding tube hung from a hook on the wall. Mark and Kathleen are sitting on the piano bench, and Sidrock is charging around with a plastic dinosaur. John and Barbara are seated on the bench by the window beside Jed and his wife, Leanne. Amy and Sienna are already clacking around in high heels and tiaras, and just as we are dishing up the corn, our neighbors Roger and Debbie drop in. They have a truck farm down the road, and Roger and Jed share fieldwork. Roger is a John Deere man to the bone, and he sees to it that Jed’s little boy Jake—currently roaring in and out of the kitchen with a plastic tractor—has plenty of green toys.
The table is the same as it always was, the Formica of the center leaf brighter than the rest because it sat in a closet out of the sun the first few years until the family grew large. Over