At Least We Had Dessert

How much lemon tart can two people eat in three days? Apparently, this much.

This has been quite the week in Small Town.

It is early May, so there have been all manner of concerts and recitals as music instruction wraps up for the year. I've piano-ed until my wonky shoulder has begged for mercy.

It's the end of school, so the school board president (Husband) has attended receptions and congratulated retiring teachers and staff, clapped his hands sore for outstanding graduates, ooh-ed and aah-ed at dozens of final project displays, and marveled at the good work done by the folks in our public schools.

On top of this, I was scheduled to have club at the House on the Corner on Tuesday night. (Does anyone under the age of Way Too Old still use that phrase, "having club"? I'm guessing it's a quaint hold-over that we Baby Boomers learned from our mothers, signifying frantic cleaning and experimenting with fancy recipes.)

Anyway, that day I wasn't paying much attention to the forecast. All of my attention was on making sure there were enough chairs and that our immunity improvement system (a.k.a. accumulated dust) wasn't too noticeable.

Guests were to start arriving at 6:30, and with one hour to spare I looked around and lo, it was good. I had done all I could to make it look as if really high-class people live in the House on the Corner--fresh flowers! Napkins artfully fanned! Carefully casual arrangements of family photos! TWO lemon tarts chilling!

And then my text alert started to chime.

"Are you watching the forecast? Should we cancel?"

"Have you been watching the weather? It looks like it might get nasty."

Do you know what can be really irritating when you have spent all day trying to make it look as if you are something you really aren't, such as tasteful and put-together? Having that facade be unseen, that's what.

But the skies were darkening and getting that green-ish cast all of us Kansans recognize. I knew cancelling was the right thing to do, but...TWO lemon tarts! I was more than a little chippy as I made the calls telling my friends to stay home out of the weather, and that we'd meet a week later. "But come tomorrow afternoon for a coffee break and dessert," I told them.

My friend who calls me on my baloney texted me to remind me that this was the right call, even if I was being petty and pouty about it. She was right, of course, especially when we woke up the next morning to find that the forecast of rain had actually been understated--the system dumped nine inches just up the road from us, and flooding closed highways all around. It was so bad, in fact, that the coffee break had to be cancelled because my usual 20-minute commute home from work turned into six times that length as I spent nearly an hour trying to get across the only open bridge coming into Small Town from the south.

So it's been another learning experience. The lesson, obviously, is that I shouldn't complain about having a clean house and fresh flowers, even if I don't have guests to enjoy that false picture of daily life with me. Husband and I can come home from our May events and wait for the dust to re-accumulate, and while we do it, we can have a slice of lemon tart.

But we may have to pick up the pace of the forks. There's still a whole tart chilling.