Uncle Sam

Today I had the wonderful opportunity of eating brunch with some good friends. They invited me to their lovely home and I was thrilled by the landscape as I drove - the contrast of the perfectly formed clouds with puffy tops and flat bottoms, drifting through the deep blue sky and the tall, deep green corn waving it's long rows of tasseled tops. My goodness, what glory in God's creation!

At any rate, I arrived at the appointed time, and offered to help as my friend was running a bit behind her food preparation schedule. She had invited a number of other friends over as well, and was worried that she wasn't ready. I didn't feel any rush, so tried to be helpful. We chatted as we worked however, and I think I must have distracted her entirely too much with my conversation. She suddenly couldn't remember what she had been doing with the quiche she had been working on. She was looking at two different recipes and was confusing them, and didn't know how much of things she'd already put in anyway. She decided to change course while the others started arriving.

We were perfectly content to snack on fruit and drink tea and coffee while my frantic friend tried to come up with some other way to feed us. We were all quite laid back, I believe, and tried to help our friend remain calm as well. It was pretty easy acutally. At one point she came over to the table area near the large front window to announce that she was still running behind and didn't know for sure what she'd give us, but she had to get going on something when another guest distracted her with a question of an Uncle Sam garden decor in the front yard. My friend's face changed immediately and she looked so happy and at ease. "Oh yes!" she said, and shared about how she had won a bid on it at an auction the day before. She stood and chatted more about the auction and other antiques and seemed to have quite let go of the anxiety of providing food.

By the end of the visit, I was stuffed with fruit, sausage, muffins, egg wraps, quiche, and blueberry scones. My goodness what a wonderful meal! The meal had played out in a lengthy, unusual way, but I wouldn't have changed a thing about it. It was refreshing, really. I felt perfectly comfortable and at home through the whole thing. Well, maybe I would have changed my friend from being anxious and frustrated part of the time to none of the time, but then I wouldn't have had that moment to enjoy when Uncle Sam, as he does so often, distracted from duty and brought to memory the glory of the purchase. Oh, Uncle Sam.