Our Everlasting Shame

We're not very hospitable, here. We should be (it being the south and Texas), but we're not. Guests come, and they end up sleeping on a futon in the living room or on the floor in the boy's room. And they find that our kitchen doesn't get the use it should. To our everlasting shame, this is how it is.

I rationalize to myself that we shouldn't feel bad. I tell myself that if an aunt were to spend, say, a couple weeks in winter with us, fleeing the snows of New York in December, her eyes would widen and her jaw drop at the blue skies and sun -- weather permitting of course, which for a two week stay it almost certainly would. I tell myself that this would make up for our shame.

And so it was that my New York aunt came to stay with us for a while, fleeing the onset of winter blowing in off Lake Ontario. Our skies were blue, and the sun did indeed shine, and she yearned to be outdoors even as we bundled in sweaters and huddled under blankets.

So we hiked up the Greenbelt -- down canyon trails winding thru the limestone rocks, thru the green woods littered with blue Juniper berries, out onto the creek bed.

And we went to Pedernales Falls -- down into the canyon, picking our way across the limestone ledges out to where the swirling water rushes.

And we kayaked on the lake -- under Cypress trees at the water's edge with Cormorants perched overhead, up Barton Creek past Coots and Scaups and Snowy Egrets and Great Blue and Yellow-Crowned Night Herons and turtles basking in the sun over water so clear and deep that it made you dizzy to look down.

We did those things with her under blue skies on warm days, and her eyes did widen, and her jaw did drop, and she gasped at the wonder of our Central Texas winter.

And I hope that the memory of those days will make her forget how she slept on the floor and ended up cooking for us, when it should have been the other way around, to our everlasting shame.

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