The Reunion: Part I

I don’t know how I did it, but somehow in the car ride, I managed to contain my excitement—I was asleep before we even hit the highway—for our impending family reunion in Gaithersburg, MD. Now, I do love my extended family on my stepmother’s side, but after recently having returned from Europe, I was not thrilled to pack up and venture off first to Amishville, Amish town, Amish land, or whatever that place is called in Pennsylvania, and then move again to Gaithersburg: a D.C. suburb. After sleeping for 3 or so hours, struggling in a futile attempt to go back to sleep for another few, and just plain pretending to sleep for another hour, I finally “woke up”, hoping that we would be approaching Day 1 final destination: Amish world a.k.a. Quarryville, PN. I took a good look around me expecting to see softly rolling hills with lush fields of green and Anne of Green Gables running around in a prairie girl dress offering fresh peach cobbler to passing by cars. But alas, this was not the case. I think my fantasy may have been a little bit too much to ask considering 1) Anne of Green Gables is not only from Novo Scotia, but is also dead, and 2) peaches are not grown in Pennsylvania. Though I saw no Anne or peaches, I did see lots of corn and some cows, which I thought seemed promising until I realized “oh wait, that’s all of Pennsylvania”. Needless to say, I had another 3 or 4 hours to go…. FML. So I contented myself the rest of the ride by reading Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which I think it is a great critique on our current food system that most people should read. I emphasize “most” here because I think most people should read this book… excluding myself. For me, I think I should just not be exposed to these types of information, for I can become a wee-bit obsessive and can easily latch onto ideas. So, what once were pretty cornfields and dairy farms became evil cornfields filled of #2 corn—that we don’t even directly eat—destined to destroy the rumen of cows and be morphed into high fructose corn syrup and xanthum gum, and dairy farms pumped with antibiotics that will run-off and turn our fish into hermaphrodites and kill our children. Ok, a little far-fetched, but I can still believe it. In addition to ruining the beautiful landscapes around me, I now have turned pseudo-vegetarian and annoyingly read the list of ingredients of everything that I eat (or more like then refuse to eat) and pointedly explain to everyone else around me exactly which ingredients came from corn. See what I mean? Ideas are like viruses (for all you inception lovers!) and some people a.k.a. should just not read them.

Given that we already know that I readily accept and latch onto some ideas, we’re going to take this a few steps further, maybe a couple of floors, to paint an “accurate” picture of how I was poorly set up for Amish land. So, I get super into themes, themes of towns, themes of days, etc. When I first moved to Cleveland and encountered Little Italy, I was ecstatic until I could truly no longer uphold the pretense that anything about it was actually Italian. Sigh. So grudgingly accepted that Little Italy was a fraud and moved on. Holidays, Oh my God Holidays! I get pretty, (reluctant to use the word “super” here but for lack of a better term) super excited about holidays. For example, sophomore year I was totally ready to deck out my suit in Halloween gear: spider webs, fake spiders, hanging skeletons, bowls of candy—the works. I had even purchased a lot of the stuff, but thankfully I was vetoed by my more sane sweet mates and only kept put out the bowl of candy. The bowl that I got was one of those orange and black bowls that you get with the automatic creepy hand that grabs at you when you reach for a piece of candy. The bowl was cool at first, except that it didn’t really work to well when you reached for candy, but would, as I found out later, crawl on the floor, dragging the bowl behind it. I found this item particularly reminiscent of Furbies, which were alrite for a few days until you realized that they would still demonically gurgle “Feed me!” even after taking out the batteries and throwing them out the window. My furbie still popped open its eyes, saying “Feed me” years later. This is when I decided that I was not saving this toy someday for my kids and gave it a new home in the garbage. But back somewhat to the main point. In general, Halloween seems to be bad, but Christmas is the worst. Someday when I have a house and a family and maybe am slightly bored with life, I will without a doubt be that person stapling Christmas lights to their roof, trying to outdo her neighbors with the most Christmas decorations in a Chevy Chase-like manner. Now I think it is relatively clear how I would have expected Amish Country to be and how I would have easily bought into that façade.

For our first day’s excitement in Quarryville (after getting stuck behind a horse and buggy on the drive in), we took a tour of/hung around my step-grandfather’s retirement home. Pretty exciting. Then we did what I had long been hoping for: a quest for jelly. I am actually serious and kept pestering my parents all the way here that we needed to find the delicious jelly they always brought home after trips to visit him. So off we went. We found this local barn right around the corner. I excitedly picked out some jelly right away as well as some Orange Blossom honey, vanilla and peppermint extract. Feeling pretty pleased with my purchases, I sat back down in the car, happily to examine my jar of blueberry jelly, only to discover that it was sweetened with grape juice from concentrate and made and packaged in Maryland, not in my Amishville in Pennsylvania. In addition to this little incident, the whole wheat peach and apricot fig neuton-like bars that we got my dad had corn syrup listed as the third ingredient and peaches as the tenth. My vision of Amish Country crashed down around me and reluctantly I accepted that it too was a fraud.

After the disappointment in PN, we hopped back in the car and headed to meet up with the rest of the family in Gaithersburg, MD. Our hotel was actually located in German town, where I don’t think any Germans actually live or have ever actually lived there. I had initially thought that we eat terrible food and not really do anything the whole weekend, and that if we actually did it would be things that we all hated, which turned out to sometimes be the case, but not nearly as much as I initially expected.