Wildlife Saturday Night.

The place to be in town last night was inside the civic center at the Fair Grounds. We were invited there by our neighbors J & J-- I had called them yesterday morning to ask if they would like to come here for dinner last night, but they were just about to call us about the wildlife meeting and dinner at the Fair Grounds. For just $5.00 per person, you enjoyed a most delicious dinner catered by a Somerville restaurant that is open only on the first Sunday of every month.... and they also had door prizes (we never win anything) and presentations from representatives of the Wildlife and Conservation groups.

The food was out of this world...... platters and platters of BBQ-ed beef and baked chicken, (I didn't touch the beef, and just had a small piece of chicken) the most delicious twice-baked potatoes I have tasted outside of my own kitchen, green beans, a really good (lots of different greens and veggies) tossed salad, fresh bread, and a dessert table filled with all sorts of home-baked treats made by the farm ladies that had been baking all afternoon. Our friends wouldn't even let us pay for our own dinners... they said we were their guests because they had invited us to join them.

At the door, everyone was given those blue and white sticky name-tags: Put y'all's names right there and come on in! I wrote my name on the little tag, but didn't put it on my blouse. I have this thing against those name tags. Number one, they work just fine in a kindergarten or first-grade class. After that, it's all downhill. (Name tags are a kiss-of-death at a party.) Number two, as soon as you stick on a tag with your name on it, everyone can just read your name (if they remembered to bring their glasses) and no one has to say Hi there! I'm .........! -- which eliminates the first happy greeting from one guest to another at a party. My dear friend Frankie hated name tags also. When forced to write her name on one at a party or gathering, she would do it, but then stick the tag on her butt. (Frankie is now up on a cloud, probably pulling off every name in sight.)

Anyway..... the dinner was delicious, and we all enjoyed it. The four of us sat across from Ida Jean and Esther May..... and felt name-challenged because J and I didn't have middle names. We all discussed the food, of course, and found out that Ida Jean's son owned the little restaurant in Somerville that did the catering. I would imagine that the twice-baked potato recipe was Ida Jean's, because she said that her son always loved to cook and would keep her company in her kitchen when he was growing up. When they started giving out the door prizes, I told Ida Jean that instead of the gift certificates to the local hardware and feed stores, they should have given out trays of her son's twice-baked potatoes.

After we all tasted the cobblers and brownies, the pies and cookies, the cakes and fruit tarts, the organizers got down to introducing the presenters. There was a man from the water conversation group that stood up in front of the microphone and with a booming voice that could probably have been heard in Houston asked us "Now !! what!!! will y'all dew!!!! (do)...... when y'all's well!!! runs driiiiiiiiiiiiigh?!!!! (dry-- for those of you not familiar with a Texas drawl)" He gave us all some statistics about the population of Texas growing faster than the high level of the water table. (One man at the end of our table said out loud "Well, shut the door!") -- To which the conservation guy answered, "We're breedin' 'em, not lettin' 'em in!" -- no one at any of the tables made a sound.

Then came the main speaker..... a wildlife representative who is an expert on the tracks (footprints) and scat (poop) of everything crawling and walking around your property when "all yore lights are put out and y'all have gone to bed." He had a slide show of animal tracks... raccoons and possums, skunks and squirrels, coyotes and bobcats, mountain lions and deer, roadrunners, chickens and quail, rabbits and hogs, horses and cows, and even frogs. Not only did we get to see their paw-prints (and our friend J decided that one lop-sided track just had to come from a gay coyote-- not that there's anything wrong with that), but we got to see the size and shape of their droppings.

The wildlife expert told us that if we got down close enough to the animal's scat, we could probably make out what they had for dinner that night. (As if this city girl was going to look that closely.....) The man's favorite pictures was a series of purple-colored scat of all shapes and sizes. He was nearly bouncing out of his boots when he was showing us those slides of purple mounds and pellets. And why were they purple? "Well, that year's dewberry crop was just plain bountiful, and all the animals were feasting on those dewberries every night as soon as the sun went down....." (I've never seen or heard of a dewberry before, but I will bet the ranch that those little berries are purple in color.)

Just as we were all walking into the civic center last night, by the way, we heard thunder and saw some dark clouds over the Fair Grounds. Within five minutes of walking into the front door of the center, the sky opened up and down came rain. Rain! Honest-to-goodness, puddle-making, ground-soaking rain. It didn't last but twenty minutes or so, but it was more rain than we've seen here in quite some time. Everyone at our table was saying Well, it's raining right here and that's just fine, but I hope it's raining back home on my land.

The wildlife. The rain. The land. The land. Number one on everyone's hit parade here-- their land. Number two: mark your calendars for the first Sunday of every month so you can head on out to that little restaurant in Somerville. You don't know what they'll be serving till you get inside, and if you don't get there early, you're going to just have to wait on line..... and they keep serving till they run out of food. Just one Sunday a month. And on some Sundays, they serve more than 500 people... which is probably twice the population of Somerville.