An Uninvited Guest ~ by Marcia Mayo

No one has ever accused me of being a great hostess. I don’t cook and I don’t clean and I don’t like people all that much. However, back in the day when I was still married and had young children, I did manage to host New Year’s Day parties for several years.

Although there’s no way I could have handled the turnip greens, which were someone else’s job, I did manage to cook up the black-eyed-peas-and-rice-based Hoppin’ John, which is the other staple of a Southern New Year’s Day good luck dinner. As for dessert, I’d had the brilliant idea for everyone to bring their leftover Christmas goodies for a final perusal in their Tupperware containers and rather-sad aluminum foil packets.

With the men in the den watching football and the women in the kitchen talking about kids and work and who said what, the kids ran rampant, up and down the stairs, in the front door, out the back, slamming, always slamming.

On one such occasion, just as we women had cleaned up the kitchen, finally relinquishing the fudge and peanut butter bars to their final resting place, the trash, and just as a touchdown had been called back thanks to an idiot referee, we heard a communal shriek from upstairs, and then the bam, bam, bam of multiple descending various-size-and-shod feet.

“Guess what we found under Billy’s bed?” was the song chirped in unison by the kidly choir.

“What?” was the parents’ choral response.

“A real Easter egg!”

I do believe that I remember said egg, with its purple and yellow embellished shell still intact after months in hiding, was being brandished about in a rather cavalier fashion.

Therefore, the orchestrated refrain from the horrified adults was, of course, “Don’t break it!”

So what if our memories include a few rotten eggs? These stories are often our favorites, offering up the opportunity to forgive ourselves for our shortcomings and, in retrospect, to find the funny in our shared humanity.

As the New Year begins, resolve to take some time to remember.