A Good Blend

We had (what might become an annual) Easter dinner together this year. And by we, I mean the Harris family and the Illingworth family. The Tarter family was invited, but didn’t come because they all had the flu. I was no so fortunate. My mom, Betty, organized this hoorah so that everyone could hang out. Get to know each other better. Blend. She even threatened to make nametags for everyone. All I could envision was Easter egg shaped nametags with cute nicknames for everyone. Small talk and “you’ll have to give me that recipe” nonsense. It made me anxious. Nervous. Sweaty. And no one wants to attend an Easter Blending Celebration with sweaty pits.
My only job for the dinner was to get ice and drinks, namely sweet tea. Ryan and I stopped at Kroger on our way and NO TEA. We went up and down every aisle. Searched every nook. Every cranny. THERE COULD BE NO BLENDING WITHOUT SWEET TEA. I started to panic, loudly. Ryan thought my body had been overtaken by an alien from Planet Overreact. In fact, that’s what he said. “There’s no need to overreact”. Just because I was shouting WHERE’S THE SWEET TEA and breaking out in hives in aisle 3, doesn’t mean I was overreacting. Maybe he didn’t know what a stress the Easter Blend was for me. Could be that it was stressful for him too, but it’s hard to say since his range of emotion tends to shift wildly from “I can’t tell if he’s asleep or not” to “I think he might have stopped breathing”.
And nothing too terrible happened. Betty only made five or six comments that made my cheeks burn. Betty and Dawn (Ryan's mother) only talked secretively long enough to give me gas – just short of talking long enough to give me a full blown ulcer. My dad only wore my cousin Marsha’s pink Easter bonnet for two minutes. Maybe three. All in all, it was a good blend.