"I will say this for country people, or anyway the ones I know: If you call for a party, you’ll have it. On a week’s notice or two days, I don’t care what it is, a family supper or a cornhole game in the backyard. Give people a reason to get together, and they’ll be there with a covered dish. Mickie remarks on this because she knows people in more places, friends she’s kept up with from her UT days. She says they’re forever whining on Facebook how it takes four months for three people to agree on one day to have lunch together. When she speaks of it, I remember that too, from college. That the only answer to How are you? was Too busy! Now I live among people who might have been up before dawn with a sick calf, or have hay to mow before rain gets here; they might work mornings at the dollar store and nights cleaning floors at the hospital and have to pick up their kids from school in between. Or take somebody to a court date. They might like you a lot or very little. No matter. If you run into each other pushing your groceries to your cars in the Kroger parking lot, they’ll stop and talk to you. Busy is not a boastful thing. It might even be taken for a weakness. It’s not our way to make a show of telling friends we have something better to do. We are each other’s better thing."
