My house (is a very, very, very fine house--not).

So, I was posting pictures of Ashley and Matthew on her birthday, over there on facebook, and I got to noticing my house as background, and I noticed a few things.

It's not that I had any grand illusions that I was living at the palace, exactly, but I was a little shocked to see how closely Grandma Helgeson and I had managed to live in the same house. Well, hers was cleaner, and it had fewer animals and children, and I'm pretty sure she made her bed everyday and I only make mine if I don't forget I have a bedroom the minute I leave the room. But still, there are a lot of similarities.

You know, like the walls are lumpy and the floor is uneven and I think we may have a really serious problem with the roof. Grandma would have learned to shingle and fixed the roof herself, but I got half my DNA from Grandma Clark and we just don't give a damn.

My Grandma Clark side is good for singing and raising children I didn't give birth to, and my Grandma Helgeson side is industrious and thrifty, but neither of my sides can make me care enough to go shingle a roof.

Anyway, back to the pictures and my bed in the background.

I forget sometimes that I moved downstairs and made the front parlor into my bedroom when it became obvious that coming down the stairs in the dark, locating the only bathroom, which the Victorians hid behind the staircase (I don't know why) and then getting back to my bed was likely to result in my death after I fell down the stairs for the tenth time. And so now it's a lot more "public" than it used to be.

You might think that would incline one to keep it in perfect order, but anyone who thinks that has clearly never met my family. Aiden likes to "help" me make the bed. He has some highly original ideas of how a bed should look. I don't fix it because I don't want to hurt his feelings and discourage him from doing chores on his own.

That and I'm as lazy as sin, but still. It's a good policy and it makes me sound so...well, either insane or saintly, I don't really care which one.

Also, until I saw it in pictures I had forgotten what a really creative mix of furniture I acquired so that kids, dogs, husbands and teenage boys fixing cars could sit on it without anyone giving them the stink eye in case they got something dirty.

Screw dirty, I always say. If I want to entertain someone who's too good to see the furniture I'll just keep them on the porch. The Pastor comes in here and even has tea on occasion so if it's good enough for him I think the rest of you can just learn to deal.

Not counting Thanksgiving I choose to entertain by picnic. No one expects anything from you and everybody gets to have a good time, most importantly me, since I don't have to worry about the decorations as God already did such a fine job what with the grass and the trees and the sky and so forth.

The weeds in the flower bed are my own contribution, but weeds are just flowers with a bad reputation and since I have a deep and abiding fondness for strays of all kinds, it stands to reason I would encourage weeds.

In fact this year for Horse and Colt Show, which is our annual festival here in hillbilly hell, I have commissioned a lovely hand painted wooden sign from those hippies up the street that says, "Weeds", just so there will be no doubt that I am aware they are there.

Some helpful fellow invariably shows up an hour after the beer tent opens and asks me if I know there is nothing but weeds in that flower bed. Usually I tell him yes, thank you, I planned the garden after all and worked on it very hard and me and the field mice are right fond of purple thistles, but this year the sign will hopefully forestall him so we can avoid the ensuing discussion of his family tree. And the monkeys therein.

Also, I have an ongoing campaign to teach the village about freedom and what it means to be an American and how everybody gets to be free not just you, so really, it is my civic duty to continue to maintain the weed garden.

I feel a certain responsibility. If you lived here, you would, too, because I am pretty sure the village president did his internship with the KGB. He was my high school English teacher and just trust me, there is something about a failed Seminarian that just causes you to question his principles.

Since we have a nearly forty year history of mutual contempt I feel it is incumbent upon me to maintain certain standards, one of them being that whenever life around here tends to lean toward oppression I have to stand up for us little people.

Mother Teresa said so. Well, not the part about me hating the village, but definitely the standing up for the poor thing. And I try to always listen to Mother Teresa. And Saint Francis. And Jesus when he can get a word in, but I talk a lot.

I shouldn't be so hard on the village, they're not really as bad as I make them out to be. Usually. Occasionally they reach new heights of unreasonable, but they are very amenable to listening to reason and lawyers and stuff like that, so you can't fault them too much.

Anyway, I had a swell time at Ashley's birthday and while the cake was definitely lopsided it was also very sweet, and now that I think of it, that pretty much describes my life as a whole.

And you can't say fairer than that.