The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

The school year is near- ly over. I won't bore you with the details of the sketchy grades I am desperately trying to rectify before the grading period ends. And I recall spotting a Times reporter at graduation, so I'll tell you something related to my plans for this summer.

We're going to California over the summer to visit my mom's brothers. We'll spend the better part of that time in the Silicon Valley with my mom's second-oldest brother, Dave, his (rather chipper) wife Carina, and their daughter Ariel.

I am not going to write about Dave or Carina or Ariel or even the trip in gen- eral. No, I'm going to tell you about Leslie.

Leslie is a friend of Ar- iel's. Once, when Dave's family visited for the sum- mer, they brought Leslie along. What followed were the ten most memorable days of my life, but her first day here stands out in par- ticular. The four of us - me, my little brother, Ariel, and Les- lie - left my grandparents' farm at nine in the morning to show Leslie Waitsburg's downtown. We stopped to pet the neighbor's mules and then continued down the road.

Every thirty seconds, Les- lie would exclaim "Wow! It looks just like a Micro- soft Windows wallpaper!" I would quietly roll my eyes.

She marveled at the size of Main Street.

"Wow," she said. "I just came back from Beijing, and they have sidewalks bigger than this!"

She was also impressed by (take a deep breath): the fact that business own- ers here took their dogs to work, the sheer number of people who owned dogs, the high tree-to-person ratio, the fact that I wasn't stressed out about my PSAT, the personal attention we got at the stores, how cheap a bag of chips was at Waitsburg Grocery, and the early age at which kids here get driver's permits.

We ate lunch at Betty's Diner. ("Oh my gosh, it's, like, a real-live diner with stools at the counter and ev- erything!") After we finished sight- seeing, we returned to the farm, where Leslie proceed- ed to change her Facebook status to "There are cows in my backyard. Mind blown."

She also griped about how little produce there was around here. ("I haven't had fresh fruit since Beijing," she posted.)

I tried to tell her that there was an entire patch of straw- berries, plus a blueberry hedge and several blackber- ry plants, right out the back door. To my knowledge, she never took advantage of that opportunity.

For dinner that night, we cooked stir-fried beef with oyster sauce. Even Leslie liked it.

"This is good beef," she commented between chopstickfulls.

"Thanks," said my little brother. "It comes from our cows."

You should've seen the look on her face.

And yethellip;and yethellip;

I suppose I won't be much better when I'm down in her neck of the woodshellip;

And if I do anything wonky while I'm there, it might wind up on the Inter- nethellip;