Mayesville News: Candlelight dinner well attended
By PRUNELLA GRIMSBY
Contributing writer
The winter doldrums social season was in high gear Friday when Marilyn Jones hosted a candlelight dinner at the bunkhouse. Neysa was the first guest to arrive. Gary hurried toward her saying he had just delivered twin lambs. "Well, I hope you washed your hands," Neysa said.
"Why? I'm not the cook," Gary replied just as Pat and Virginia and the Zappones arrived.
Ross came next bringing a red bottle for the bottle tree in the yard. Groans arose from the assembled company when the bottle proved empty. "It was only water," Ross kept saying.
Inside, the guests sat around the table and peered at each other in the dusk. Marilyn explained each dish as it went around the table. "Good thing," said Ross, "or I wouldn't know what I was eating."
"It's delicious, whatever it is," said Virginia.
Pat and Maureen of Wichita swapped snake stories. Maureen's husband, Iain, charmed everyone with his accent and stories of how the Brays met the Joneses in the Guernsey Islands a few years back.
After dinner the guests reassembled around the wood-burning stove in the next room and watched slides of early Peabody photographs. Ross and Marilyn have been working on cataloguing the photos.
Tony and Gary went to see to an ill computer while Lori and the other women went to see the lambs in the pens and barns on the property.
It was a dark, cloudy night, so there would be no dancing around the bell house. Instead, after the new babies had been admired, Marilyn took her lantern and walked everyone up the driveway to the road.
All piled into their cars and another great evening at the bunkhouse came to an end as folks drove through sleepy Mayesville to home.
