The Flag

For the most part I embrace the woman in me that grew out of the Brownie I was as a little girl.  I make crafts with my kid and give them as gifts unabashedly.

Over the last few years I became a seasonal door decoration person.  A part of me blames motherhood.  Another part of me blames MQD and his desire to cover the window in our front door with something to prevent our neighbors from peeking in.   It doesn’t matter how it happened.

It started with a Christmas wreath.  And then I had this cute wreath with Easter Eggs on it.  I have a patriotic themed “Welcome” wreath for mid-summer and the 4th of July.  Autumnal leaves for the fall.

But I have a line I won’t cross.  Or at least I thought I did.

The American flag went up for Veteran’s Day.  And it stayed up.  It makes me happy.  And admittedly, aesthetically, it looks pretty cute with the pansies and the front porch and the holy-shit-all-we-need-is-a-white-picket-fence-I-have-never-been-so-happy vibe I have going.

I don’t remember what exactly prompted it.  But when MQD suggested we could get all kinds of flags, for the seasons and the holidays I let fly a string of obscenities that would have made a sailor blush.  Evidently homemade crafts as gifts are acceptable.  Door wreaths are acceptable.  Seasonal flags are not.

I was in Michael’s.  I had a basket full of stocking stuffers.

I was feeling full on Mom mode and chatting with an elderly woman behind me.  The line was long.

And then it happened.

At first I just took a picture.

And then I started needing permission.  I all but begged MQD to tell me to buy it.

He didn’t make it easy on me.  Neither did the woman working the register.

Quietly I asked her “Umm… that Snoopy flag, where are they in the store, I umm… didn’t see them anywhere.”

She pointed.  I ran past the twenty people behind me in line to look for it while she rang up my other items.  I started feeling a little like a contestant in that game show where the harried housewife runs through the grocery store aisles all wild-eyed and crazy.  I didn’t see one.  They had reindeer.  And Santa.  And snowmen.  No Peanuts.

I returned to her register and asked one of those questions I already knew the answer to.  “Is it a huge pain in the ass to ask you to get that down for me?” and I pointed twenty feet up in the air to the lone Peanuts flag.  Wordlessly she left her register.

And now I have a Snoopy flag.  But just this one.  So help me.