I’m often asked, “Does all the stuff you write about really happen, or do you just make it up?”

People, I live in the south. I don’t have to write material; it just happens. All I do is take notes and report back.

Case in point, my horsey friend, Nicole, who shared an excursion with me that was so delicious that, well, I’ll just let her tell you all about it:

“As I’m walking around and starting to fill my cart, an elderly lady runs up to me with a panicked look on her face and grabs my arm. I’m thinking this poor woman is having a heart attack or stroke, and then she shouts at me, “Can you help me find the canned vegetables?!”

Great. So then I’m looking for a pumice stone and thinking about Paul’s big toe callous, when I walk down the next aisle and start pondering, ‘I wonder why they put the Jesus candles next to the shampoo?’ when I turn around and see an 80-year-old man place a large package of feminine napkins in his cart. I had to walk away quickly to avoid laughing. Upon request of my sweet husband, I head to the beer cooler. But, Russell won’t drink just any beer. It has to be a fancy, snobby, foreign beer with a name that no one can pronounce. So I call him on my cell phone from inside the beer cooler, and he answers on his cell phone from inside a factory of banging machines, and we have several loud rounds of, ‘Do you like wheat beer? What? What?’