The Entry

Tomorrow is our town's annual celebration of being a small town -- Old Home Day -- and today, the whole town is abuzz in preparations. There will be a parade, a dunking booth, a frog-jumping contest, a cake decorating contest, a cake walk, a used-book sale, a soap box derby, a corn shucking contest, several barbecues and so on.

I volunteered to make a cake for the cake walk, which is one of the highlights of the day. For the uninitiated, a cake walk is when people, young and old alike, buy a chance to play a sort of musical chairs. You walk in a circle, and when the band stops, you sit in the closest chair. Each chair is numbered; an announcer calls a number, and if that's the number of your chair, you win a cake! How far into the evening the fun and games go on depends on how many cakes are donated.

I called the organizer of the cake walk to let her know I would bring a couple of cakes, and she said, "Well, why don't you just enter it in the cake decorating contest?" When I told her I don't decorate, she said, "Have your kid do it! They love to see their cakes in the contest, then we'll just take the cake over to the cake walk later."

So this was our activity this afternoon and evening. The theme of this year's Old Home Day is "Back to Basics." My daughter spent about an hour on this entry for the cake-decorating contest. It doesn't have a name yet, but I'd say it was a basic riot of colors. Or just a basic riot.

(The dog, by the way, has been vigilantly guarding 'the entry' for hours.)