Tomatoes.

Everyone back in Michigan is obsessed with tomatoes. When my dad and I went out for dinner last night, the waitress, who had heavy eyeshadow and a smokey voice, told my dad he got a salad with his hamburger steak dinner, and then added really seriously, "But it comes with tomatoes and we can't make any guarantees, just so you know."

Later, the woman at the next table started talking with us and said that she's been scared of vegetables ever since she bought grapes and a huge spider bigger than a half dollar sprung out from where it had been sitting on the stem. She says it happens more than you think, and now when she's in stores and buys grapes she breaks all the stems apart right there in the store to make sure nothing comes out, since it's not going to happen to her again.

On another note, the guy who owns the local moving company came over the house and had beer with my dad the other night. He says right now there's 60-70 homes he knows of in the county that are just empty, since people just took as many essentials as could fit in their car, and then stuck them in and shut up the house and just drove away and left it and went to a different part of the country to find work, most of them to Texas.

In the even more rural counties to the south of us, too, there's been two cases that they know of where the people figured out how to shut off the main power and the water and they took out all the copper wire and pipes before they left and sold it to the junkyard just so they could get enough gas money together to leave.