The meeting of the sisters.....

It was terrifying.
Not at first, mind you, but it did end that way.
You see, Lesley, AKA Lannio, was at her sister Dale’s home in Windermere this past weekend.
I most unwisely thought to contact Dale and suggest a visit with her and sister while she visited the fair Columbia Valley. I just thought meeting a couple of my blog buddies would be really nice. How very wrong I was. Dead wrong.
I bought wine, and with happy thoughts tripping through my head, followed Dale’s VERY SPECIFIC directions to her abode. That should have been my first warning…
When I arrived at the door, I thought, “Gee, what a nice tidy yard.” Even the snowman was immaculate.
Upon knocking, I heard the clopping of sensible Donna Reedesque heels approaching with quick, steady measures.
The door opened, and I beheld Dale. Her hair was in severe plaits (not loose braids, but tight, perfectly coifed plaits) and she was dressed in the most austere and tidy dress I have ever imagined.
“Stevie?” she inquired crisply.
“Um, yeah, that’s me… Dale? Is that you?” I replied, bewildered at the difference between her and her happy, carefree blog photo.
“Correct,” she said, before ushering me into her neat as a pin home.
Sitting on the couch, which was covered in clear, tight plastic, was Lesley, dressed in no less than Donna Karen and Malano Blahnik boots.
“This is Lesley, my sister,” announced Dale. “She is from the city.”
Lesley looked me and my carelessly bound hair, generic brand jeans and bargain basement top and home beaded jean jacket as though there were bits of poop attached to me.
“Oh, hello,” she said, before sniffing and turning her attention back to her glass of French wine, which I found out after is all she drinks. French wine, grapes crushed by the feet of virgins borne on the spring equinox.
Dale announced her children, who stood up immediately upon their names being spoken and curtsied and bowed in unison.
“May we retire to our bedchambers now, Mother?” the male child, Robert, inquired.
“You may,” Dale replied tartly, “but remember not to toss about as you sleep so the sheets will not wrinkle.”
The poor urchins made elaborate bows to their mother, aunt and father, who himself chose to head off to bed, but not before being reminded by Dale to shower twice so as not to soil the sheets.
I sat carefully on the pristine Louis XI high back chair offered to me and offered the bottle of wine I had brought, feeling like a bug under a microscope.
After Dale had poured me a glass of wine of her own choosing, which took some time as she had to rewash the glass several times and polish it twice more before carefully measuring our exactly eight ounces of the liquid into it, she placed it carefully on the coaster on the table next to me.
Then she arranged herself carefully on the couch near, but not too near, her high class, citified sister.
I reached for the glass, took a sip, and when I went to put it down was a few millimeters from the centre of the coaster.
Dale shrieked and lunged for the glass, putting it dead centre on the coaster, then walked smartly to the kitchen to get me a clean coaster as apparently a speck of dust had landed on my current one.
While she was doing this, Lesley gave me along, slow look, one that said, “oh Lord, I have arrived in Green Acres, and here is my fashion nemesis.”
I looked nervously around the house. Everything was in its place, not a speck of dust anywhere, and the scent of Orange Oil Pledge filled my nostrils. Even the cat minced carefully about in paper booties, with scotch tape around its ankles to keep them in place. It was so perfectly trained to be neat that when it accidentally brushed past my leg and left three strands of cat hair on my jeans, it stopped, backed up and carefully picked them off and put them in the trash can near the door.
By the time I left, Dale had polished the floor where I had walked in, and kept muttering “not clean enough” under her breath, forcibly combed my unruly hair into submission and kept glancing nervously at the floor near my jacket in case, I assume, one of the beads had landed on the floor. Lesley refused to speak in anything but French and Italian, the only English leaving her lips making reference to my horrid taste in wine in low but not inaudible undertones, while Dale smiled a tight little smile, and waited patiently for me to leave so she could steam clean the chair I occupied.
After 45 minutes, I simply could not stand the scrutiny any longer. I ran headlong out the door and rushed to my car, with the sound of Dale’s vacuum cleaner starting up in my wake.
The lesson: never meet your blog friends in real life. I start therapy tomorrow with Bob O. the therapist.
Dale recommended him.