BARLOW, Ky. — Local woman Roxana Carozza is entering her 20th hour of the dreaded “Midwestern goodbye” this morning, still inside her mother-in-law’s home and currently trapped in a conversation about window insulation, overly polite sources report.
“I don’t even understand how this happened — one minute we’re getting everything packed up for the car, and three hours later, my mother-in-law has me trying four different peanut butter bar recipes to figure out which one is too sweet,” stated Carozza, disheveled and visibly exhausted. “I kept telling her we needed to get on the road before it got dark, and she kept telling me that her mamaw always said, ‘Mice see better in the dark anyway.’ What the fuck does that even mean? Is it an insult?”
Carozza’s husband Brian reported from a nearby Tudor’s Biscuit World, where he sought refuge under the guise of stepping out to check the tire pressure on his grandmother’s Buick.
“Listen, I hate to leave her hanging like that… but good God, passive-aggressively glancing at the door and then my watch over and over can only go on for so long. Sometimes, you just have to make a break for it,” he explained. “I love my family, but the only good thing about going there is that I can just zone out and play video games as much as I want. Everyone just sits around talking about who’s in the hospital and who’s doing worse in the family, as if it was a competition or something.”
Family matriarch Elanor Carozza, however, couldn’t be more overjoyed with the company.
“We never get the family together enough anymore, and it’s always so lovely to have them over,” Elanor said. “They tend to linger on after dinner, and dessert, and coffee, and a second round of dessert, so we always prepare the guest bedroom in case they need to stay the night. Sometimes we even get them for a whole weekend.”
“It can be a bit much, honestly,” she later added. “Sometimes I just wanna watch the news and get to bed, but when someone compliments your stewed tomatoes, you just have to buckle down and talk about the canning process for no less than four hours. There’s no other way around it.”
At press time, Roxana had grasped the door knob, only to be pulled into the sitting room so she could see the great work a neighbor did on the crown molding repair.