Just don't hide the wine!

I had the privilege of living with an incredible roommate, Mona Bailes Epperly.  Mona had dated my high school boyfriend’s best friend, and we had met during those double dates and stayed friends after the relationship was over.  When I was going to move to Huntington to court reporting school, Mona and I decided to try to live together.  We found this old house on 10th Street that had been remodeled, and it was affordable and close enough to school that I could walk.  Mona was already employed full-time as an eye surgeon’s technician, so she worked all day while I went to school and had a part-time job also. 
 
We were not the typical college kids, I don’t guess.  Neither of us had much money, so we brought canned goods and food from our parents’ freezers, and we cooked a meal every day like married people, seldom wasting money eating out or on junk food.  When we went to the store, we knew exactly how much we had to spend, and we kept track of everything that went into the buggy to make sure we could afford it.  Mona is really funny, so we had lots of laughs and good times. Cheryl Durst Poling lived with us for a while also, so that added another element of hilarity. 
 
We had two bedrooms and Mona had her own twin bed, but she usually slept with me as we’d lie in bed and talk until we fell asleep.  One morning, I woke up to Mona’s finger stuck in my mouth.  I wake up, there is this finger in my mouth, and there lay Mona on her back, left arm flung across my body with her finger in my mouth.  I take her finger out and wake her up with a “What in the world are you doing?”  She says, “You have been gritting your teeth all night – I couldn’t take it another minute, so I just stuck my finger in there to make it stop!”  Oh my…..I guess it never occurred to her to get in her own bed.
 
She would make fun of me and do these impressions of me waking up with hair standing on end, eyes squinted, picking the clock up and putting it right up to my face, saying, “What time is it?”  Thank the Lord for the invention of clocks with big numbers and contacts you can sleep in!  In this day and age, I probably could sue her for discrimination against a half-blind person.
 
Anyway, Mona had this guy interested in her, and we had invited him over for dinner.  When he shows up, he brings this bottle of wine as a house-warming gift or hostess gift or whatever.  We didn’t drink, so we just sat the wine on the counter, had the meal, and her interest in that guy never went anywhere, so we ended up with this random bottle of wine.  My mom and sister were coming down to attend a bridal shower Mona was giving me before I got married to Terry, and here we have this wine still on the counter.  I tell Mona, “I’m going to stick this stupid bottle of wine in the back of my closet so my mother doesn’t go nuts thinking I’ve become a wino while I’ve been gone to college.”  I stick the bottle behind my hang-up clothes in my closet and promptly forget about it.
 
Mom and Kim show up, and – you guessed it – somehow Mom has brought me something, an outfit or some clothing item, and she heads straight from the front door right to my closet, swooshes aside the clothes to hang up what she’s brought, and there it sits, my hidden wine!  Which, I must say, was not even MY wine – it was Mona’s date/nondate that brought it – why in the world it got stuck in my closet is beyond me!  You should have seen the look on mom’s face – it was one of those “What is this” looks that wasn’t accusatory, but more like “Why are you hiding a bottle” looks.  Oh yeah, that’s when all the story-telling started that I didn’t want to have to go into to start with.  We got a good laugh out of it, and it reminded me once again, your sin (or not sin, actually!) will find you out!