Texas Bridal Registry and Such

Before the internet, brides prepared for their wedding day and setting up a new home by visiting a department store, choosing her china pattern, crystal, silverware and possibly less formal dishes, like pottery, flatware and glassware (this would be drinking glasses that did not resemble the jelly jar). The couple would also pick out towels, sheets and other linens, maybe a can opener, blender and other small appliances. Guests would have to travel to the department stores to make their gift purchases or use their credit card and pay for shipping the gift.

Bridal web sites have changed the way things are done. The couple can make selections online, never leaving the home they probably already reside in together. This has been a wonderful convenience for those of us who reside in rural areas, sometimes thirty miles from the nearest department store. Rural residents have always been resourceful, however. Bridal registry was offered in the gift shops of local pharmacies and wait for it, the feed store. These registries remain, and offer unique, practical options to the gift giving dilemma.

In one of my previous lives, I was the owner/operator of a bed and breakfast in a small south Texas town. One of the tours I suggested for people who had already visited the historical sights, was a driving tour of the feed stores to peruse the bridal registries. There are any number of possible routes, however, my favorite started with the Ful-O-Pep in Cuero on Highway 183. Continue to Goliad and visit the Hen House on Highway 59, then Goliad Feed, just a few blocks away. The tour finally would be the old Anderson Ag, on Highway 77 in Refugio, offering John Hart and Yeti.

There is an odor about a feed store you have to get accustomed to. It’s not like visiting the mall department stores, where the cosmetic counter employees squirt cologne every few minutes. It is not all together unsatisfactory, but more bucolic. My guests from Manhattan loved the idea, especially when they realized there was Mexican food to be sampled along the way and maybe a Dairy Queen or two.

A city-dweller might not appreciate the live chicks in the metal tank at the entry during the spring, before Easter, or the snake boots that could shield the fangs of a rattler when they emerge from hibernation. However, the bicycling tourists from Belgium got a kick out of all the equipment and garb Texans bought for their ranch life and hunting excursions.

Pecan trees are a big deal in Texas because it is the state tree. However, pecans are the messiest tree, always dropping, tassels, leaves, small branches, large branches, empty shells, and the worst, web covered branches with web worms. My neighbors, Alta Hunt on one side and Alline Bethke on the other, knew all the tricks and secrets for surviving rural living without a man in the house. Alline would leave fresh baked bread, and fig preserves on my screened porch many mornings. However, Alta had the cure for messy pecan trees, a parasitic wasp.

Since my property for the bed and breakfast was filled with pecan trees, it was in Alta’s best interest to give me a heads-up about the wasps and offer to order me some when she submitted the order for hers. She was a member of the garden club and knew all the tricks for fighting the evasive web worms that clustered on pecan trees.

I had forgotten about ordering the wasps when my father told me he was at my back door and there was a white envelope tapped to the knob, and someone had written wasps in large letters on the front. He’d called me on his cell, and I stood in the grocery store line of a neighboring town on my cell, wondering what the heck he was talking about. He hadn’t been a fan of my husband and me opening a bed and breakfast in an old historic home, and me operating it alone, with strangers in and out, while my husband continued to work three hours away, awaiting retirement. My father seemed certain that some nefarious person was menacing me with the threat of wasps.

I managed to convince him he didn’t have to worry, but it wasn’t until I got back with the groceries that I figured out they were the parasitic wasps, Trichogramma, that Alta had ordered for me. Turned out I couldn’t even see the wasps on a sticky strip that I needed to staple to each tree. I followed the directions on the brochure that Alta left. It was truly a miracle. That spring and summer there were no web worms on any of the trees in our area.

So, now I live in a larger town or small city, but I still have the utmost respect for feed stores and agricultural agents. They make the world go round.