I’ll be honest, moving to the Dallas – Fort Worth area of Texas from Southern California took a little getting used to. So much was different. Like why can’t people move over when they are going to turn right and what the heck is sweet tea? These were just a few of the questions that nagged at me as I made my first real trip to the grocery store my first week here.

I knew logically it would take time to adapt and I should just roll with the changes. However, it seemed like every few hours I started feeling like I was on another planet. I learned quickly that it doesn’t take a huge deviation from the normal to upend my sense of existential balance. I pushed my cart down the grocery aisle picking out the normal items, something I had done hundreds of times with no major epiphanies or surprises – coffee, bread, peanut butter, eggs, orange juice, vodka. Vodka… Vodka, where are you? I stared intently at the offerings in the beer and wine aisle certain there was some section I had overlooked. Maybe they group products differently? A very kind woman stocking shelves offered to help me and laughed softly when I explained my confusion. “Oh, Honey. We don’t sell liquor in the grocery stores in Texas. Y’all need to drive out for that.” She walked away and I grabbed a six pack of beer as consolation. At home I announced the vodka situation to my husband while unloading the bags onto the kitchen counter. “Apparently we have to drive to another county or something to get to a liquor store.” He nodded in agreement. The neighbors down the street had stopped by to say welcome and the vodka thing had come up. There was a long silence as I thought about our options. Most of the boxes were still packed and we could probably find a buyer for the house we just closed on ten days earlier, but were we the kind of people who would let something like this make us give up and go back to California? I can tell you – no, we are not. All of our underwear, every fork, every Tom Clancey novel we owned was in Texas. I had already given up my California driver’s license to the not-so-nice lady at the Department of Public Safety (DMV for all you Cali-people). As far as I was concerned that made us Texans and Texans are resourceful. So we got in the pickup truck, drove 18 miles (I exaggerate) to the liquor store in the next county and stocked up our oversized pantry – like Texans. These days, liquor stores are a bit more convenient and I have seen a fair amount of this state beyond the county line. All I can say is Texas is still full of surprises.