State of the states: Happy days and homespun ways

Lafayette appears to be Middle America in a very big way. Our three-storey exchange home is lovely, set in a leafy outer suburb it is all space, comfort and convenience. It has a large private back garden rich in lush green lawn that slopes down to a fat pond that sprawls behind most of the houses on this side of the street. There is a stunning red cardinal resident in yellow bushes skirting the garden, and a crazy obsessive woodpecker rat-a-tat-tatting a nest in the house siding. Caulk. We're onto it. Caulk, flying silver foil pellets, and other such weapons of singular destruction are being employed to rid us of the pesky tapping bird.

On one of our early adventures we checked out the local Lafayette historic farmer's market, one of the longest running in the States, harking back to 1839. Local growers are there selling fresh corn on the cob by the truckload, ornamental orange, green and yellow pumpkin gourds especially grown for Hallowe'en, and Amish-baked angel food cakes, rich cherry pies and snickerdoodles-- a magic mix of sugar and cinnamon cookies, delicious with hot sweet tea.

We ate at the Coney Island Sunshine Diner on the corner which surely came direct from the set of Happy Days, with red-checked oilcloth tablecovers, slide-in booths with moulded red seat backs, and jumpin' jukebox decor, it purely oozes homely waitresses bearing giant servings of 'biscuits' (scones) doused in thick dollops of pale gravy topped off with traditional bottomless, albeit desperately bland, American coffee. Their buttermilk pancakes spilled over the sides of massive breakfast plates, two measured an inch in height, topped even higher with a mountain of artery hardening whipped fluffy butter and lashings of corn syrup. Seconds anyone? Brunch for five (literally mountains of food!) cost $25.00, with coke and coffee on tap.

In a downtown square one evening Lafayette Citizens Brass Band conducted an excellent concert just on dusk, attended mainly by the grey-haired contingent in town. We had hoped for a bit of bunting: the red, white and blue flounces and flags we've often seen on television, but we had even better: two old dears hopped out of their walkers with a little of their old spry and began waving their hats specially striped in patriotic colours, whipping the crowd into a real stars and stripes fervour. Those were the days, my friends.

Someone in the crowd recognized us from somewhere, perhaps from the performance of The Mousetrap the night before that played at the Civic Theatre. That started a flutter of queries wanting to know about our accents, and whether Australia is anywhere near Austria, and if we drove all the way to America. We must remember to carry a map with us, we think, as these continue to be the most frequently asked questions we are faced with in the states.

On Labour Day we found ourselves at the Globalfest Celebrations in the Moreton Community Centre celebrating cultural diversity in Lafayette. Turkish belly dancers vied for stage time with German bierhalle musicians and Irish Ceili dancers, and the smell of delicious ethnic foods wafted along corridors filled with Indian bead art, Chinese calligraphy demonstrations, and Nordic folk art pieces. It is all wholesome, finger-lickin' good, traditional amiable fun.