She decided to take her back of the bus attitude to some place where she’d feel at home. She’d heard of a small town with an overly-hyphenated name across the river. She liked it that the town was originally named after a city in New Jersey. The next day she loaded all her stuff into the back seat of the Mustang, put the top down, and drove into a wide open future.

Lil took on a one-bedroom bed & breakfast in a modest clapboard wartime house on a side street. She entered into a business relationship with a peach grower, drawing on what she’d learned at the retreat to organize wedding receptions in the orchard and palatial farm house. On his tax return the grower expensed the partnership as a personal service contract. Shortly afterward the grower’s wife complained, and Lil backed off, not wanting to repeat the experience with Rick.

She also got her license to help people buy and sell houses. Her first day on the job she was sitting in the office reading the MLS listings, cataloguing the houses on a continuum from cutsey to kitschy to show-offy. She was wondering if she had enough stuff in her gris-gris bag to help her get her head around the houses, not to mention the people who might want to buy them. In the midst of this conundrum her first customer walked in. It was Mother Teresa Bellissimo.

“I hear this town’s got some real dirt!”

“Excuse me?”, said Lil.

“I said I hear this town’s got some real dirt, and I want to buy some of it. That place with the for sale sign on the sideroad, upwind of that @#$% village run by those #$% Mennon brothers. Them and their aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins. They’re all inbred, even the one that married the Mason. I’ll tell you, if those $%^&* think they can $%^&* with me I’ll @#$%% their @#$ @#$% all the way from here to Kingdom Come.”

Lil was new to the business, so didn’t realize this was normal language in a real estate office. She recoiled in her chair.

“And if you think you’re gunna #$% with me I’ll #$% your @#$ too. People are no %^&* good to you unless you’re serving them drinks in a bar. Even then they complain you’ve watered them down. And I’m not eye candy any more either, so I have no @#$% illusions of grandeur. I just want a place I can call home.”

Lil wanted to take a split second to reflect on that last concept, but Mother Teresa cut her off.

“Some place where I can get some of the dirt under my fingernails.”

Lil nearly said, “I hear that’s hard to avoid around here.”, but thought the better of it.

“And I’m paying cash.”

Lil perked up. “I can help you.”, she said.

It was a ten acre mini farm with an angel stone bungalow and a tin roof shed out back. A rotting help house was settling into the tile bed. An unnamed creek ran down the middle of the property, and a rusting irrigation pump sat beside it waiting to be primed. The acre of peach trees and two acres of basket grapes would keep Mother Teresa for life. The vendor, a long-lost cousin of the Mennons who had arrived after the war via Paraguay, included the orange tractor in the chattels, but made Mother Teresa pay for the fuel in the bulk tank. Mother Teresa thought the vendor’s name sounded similar to the young Oberleutenant’s, but she let it go. She built brick gate posts at the end of the driveway, and bolted chrome-plated lions onto them.

{Miller} Oh man we're finally in VirgilON!!! What a trip. I am not personally a great lover of scroll bars and I think www.hips.com/anchorbar is at the point where we need an episodic drop-down menu. There are a number of ways of doing that and I'm working on the code concepts right now. But first I have to get sober and try to remember what I just figured out. In the mean time, keep them cards and letters comin' in folks. I think the Oberleutenant is about to make a re-appearance somewhere along the Stone Road. Is he really who I think he is?

[Miller]I missed the deadstock truck job in Dunnville but that's just a symptom of the plot complexity issues. We can either keep running one page like a blog or set up with button links to episodes or different plot lines layered into the site. Don't forget, the ride Bill took into Homer was just another dream. Also, I don't know what you mean by "cash" herding but that's all part of this wild and crazy ride. Its possible all of the characters are actually in Virgil already and we don't even realize it.

Mother Teresa decided to try out the orange International and gave it run downtown, only a few miles from the mini farm. A Paraguayan pulled pork picnic was underway at the VirgilON ball park and she could not believe who was seated in the bleachers. Tears filled her eyes, her face flushed beet red and a plate heaped with pulled pork and jellied salad dropped from her hand into the waiting eye of Hank the blue tick nobody owned. And so began Mother Teresa's new life in VirgilON.

A shot rang out - so close it made Teresa's ears ring. Hank froze in full point. For a fleeting second the dog reminded Teresa of Bill's Field & Stream magazines that littered the floor of the peat bog trailer. "We have to move quickly, he'll only stay like that for a few seconds - he's trained by US Customs to find smuggled meat" came a soft voice with an English lilt. The school teacher, Penelope Whyte-Badger (pron. Badjaw), stood nearby with a smoking starter pistol in one hand and gesturing wildly with the other. As the two women moved back, Hank hit the pulled pork like a duck on a June bug. "Keep moving, keep moving" urged the teacher "he'll bring that up as quickly as he ate it." Hank was the undisputed speed eating champion [pet class] at the Virgil Stampede. He could eat the shimmering contents slid from a 20oz can of Dr. Ballard's in a single gulp. Easily fast enough to win but seconds later, to the gleeful delight of the children, he would always regurgitate it in the same idenfiable shape of the can it came from. He was famous for it and sure enough there was pulled pork and jellied salad heaved in all directions as Teresa and Penelope Whyte-Badger cleared the area.

Penelope Whyte-Badger had escaped the German occupation of Sark on a shipload of women and children evacuating to Canada as "war guests". She was sent to Virgil under protest with a group of other big girls assigned to the Women's Farm Service Program. She was a trained teacher on Sark and after several heated confrontations with the local MPP she received a letter of instruction from Ottawa to run the small school on Four Mile Creek Road which, to that point, had been closed under the War Measures Act. She read the letter with smug satisfaction and within two days the school was open for the first time in over a year. She always got what she wanted on Sark, and by gawd this farm town would be no different.

To the surprise of many, the big school marm fit in well and eventually became the organizer of the Childrens' Chuck Waggon Race at the community summer picnic. The children were banned from participating in the Stampede, following the unfortunate trampling of a pet ground hog called Darka. Cries of protest raised by the banning led the organizers to create the mini chuck waggon races which in the end proved more popular to the kids than the Stampede had ever been.

The teacher brought an element of culture to the Virgil community that no one there ever expected possible. She joined many organizations and initiated the Palatine Pashion Play which was such a hit even the Mennon Brothers volunteered for that year's production to be held in the ancient Servos Gristmill ruins.

Penelope Whyte-Badger had been in the process of firing the pistol to start the first mini chuck waggon race when Teresa dropped her plate. Teresa thanked her profusely for avoiding what would have most certainly been a messy disaster. Hank headed off towards the snack bar and as Teresa looked back towards the bleachers she was jolted again as the teacher fired the pistol to start the most bizarre race Teresa had ever seen.