A modern Yankee in Queen Lizzie’s Court (with apologies to the monarchy and Mark Twain)

My mother-in-law busted the mold for mothers-in-law just like my own mom broke the mold for step-mothers (but that’s perhaps for another writing.) Jo, widowed for four years, met and married an equally wonderful widower, a Brit, a fairy-tale Prince Charming who whisked her away from Indiana to a cottage on the English Channel, complete with castles, bobbies, and tea time. 

But it didn’t take too terribly long before she found out that, to put it in her own words, “England is a foreign country!”  Not only do they drive on the OTHER side of the road, not only do they have OTHER spellings for words like “tire”, there are also OTHER customs strange to someone even as genteel and experienced like my dear Jo. 

Case in point: hosting a dinner party one day, she picked up the nicely made dessert and passed it to the person