EXPLAIN AWAY

My husband was in Bahrain. I was at home in Saint Cloud. I was attempting to explain to him, yet again, the nightmarish challenge of being me; I was attempting my explanation through the miracle of a long distance cell phone connection.

“No, no, it’s the television in the bedroom that doesn’t work now.”

“What happened?” he asked.

I could almost see him running his hand through his hair. It’s the gesture my husband makes when he wishes he could turn himself into a earless deep sea squid so he doesn’t have to listen to me.

“I told you. I had to take the VCR from the television in the bedroom and hook it up to the TV on the porch so I can exercise out on the porch and now the television in the bedroom doesn’t work anymore.”

“What VCR? We don’t have a VCR.”

Now that he mentioned it, VCR did sound kind of wrong. I crumpled my eyebrows together and came up with a better name.

“Not VCR then. That machine. You know that movie machine.”

“DVD player?” he offered.

“Okay, whatever.”

“And why did you have to unhook the DVD player inside the house?”

I made a rude noise. “Ugh! I told you! Because the channel changer thingy for the movie machine on the porch is lost and I can’t scroll through my exercise tape so I can’t work out and keep my stupid girlish figure so you won’t leave me for an idiot baby bimbo.”

“Tape?” he asked, feeling his way through my mouse maze of thinking. “We . . . we don’t still have . . . tapes? Do we?”

I switched my cell phone from one sweaty ear to the other sweaty ear.

“Okay, fine, not tapes. Whatever those roundish little record looking things are. Good grief. Try to keep up.”

“DVD’s?”

“Yes. That’s it. I had to unhook the DVD player from the television in the bedroom and hook it up to that hunk of junk television on the porch and now I can’t make the television in the bedroom work because there are a thousand wires going to a million kinds of nowhere. Arrrgggghh.”

“Why can’t you exercise in the bedroom?”

“What? Are you kidding me?  I told you why” I said, thinking that I was pretty sure that I had told him why I couldn’t exercise in the bedroom, probably, maybe  . . . “because the rug scoots when I do jumping jacks and the tile hurts my knees. You know my knees, the knees with the burning in the bone parts knees? Who cares? I want to exercise on the porch. That’s why.”

Then he said that thing that makes me wish that I were a Killer Whale playing with my food by tossing it into the air on the Discovery channel.

“Linda, is the TV plugged in?”

I couldn’t answer him because various teeth were colliding up against each other.

He kept right on going. “Why did you unhook the DVD player again?”

“Because if I don’t exercise soon I will break someone.”

“Don’t you mean something?”

“No.”

Long distance phone calls are tricky. Long distance explanations are challenging. But sometimes, long distances are your best bet when building a happy and healthy marriage.

Linda (High Impact) Zern

  

A DOG'S TAIL

When you hear yourself screaming, “Sherwood, grab the hose; the dog is on fire,” you know that you are—once again—the butt of some giant cosmic joke, not to mention the dog.

We are country folk. We sit outside a lot.  We make fires. We own dogs. We sit outside around fires with our dogs. It’s a lifestyle. You have to respect it.  (If we sat outside naked, beating tom-toms while reciting cowboy poetry with our dogs you’d have to respect that too—if it’s a lifestyle. That’s what I have learned in college.)

I am a lazy fire pit builder. I like to hearken back to my Native American heritage by slapping a random length of wood onto the fire, letting the ends hang over the sides. When the log burns in half, you shove the ends in. Easy. Peasy. Others in my family would rather court hernias by slapping logs against trees, whacking branches on the ground, or slamming hunks of solid wood over their knees to try to produce the “correct” size.  Mostly, they just look like learning disabled Sasquatches. It’s fun to watch.

The down side to my method of fire building is that blazing hunks of junk sometimes fall out of the fire pit, raining down like space junk re-entering the atmosphere.

Sometimes blazing hunks of junk fall into the dog’s tail. No, not sometimes—once, it happened once.

What I learned when the dog’s tail caught on fire: I have the reaction time of a Navy Seal, Sarah (my daughter-in-law) who is very pregnant does not have the reaction time of a Navy Seal, and my husband is . . . a learning disabled Sasquatch.

CoCo, my very hairy collie/retriever mix, had cuddled up to the fire pit when a blazing bit of junk fell out of the fire pit into her very hairy tail bits. Her tail fluff began to smoke. She was oblivious. I leapt out of my chair and screamed, “The dog is on fire.”

Sarah screamed and tried not to wet her pants. Sherwood continued playing ‘Angry Birds’ on his machine. The dog’s tail blazed up.

Reacting like a Ninja taking vitamin-B 12, I started to kick sand onto the dog’s tail.  I continued screaming, “Sherwood get the hose the dog is on fire.”

CoCo remained oblivious. She may have been playing ‘Angry Birds’ in her head.

A smell straight from Dante’s Inferno rolled over me. Coughing bitter coughs, I started to stomp on the dog’s tail.  She lifted her head, confused.

Sarah continued screaming and doing Kegel exercises.

I stomped on the dog until a giant chunk of frizzled and singed tail fuzz fell out of her tail. She got up, walked to the opposite side of the fire pit, flopped into the sand, and fell asleep—probably wondering when I’d had my stroke.

Sherwood looked up from his machine, annoyed that I was yelling at him.

“What did you want me to do about it?” he said.

I thought about becoming an angry bird and pecking him to death. I threw more wood into the fire pit instead. CoCo snored. Sarah tried to catch her breath. Our lifestyle continued.

And you have to respect that or be labeled a judgmental, diversity hating, cowboy poetry bigot.

Linda (Fire Retardant) Zern

 

   

Eye of the Bird

Sandhill Cranes are big, tall birds. Some of them are big enough to look me in the eye—almost. They have a wingspan of almost seven feet across. Having them hang out in one’s yard is close to being in an episode of “Animals are Better than People” on the National Geographic channel. (Note: There’s no such show on the National Geographic channel, so don’t look for it.)

In the spring Sandhill Cranes have a funky sex dance they do that resembles teenagers dancing at a high school homecoming. It’s delightful.

Sandhill Cranes are way cool. Except when they aren’t.

We had a family of cranes start dancing around our front yard; we were so thrilled we started throwing money into a ball cap for them. No, not really, actually we started throwing bits of bread into the grass. The Sandhill Cranes loved it.

We loved the Sandhill Cranes. Except when we didn’t.

Over time, feeding the cranes became something of a family tradition. The cranes grew used to finding bread littered across the ground, seemingly from Heaven. We grew used to providing manna to the cranes like creatures of heavenly love and mercy.

We laughed when the cranes met us at the car, trumpeting for bread. We chortled when they began to wait for us at the back door, expectant. We joked when they began to stalk the smaller members of our family: the children, the old people, me. There was uncomfortable giggling when the cranes began to surround the house at odd hours and holler for bread.

On the day that I ran out of Sandhill Crane bread and the birds threatened me with outstretched pterodactyl wings and nightmarish screams of rage, I ran back into the house. I began to search the pantry for something else to feed the gigantic birds. Birds whose knife sharp beaks lined up with my eye sockets perfectly. I found some stale coffee cake shoved behind a bag of powdered sugar. I grabbed it—the cake not the sugar.

Standing behind the screen door I threw the coffee cake at the demon cranes and made a run for the barn. They rejected the coffee cake, registered the bait and switch, and came after me like Navy Seals pursuing Somali pirates. I ran and screamed.

The birds hollered and ran. Throwing myself into the tack room I slammed the door shut just as the beasts careened up onto the stoop. Through the dusty glass of the door, I saw the cranes tipping their heads back and forth, their beady eyes glistening as they worked out a way to destroy me.

Sandhill Cranes like bread.  Except when it’s coffee cake.

So this is what I learned from the Sandhill Cranes:  free bread makes for mean cranes; handouts do not breed gratitude and patience; cake is no substitute for bread; getting Sandhill Cranes off the dole is dangerous. They tend to object. Strongly. I’m just glad we didn’t start throwing tuna fish to the bobcats in the back pasture.

Linda (Wild Kingdom) Zern