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
