ALLEGEDLY

The Yard Circle

Watching that Elvis impersonator dude get arrested, interrogated, searched, accused, and observed with a jaundiced eye for possibly whipping up a batch of Ricin in his kitchen made me wonder. What would our neighbors say about us on cable TV if they hauled us off for cooking up crazy crap in a crock-pot?

Allegedly.

See something. Say something.

I’ve been trying to imagine what the neighbors are “seeing” at our place when they peek over our wire field fence, realizing if I said something every time I saw something at my neighbor’s house, I’d have the See-Something-Say-Something folks on speed dial.

I mean how weird does it have to be to qualify as something?

It’s not hard to imagine one of those breathless, throaty cable reporters stuffing a microphone in my next-door neighbor’s face and asking, “So, is it true that the Zern family had some unusual weekend rituals? Allegedly?”

“Rituals, no, but they seemed to be overly found of circling.”

Reporter nods and asks, “Satanic symbols? Hex signs? Crop circles?”

“No. Nothing like that, but when they sit outside in their crappy lawn chairs they always wind up in a circle. But it migrates.”

“What does?” The reporter will look perplexed but intrigued.

“The yard circle. In the summer they circle under that big maple tree, but in the winter they land on the septic tank.” Our neighbor gets tired of pointing and drops his hand.

“And did you see that as an indication that they were cooking up crazy crap in a crock-pot.”

Hesitating, my neighbor will scratch his head. “No. But those grandkids are constantly peeing on stuff.”

There it is. Public urination and yard circles.  Our family would be good for at least a charge of felony mischief.

But that’s not as bad as what goes on at our next-door neighbor’s house.  Allegedly.

Our neighbor’s eight-year old son informed my daughter that on Sundays his family likes to practice “knifing.”

She asked, “What’s knifing?”

“You know,” he said, “when you make a target and practice throwing knives at it.”

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that our family is way behind on its knifing practice. Don’t tell.

Linda (Don’t Look. Don’t Tell.) Zern

  

DIVERSITY MUCH?

During the festival of Eid this year, our Moroccan neighbors rented a bouncy house, enjoyed carnival games, and slaughtered forty farm animals (assorted goats, sheep, and three cows.) We enjoyed our neighbor’s festival from the comfort of our lawn chairs under the live oak tree in our backyard.

I for one, appreciated experiencing a slice of Morocco without having to travel to Morocco, but that’s our neighborhood for you. It’s stuffed full of diversity.

The festival of Eid celebrates the end of Ramadan and is as close to a hoot-a-nanny as you can get without being either a hoot or a nanny. Celebrating Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, goats and sheep are butchered to honor the sparing of Isaac when God provided a “ram in a thicket” (see the book of Genesis in that big book called The Bible.)

There’s a lot of talk of diversity at Rollins College where I go to school. We speak of it. We debate it. We celebrate it. We swim in it. But until you’ve listened to your neighbors bone sawing their way through forty animal carcasses you’ve only dreamed of a universe full of the diverse; you’ve never lived next to it.

Grab a lawn chair and come on over if you want the real experience.

Daughter #1 pulled her lawn chair up next to mine and asked, “What’s happening now?”

“Not much. The traffic jam on Kissimmee Park Road of folks coming with coolers and gunnysacks has eased off and everyone seems to be settling in to party down.”

“What’s that sound?”  The air rang with the energetic sounds of whirring blades.

“The bone saw.”

“Well, I’ll be,” she murmured, popping the top of a Coke.

“Hang on,” I instructed, leaning to my left, her right.  “Check that kid out that just dropped his Igloo cooler.”

She leaned forward. “Which one?”

“Right there. The cooler on the ground, see it? The one with the haunch of beast that just rolled out.”

“Sure enough,” she said. “What is that? A leg? A rump? A pot roast?”

“Not sure, but it’s absolutely got a hoof hanging off of it. Pass the popcorn,” I said.

A good time was had by all.  

Mr. Abe, our neighbor, asked me later if their festival of butchery bothered us at all. I told him, “Nope. There’s a reason we don’t live in a sub-division with a homeowner’s association.  It’s your property and your goats and your bone saw. Slaughter away.”

He gave us a goat in appreciation. The goat was alive. We took it. And that, my friends, is diversity in all its undiluted purity.

Linda (Neighborhood Watch) Zern  

      

   

PUBLISHED @ HUMORPRESS.COM (MORE SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION)

Hair Of The Dog
By Linda L. Zern, Florida

My husband and I got rid of our kids the old fashioned way. We swaddled them, wiped them, smothered them, adored them, bossed them, and then firmly and finally kicked them out. They went. It was too late. We were addicted to the swaddling, wiping, smothering, adoring, and bossing. We were addicted to the caring—so we got a dog.

The dog arrived just as the kids escaped. She was free, adorable, and covered in hair. That dog and the fur coat she came wrapped in was proof positive that my husband and I had lost what little equilibrium we had managed to cobble together over the years. Just as our home had become clean, comfortable, and hypoallergenic, we filled it with a mammal that shed the equivalent of sixteen angora sweaters per lunar cycle. She’s a hair explosion. We adapted.

We started buying lint rollers in case lots from a start-up company in Indonesia. We qualified for the large quantity discount and the company Christmas card. Our account rep’s name is Omja; it’s a name that means, “born of cosmic unity.”

Last night my husband cracked open a new case of lint rollers and then pointed out that we were closing in on our thirty plus year wedding anniversary. He was trying to be romantic, but I got distracted by a tumbleweed of dog hair as it drifted languidly through the air in front of my nose. Waving a lint roller like a road flare, I expertly whipped floating fur from the air.

“Hold still,” he said, and with a flick of his wrist ran a lint roller down the back of my Winnie the Pooh pajamas.

I trembled and jumped a bit. It was hard to tell if the ‘old spark’ was still there, or I if was being electrocuted by a mix of sticky tape and static cling. Either way, I felt my innards flip-flop and my neck hair crackle.

“Sorry, I thought—you know—the shedding.” He gave me a half grin and a shrug. “There was dog hair on your . . . back parts.”

I watched a single hair drift and settle onto the top of his skull. Nodding, I rolled his head, noting how much white hair belonged exclusively to him now and not on the dog’s butt. Where had the time gone?

Climbing into bed, my husband lint-rolled his pillow and then mine, while I ran a lint roller across the part of the bedspread that catches our chin drool. In tandem, we ripped fur clogged sticky strips free from our matching rollers, wadded them into clingy balls, and tossed the wads over our shoulders.

“Honey, have I told you that the last thirty plus years have been,” I said, pausing, as another errant tuft of fur floated by, “a thousand kinds of fun.” I watched it settle and then drift like snow across the bedspread. I flashed on the image of a snowman wearing the shaggy coat of a mixed breed Golden Retriever with a dash of Boarder Collie. I chuckled softly.

Smiling his special smile at my apparent good humor, my husband ran his lint roller down the front of my Winnie the Pooh pajamas. I giggled. A dog hair stuck in my lip balm, making my lip itch. Lint rolling my upper lip, I returned his special smile with my own special smile.

Just as he leaned in to kiss me goodnight, our sixty-pound canine hair factory vaulted onto the bed and shook. Dog hair showered down like dandelion seeds in May. We lint rolled each other’s faces. Pushing in between us the dog flipped onto her back, burped a burp that smelled vaguely of plastic wrap, shoved her four legs skyward, and fell asleep in a puddle of her own shedding.

“A thousand kinds of fun,” I repeated, quietly.

We tapped our lint rollers together. They stuck. We left them that way all night.

Now that’s love born of cosmic unity.

BEWARE! Scary Girl Stuff (A Classic)

For the past fifty plus years I’ve been a girl person, during a dizzying period of technological advances that have allowed mankind (oops, I mean human beings without apparent gender) to fly to the moon, dive the Mariana trench, and humiliate me in every conceivable way.

 Cathy Rigby, the first US gymnast to win a medal in the Olympics, introduced me, and a whole host of teenage girls to the wonders of modern feminine hygiene products. Cathy made Stayfree Maxi pads cool, and she made you think the you could be upside down on a four inch balance beam and not have a girl care in the world. I must have gotten stuck trying out the maxi-pad prototypes, because I never could do a handstand on a balance beam, ever, but that’s Madison Avenue for you.  You can find out more about Cathy Rigby, the Maxi pad-wearing gymnast, at the Museum of Menstruation.

 Later, after my first mammogram, a technological marvel that can look inside your boobs—if your boobs are really, really flat, I was told that I would need a needle nosed biopsy and that the incision would be no larger than a grain of rice.

 “Brown or instant?” That’s what I should have asked.

 With the image of a grain of rice emblazoned on my mind, I walked into the biopsy room, wearing a paper washcloth, noticed that there was a great big hole in the surgical table, and had a hideous vision of my future.

 Horrified, I turned to the strange man about to dig around in my mammary gland and asked, “Is that hole in the middle of that table for what I think it’s for?”

 “Yep.”  And it was.

 Once I flopped my slightly used, less than perky bosom into the mammary gland hole in the middle of the table the words “Boob Loogie” came to mind.

 When the highly touted anesthesia refused to deaden my dangling breast, and I complained loudly, the strange man digging around in my boob with a needle, said, “Well, some breasts are more dense than others.”

 “Dude, the end of my boob just hit your shoelace, how dense can it be?”

 Don’t even get me started on four C-sections in six years. For my first baby they shaved me “nipples to knees.” No, seriously that was the official medical expression. By the fourth baby, I was watching the entire surgery in a giant mirror, angled for my viewing pleasure.

 Recently, my daughters were describing the latest in advancements in the way of the latest in gynecological examination chairs.

Apparently, there is a new “exam” chair that mimics the space shuttle in the act of taking off. A girl patient climbs in and with a flick of a switch, stirrups are deployed, the part under your bum disappears, and the chair reclines—until your head is poking down and your girl parts are poking up. When my oldest daughter demonstrated I felt faint and had to put my head between my knees.

 “I cannot do it,” I murmured from between my knees, “I simply cannot risk “The Chair.” I will be making my next appointment with a certified witch doctor of the noble savage variety. As Scarlett O’hara is my witness, I swear it.”

 I love being a girl.  I love the shoes, the clothes, the makeup, and the mystique of it all, but honestly, is it just me or is the modern world out of its technological mind?

 Linda (Girls Just Want to Have Fun) Zern

PS   Have everything checked constantly so you can keep wearing those darling girl shoes.  

SHAME, SHAME

One of the kids in my first grade class took our teacher’s shiny, new magic markers and flushed them down the classroom toilet, causing a massive plumbing crisis. It was a big overflowing deal.

I don’t know why the kid did it. Because he/she was a crumb?  Because there was a toilet and it had a flush handle? Because magic markers are evil?

I never understood it. Not then and not now.

The unfortunate result of the above vandalism is that the principle came into our first grade class and gave us “the talking to.” It was probably the finest speech I’ve ever heard on civic responsibility, the evils of clogged drains, and the importance of feeling guilt for misdeeds. He threatened us with not being allowed to use the classroom potty—ever again, amen.

Halfway through his lecture I broke down weeping uncontrollably, thinking that I should, would, must confess to a crime that I had not committed. I wasn’t guilty. But I felt guilty.

I felt like something you’d flush down the toilet.

To my knowledge the guilty party was never caught, and I know for a fact that the only one who broke during the principle’s big talk was the skinny, little freckled girl in the third row—me.

What I learned that day in first grade is this 1) that a single wicked person can clog the toilet up for everyone 2) that angry officials don’t have much in their quiver except angry words, silly new rules, and finger pointing to get to the bottom of the clog, and 3) the only kids who ever really feel bad about bad stuff happening are the good kids.

I still think about that kid, and it makes me so mad because it was so unfair. And it’s still so unfair that one or two or a handful can create situations that wind up punishing us all. Shame on them. 

Linda (Sad and Mad) Zern      

  

      

RACE FOR THE FRONT GATE

He thought I’d shut the front gate. I thought he’d shut the front gate. Truth be told, the front gate was swinging open like an old man’s zipper at half-mast.

And I had just opened the barn gate, letting the horses romp off to the front pasture where the front gate flapped wide.

My husband looked at me stupefied as his foundation quarter horse, our Morgan posse horse, my Arabian mare, and the kid’s chubby Welsh pony thundered passed him.

“The front gate’s open. Are you nuts?”

He took off, trying to outrun the herd.

Now, I’m not saying my husband has lost a step or two over the years, but dang that man has lost a step or two.

Sherwood Zern used to be the human equivalent of a gazelle-panther-hawk. I remember watching him react to the crack of a softball bat like a hunting panther attacking, cover left field with the ground eating strides of a gazelle, sail through the air—horizontal to the ground like a hawk swooping—catch the softball in the gaping maw of his glove, hit the ground with a forward tumble and roll, and then catapult to his feet, holding the fly ball in triumph over his head—while talking trash about the opposing team.

That man could move.

As I watched him shuffle, skip, dogtrot to the front gate, I couldn’t help but get a little nostalgic and misty eyed. I sure did miss my husband’s ACL, the one that he pretty much snapped off in his right knee when he jumped a fence trying to help our neighbor catch his rampaging bull. That was the same knee that he’d dislocated while playing softball like a gazelle-panther-hawk, and he rounded second that one time, trying to stretch a double into a triple.

That time he wound up in outpatient knee surgery, got juiced up with sodium pentothal, and proceeded to demand that I do unspeakable things to him while in the recovery room.

That man had some brass.

But then I remembered that the horses were trying to make a break for the tasty grass along the front ditch next to the road.

“You’re never going to make it,” I shouted. “Wave your arms.”

I took off at a hopping, skip-walk to help out, but then I realized that trying to run only made me wet my pants. So I stopped.

I sure did/do miss my bladder control.

The arm waving worked. The herd skidded away to the tasty grass along the front fence and the gate was shut. But not without the sad and sobering reminder that our days of racing carefree and wild with the herd were over and that now our place was shuffling along as best we could at the rear of the pack, hoping that we’re not the first one to be picked off by wolves.

FORGET THAT!

I take combat kickboxing at the gym where I practice kicking wolves in their snarly faces on a regular basis, and I can always start wearing Depends. What we’ve lost in speed we more than make up for in arm waving wisdom and sheer tenacious wolf punching meanness.  

Linda (Roundhouse to the Face) Zern   

   

ARTWORK BY THE AUTHOR for her book "MOONCALF"

Mooncalf:  A naive or foolish person, given to gullibility. Originally, it was believed that a mooncalf was an animal born under the light of a full moon, causing deformities and handicaps. 

Mooncalf - coming in the fall of 2013

Murder in the First Degree

Miss Kitty Plotting

My husband’s horse, Miss Kitty, is a big, sorrel, foundation quarter horse; she is a sneak thief and a plotter. She plots mayhem and, I am convinced, is capable of murder most foul.

Recently, she tried to kill me with a bag of concrete.

While Sherwood traveled the world Miss Kitty tipped over a ladder, broke onto the back porch, and bent a metal gate rail with her mind or her enormous block of a head. Then she dragged bales of hay out of the hay room with her teeth.

Then she tried to kill me.

When she couldn’t reach any more hay, she dragged a fifty-pound bag of Quick-Crete off the workbench.

She then dropped the fifty-pound bag into the goat’s water bucket. Where it became a stone or a rock or a stony rock of a stumbling block.

Here’s where it gets diabolical.

Miss Kitty, knowing that I would leave the enormous chunk of newly minted rock right where it dropped so that I could teach my husband an important lesson on how difficult my life is while he’s out traveling the world, stepped back and waited.

The lump of rock remained where it hardened.

It was only a matter of time before I fell over the rock lump and bashed knee, hip, elbow, and hand into the cement floor of the workshop. Somehow Miss Kitty knew. She knew that Mavis the Goat would be chasing me through the gate, trying to beat me into the feed room. She knew that I would forget about trying to teach my husband a lesson because I would be trying to teach that idiot goat a lesson. She knew that I would be distracted and fall over that concrete rock. She knew.

As I lay on the floor listening to my bones rattle and trying to decide if I’d broken my will to live, I cried and blamed my husband.

Miss Kitty is his horse after all.

Linda (Black and Blue) Zern

           

     

    

QUICKIES: Postings that are Short and Sweet

I LIKE TO CALL THESE PICTURES - NOAH THE CHICKEN'S ARK

How not to raise chickens: Move them to the cattle tank outside from the shower, turn the water  on to fill one end, and forget about it. The chicks have retreated to the ark of their feeder. The ducklings are digging it. 

Luckily the dogs started barking their heads off when the chicks started cheeping their heads off.

Tragedy averted. All is well in Chickville. 

The Great Cat Roundup of 2013

Pile O' Kittens

We live in the country and by country I mean that at night we can hear coyotes yipping and during the day we can drive 4.7 miles to our choice of five different banks and the Dunkin Donuts. We live over the bridge and past the sharp curve, next to the pasture where the wild turkeys roost.

We also live on a dead end road right down from the county animal control center (i.e. the pound.) Which means that city folks, people who live five minutes from the bank, who just can’t bring themselves to take their pregnant girl cat to the pound drive to the end of our street and dump Fluffy off in front of our house.

Then they tell their children that they’ve taken Fluffy to the country. Big fat liars.

Fluffy immediately goes feral. Feral is a word that means wild. It’s the equivalent of Fluffy becoming a saber-toothed tiger with a dash of bad tempered panther. Then pregnant feral Fluffy takes up residence under our chicken coop, looking to eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow she delivers—two to two hundred kittens.

The next thing I know, my husband and I are forced to organize a cat roundup complete with live animal traps, bait, welding gloves, and assorted ancient hunting methods.

Or as our granddaughter Zoe (9) said to her mom on their way to our house, “I sure hope I don’t miss the cat roundup.”

Cat roundups may sound fun. They’re not. They’re harrowing invitations to divorce as evidenced by the following exchange.

“Babe, hurry! Get the cat carrier! I’ve got her,” I said, during a recent cat roundup. Wearing gardening gloves, I’d managed to sneak up on a hissing, spitting mother of SEVEN new kittens and grab her by the scruff of her neck. She’d had her SEVEN adorable kittens in our hen’s nesting box.

“Hang on,” he yelled, “I need to find my welding gloves.”

The black, yellow-eyed demon continued to hiss and spit while I started to sweat. Her tail whipped back and forth. Her SEVEN kittens yawned and stretched.

“Hey,” he continued, “where are my welding gloves?”

“Are you kidding? I’m holding a panther in here by my arthritic fingertips.”

The hissing became snarling.

He wandered into the chicken coop, pulling on his gloves and carrying the cat carrier upside down.

“Seriously, Dude, hurry up.” The snarling exploded into yowling mixed with screaming. Mine.

I tried to push the cat into the fifty-dollar deluxe leather cat carrier. She shape shifted into a flying squirrel and launched her thrashing body, claws extended, at my husband’s right eye. There was more screaming. His.

She landed against the back wall of the chicken coop and stuck.

“Get her!” She shape-shifted into an invisible banshee ghost and disappeared.

Her SEVEN adorable kittens meowed sweetly, flexed their tiny dagger claws, and fell asleep.

“Why did you let her get away?” I snapped.

“You dropped her.”

“My hands are small. You know that.”

The conversation deteriorated from there and before it was over he was calling me a big whiney baby, and I was accusing him of being a foot-dragging slacker. And we don’t even own any cats.  

Please, I’m begging you. Take care of your cats. The marriage you save may be mine.

Linda (Great White Hunter) Zern  

     

  

QUICKIES: Postings that are Short and Sweet

It's like having a 1, 200 pound toddler in the barn. Miss Kitty, my husband's horse, bent the top rail of the gate so that she could pull hay out of the hay room.

She wants what she wants.

NAKED BOY TROUBLE (A Classic ZippityZern)

Dateline:  New Smyrna Beach; A Summer Gone By; A Mexican Restaurant: 

Adam, the youngest boy chick in my nest, once ate **a heaping pile of raw jalapeno peppers in a single sitting—in public, in front of witnesses, for cash and prizes. 

It was on a Saturday night, and the folksinger at the restaurant sang “Copacabana.” The family watched. It was a bet.

You know the kind of bet I mean. The one that goes like, “I’ll bet you one hundred dollars you won’t eat that massive pile of jalapeno peppers that you’ve just picked off your nacho’s, because you despise them, and because they’ll probably make you throw up.”

You know! A boy bet.

Adam won the bet. The other boy involved? His father. Of course.

Items that do NOT work to alleviate jalapeno pepper tongue burn include:  water, soda (diet or regular), licking the restaurant’s checkered table cloth, sugar, salt, tongue scraping with (fork, knife, spoon, nacho chip, napkins—cloth or paper—bread,) air drying, or sucking the waitress’ apron.

Boys are so weird; I said it when I was nine, and I stand by it. 

Watching Adam chew, snot, and cry his way through the entire heap of toxic peppers was revolting, boarding on disgusting with a dash of horrific. But worse was the four hours of male speculation on what a full cup and three quarters of jalapeno peppers was going to do to Adam’s gastrointestinal track and when.

Boys are so weird and gross.

My son-in-law was happy to add to the discussion by relating a charming collegiate Taco Bell – hot sauce packet story. They bet some guy fool in their college dorm that he couldn’t choke down one hundred packets of Taco Bell hot sauce. He couldn’t. Seems the guy “melted down” (i.e. vomited) at fifty hot sauce packets. Disgusting but highly amusing was Phillip’s official conclusion.

It’s a wonder to me that any members of their sex survive to reproduce. My boys thundered out of my uterus counting the days until they could hurl sharp sticks, tie up the cat, kidnap the Barbie dolls, skewer themselves with homemade arrows, and ride the pony naked (true story—don’t ask.)

I knew that I was dealing with a brand new kind of barbarian when I heard myself saying, “There is no playing of computer games in this house NAKED, mister—or pony riding! Put your pants on!)

I tried to think of all the ways they could break the rules while naked. I couldn’t.

Please don’t misunderstand. I love boys. They are fun. They are game. They are always ready to go hiking through the mud of The Little-Big Econ State Park knocking down the giant Banana spider webs that block the trail. They use big sticks—the boys—not the spiders.

Boys are exciting and unpredictable, and you absolutely never know when the father-to-be is going to show up at your baby shower in a yellow convertible Volkswagen Beetle without his pants on—for a joke. It happened to a good friend of mine, and it wasn’t a problem until my friend trotted all her girlfriends out to meet her husband, the beloved father of her child. True story.  She had a boy.

I love boys, but sometimes I don’t feel sorry for them. As we left the restaurant, my husband (a boy) whispered, “Where am I going to get a hundred bucks to pay Adam?”

“Not out of my girly girl purse,” I said, while batting my long eyelashes.

Gentlemen, I salute you and all those like you. You make life interesting, colorful, and fun, but honestly, put on some pants!

Linda (Barbarian Queen Mother) Zern

**It really was approximately and easily one and three quarters cup worth of peppers, should anyone wish to replicate the manly challenge of it all.