POSSE PERFECT

We are a civic-minded couple. We vote. We pay taxes. We watch cable news and shout at the television. We watch CNN in airports and shake our heads.

We volunteer in our communities.

We are Osceola County Volunteer Mounted Posse members. Well, my husband is one of those—him and Miss Kitty, his horse. I’m just applying to be a one of those—along with my free horse, Jayla. Right now, I’m in volunteer limbo, waiting to be finger printed, lie-detected, drug tested, and questioned. 

My free horse is waiting to grow hair in her ears, but that’s another story. 

Until the county calls, I rub lotion on my free horse, hoping she’ll grow hair. I practice posse stuff, and I continue to live clean and free.

Sometimes my posse husband and I ride our horses down to Lake Toho. We practice walking passed cows, plastic bags, deer bones, barking dogs, speeding cars, metal grates, and a graveyard. It’s important to de-sensitive horses to things that might frighten them, which is everything. Horses have been wolf food since God kicked Adam and Eve out of that garden. It’s made them skittery, the horses, not Adam and Eve. 

Adam and Eve are skittery for different reasons.

One of the jobs of the volunteer posse is to look for folks who’ve wandered off: kids, seniors, dead people.

The way I see it if I fell out of an airplane and ended up naked in the woods, not alive, I’d want somebody to come and find me besides the raccoons.

On a trip down to the lake we noticed a cloud of smell that murder mysteries like to refer to as decomp. We rode on. Our horses didn’t twitch or snort. 

“Wow, that’s some bad smell,” I said.

“Yep. That’s a big dead something all right,” Sherwood said.

We rode on. Passed the cows, next to the cemetery, down to the lake. And back again.

The smell had not dissipated. 

“Wow, that’s some bad smell,” I repeated.

“Yep. That’s a big dead something all right,” Sherwood said.

“And there it is,” I said. And there it was, someone’s really big, really stinky, really dead cow, in plain sight and in plain smell, in the pasture next to the road. Somehow we had managed to ride right passed a thousand pounds of odiferous cow. Some posse members we were.

“Wow, I’d have to give us a big F on locating dead cows in the woods.”

“Yep,” he said.

That’s country living. Wolves eat horses. Cows drop dead. Vultures fight the Bald Eagles for road kill. And free horses are never free.

But if you fell out of an airplane and ended up naked in the woods, not alive, you’d want someone to come and find you, even if their free horse had no hair in its ears.

Linda (Leg Up) Zern

I'll Scratch You All Over

The fourth brother in the grandkid gang was snotty, crying, dirty, and done. I pointed at it and told my daughter, “Take that one home, wash it, pat it, and put it to bed.”

The third brother in the gang felt that I had dissed his littlest brother.  He began to mutter. His face closed like a fist.

I tried to interpret his three-year old muttering.

Nothing.

“Heather,” I said to my daughter, “what’s he saying?”

She listened for a while.

With more optimism and hope than knowledge she reported, “He’s saying, ‘I’ll love you forever.’”

Zac’s face now resembled angry granite.

“Heather, look at his face. I don’t think he’s saying, ‘I’ll love you forever.’”

She sighed and then reported, “He’s saying, ‘I’ll scratch you all over.’”

Ah ha!  That was more like it.

This incident typifies what I like to call the Wishful Thinking Syndrome. It was wishful thinking that Zac was waving a fond goodbye to his old YaYa with charming declarations of undying devotion.

There’s a lot of Wishful Thinking Syndrome going around I’ve noticed.

It’s wishful thinking that professors who are busy trying to sell their books will be available to help you sell yours.

It’s wishful thinking that low self esteem, broken hearts, damaged egos, and sociopathic behavior can be fixed with quick cash. 

It’s wishful thinking that food without butter, salt, fat, and sugar is going to be as good as food with butter, salt, fat, and sugar.

It’s wishful thinking that bread and circuses are going to work forever. (See history of the Roman Empire)

It’s wishful thinking to believe that hot flashes will make you grow taller after age fifty or before age fifty.

It’s wishful . . . well, you get the picture.

Wishful thinking is a direct result of the modern notions that human beings deserve trophies for breathing, that buying a Wraptastic will change your life, and that everything billed as ‘based on a true story’ is true.

Get real. The three-year old kid is not telling you he’s going to love you forever—this time. This time he’s threatening to claw you with grubby fingernails. Sigh. It happens.

The news isn’t all bad, however.  

It is my hopeful wishful belief that for every busted thought-wish, there are those rare and dazzling moments when our wishful thoughts actually reflect reality and the kid is saying that he’s going to love you forever and the purchase of a Wraptastic does, in fact, change your life. But those moments are both rare and dazzling, which makes reality way better than wishful thinking—sort of like having a unicorn to ride to the free puppy store.

Linda (Scratch Resistant) Zern

              

 

MOONCALF - BOOK JACKET

COMING TO AMAZON.COM * SOON

Over Olympia and Leah’s heads, Americans race the Russians to the moon; on their television sets young men fight and struggle in the mud of Viet Nam. America holds its breath between heartbreaking tragedies.  

But on Miss Brinker’s school bus, in the seat with the rip in the green plastic, Olympia and Leah fall in love, the way children do:  immediately, completely, and without knowing or caring why they shouldn’t. Olympia Crooms, with her happy hair, and Leah Breck, with her silly red dog, are two smart girls.

Olympia's father works other men's orange groves in rural Central Florida and tells his daughter that school is the best way to reach for the stars. Leah's father moves his family from the Space Coast to the country where she and her brother can climb orange trees, imagine lions in the tall grass, and learn to feed baby cows milk from a bottle.

At Evegan Elementary, two smart girls find each other and have to decide if they will learn the hardest lessons of all—the false traditions of their fathers.

Vulture Watch

We live in a rural setting. I often blog about the idyllic nature of our enchanted lives: gamboling goats, preening ducks, rustling leaves, slowly circling vultures.

It’s a dream. 

Especially when our Muslim neighbors fire up their bone saw on the festival of Eid. It’s a traditional Middle Eastern festival celebrated with bouncy houses for the kids and large curved knives for the slitting of goat throats. 

It attracts nosy neighbors peaking over the fence (that would be me) and the nosy neighbor’s friend. (That would be my friend.) 

“Did I exaggerate?”

My friend watched as a bearded man neatly cut a goat’s throat. She looked at me with big eyes and said, “Not one bit.”

“I’m so glad you’re here to be a witness. I think maybe people think that I make this stuff up. I mean I do make stuff up but this is not the stuff I make up if I did make up stuff like this. You know what stuff I mean?”

“Not one bit.”

“Exactly.”

The sound of an air compressor kicked up and a man stuck an air tube into a goat carcass inflating the goat’s skin. The goat carcass took on the shape of a helium balloon on Main Street, Disney World. 

“Hey, that’s pretty slick,” she said.

Another man stripped the goat’s skin off like a used condom.

We looked at each other.

“Did I exaggerate?”

“Not one bit.”

My friend and I retired to our red neck yard circle to enjoy lemonade and eavesdropping on the neighbors. Wind rustled through the maple tree leaves. Crickets sang. We watched as the neighbors loaded a steer into a handy homemade guillotine then brought the knife down and . . . a child screamed with laughter from the bouncy house.

Overhead a circling wheel of vultures hovered over the neighbor’s gut pile. Sunlight sparkled in a bucket of blood tossed to lower the level of the blood barrel. A mockingbird practiced its bald eagle screech. Something skittered in the lantana.

My friend and I relaxed to the sound of the bone saw and the knowledge that Halloween was just right around the corner. 


Linda (Make Mine Mutton) Zern 

Lexicon

My husband can make numbers dance. It’s a computer analyst thing. Numbers take the place of words in my husband’s binary mind. What you can’t say with a 0 or a 1 isn’t worth saying.

I, on the other hand, love the wordy majiggles, sometimes making up new twinkle words right on the spot. Words are magic. In my mind, words are like pieces of a glorious puzzle that fit together in endless combinations to form blazing snapshots framed in braided twists of golden licorice.

You see the basic problem.

I spend my days tapping away at letters, blending them into words—also mowing, chopping, burning, edging, mucking, grooming, raking, planting, growing, dragging, and nailing, but that’s a subject for another day.

My husband reads what I write and says, “Good.”

He says it always and forever, because the word “good” is his describing word of choice. No matter what I write, how much or how little, how sad or how happy, he will call it good. No matter how much he likes a piece or how moved he is by it, or how hard it’s made him laugh, he has one and only one word to bestow on it.

GOOD. Not wonderful. Not amazing. Not wham bam thank you Sam. Just good.

I can’t decide if a one or a zero represents the word good in his binary brain bucket.

My latest project is a novella (a short, sweet novel) set in rural Florida in the mid ‘60’s called Mooncalf. It’s a very serious, literary work requiring a lifetime’s worth of blood and bone.

He read Mooncalf. When he finished reading, he paused, pondered, and said, “This is terrific.”

I just may have a Pulitzer Prize winner on my hands.

To illustrate what I’m up against, I’ve compiled a Sherwood Zern compliment lexicon:

It’s good. (Said in a neutral tone) 1. I know you were making sounds resembling our mother tongue, but I wasn’t listening so I’ll play it safe. 2. What?

That’s good. (Said with no discernable intonation) 1. Why do you insist on reading this stuff to me when you know I prefer to read it myself. 2. No, really, I’m listening.

Good! Of course, I mean it. (Said in a clipped, sharp way) 1. I’m on a conference call and I forgot to mute it.

Well, isn’t that good. (Repeated) 1. What’s for dinner? 2. Did you take my power cord? 3. When are you going to get a job?

That’s dang fine good. (Eyes glued to computer monitor) 1. I didn’t understand a word you just read; it must be stellar.

And then . . .

Linda, this is really terrific. (With eye contact and vocal inflection) 1. I love you, babe. Hang in there. 2. Dr. Suess received twenty-seven rejections before he was published. I believe in you. 3. You misspelled cooties on page eighty-three.

So back to page eighty-three I go, working like the devil to deserve such high and mighty praise from the king of the binary people.



Linda (Good, Better, Best) Zern

Single Point of Failure

According to my computer engineering husband, it’s important to find the weak spot in the computer software—that should it fail—causes all the other spots in the system to cramp up, keel over, and die. 

That weak spot is a pimple on the butt of everything—sort of. Or it’s the string on the collar of that made-in-China shirt. Give it a quick tug and the sleeves fall off. 

This weak link is called the single point of failure. 

It’s the single piece of broken crud in your life that is responsible for the systemic destruction of all the other crud in your life that you hold dear.

In our world the single point of failure is a tire on a John Deere garden cart. It’s flat. And that ruins everything—absolutely everything.

That tire is our single point of failure.

We have horses. They poop. A lot. They poop a lot in the barn. And as I have stated in the past, farming is the business of purchasing animals that poop and then moving their poop around. Our John Deere garden cart is the official poop mover. I NEED that cart to move poop, or the poop builds up to gargantuan, mountainous proportions that threaten to avalanche onto small children, burying them alive. I mean it.

One tire went flat on the garden cart. My husband pumped it up. It went flat again. He filled it with magic blow up stuff. It went flat again. He took the wheel off and dragged it to the John Deere tractor repair shop, run by the meanest married couple on the face of the entire earth. 

No really. This couple is so mean that we play Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who has to go and drop off the flat tire.

Sherwood lost. 

He took the tire to the shop. The shop was closed. Seems the John Deere repair shop couple were so mean John Deere had to shut them down and put them out of business. Burned the repair shop to the ground and sowed the acres with salt. (No, I made that last bit up.) 

Meanwhile, the poop pile continued to build.

“The John Deere repair shop couple were so mean, they’re out of business,” he said, holding the still flat garden cart tire.

“Now what?”

The poop pile grew another foot while we talked.

“Well, I thought about buying another whole wheel deal, but it’s about the cost of the whole darn cart.”

“Now what?”

The top of the poop pile shook loose, rumbling to the barn floor. Road apples danced and rolled near our feet.

“How about using the wheelbarrow?” he said.

“It has a flat tire.”

“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” 

Exactly, or in our case it’s, “A tire! A tire! My kingdom for a tire!”

Before the whole kingdom fills up with poop and tips over like the island of Guam if you put too many marines on it. 

(During a House committee meeting, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia said he feared that stationing 8,000 Marines on Guam would cause the island to "become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.") True Story!!


Single point of failure? How about the whole darn federal government?


Linda (Scoop) Zern