For sixteen years I’ve been writing and drawing and reaching out from the desk in my office . . . or from my bed, which I treat like a desk until I get up, have a shower, and get dressed. Then I go and sit at a proper desk to write.
No, I don’t. That’s a lie.
I never get out of bed to write because I’m short, and my legs don’t touch the ground when I sit in grownup chairs and that hurts my knees, so I type in bed where I can keep my legs elevated and relax back into about one thousand pillows.
And that’s a long sentence.
When I first went back to college, the instructor gave a speech about love, respect, and mutual approbation. Then he had us read from an assignment he’d given us. I read. One of my sentences was longer than the average fifth grade reading level, and the cool girl in my college writing class told me, “Good grief, Hemingway must be turning over in his grave at the length of that sentence.”
I found her less than loving, respectful, or approbating—not to mention wildly ignorant. Hemingway wrote both long and short sentences. But you have to read more Hemingway than just that story about hills and elephants and abortion.
And that last comment drips with sarcasm. I’m aware of that. It’s possible I’m not as loving, respectful and approbating as the average college kid. But then again, I’m not stoned.
Shoot. There goes that sarcasm gene again. So you see, I struggle a bit with the silliness that is modern education, literature, and art in general.
As a kid I read books that weren’t on any government approved reading list—hard books with long sentences and big words. Most of those books have long since been sold at used book sales or dumped in landfills. I know because I bought up a lot of those hard books with big words at those used book sales. So now I have an entire room dedicated to books—IN MY HOME. It’s called a library.
That’s my silly disclaimer, kind of.
When I was a child, reading wasn’t an assignment so that I could be the cool girl in a cool college; it was life.
My childhood was less than . . . ummm . . . er . . . how to say this . . . well, it was less than warm and fuzzy. Let’s put it that way. I was a lonely, sad little kid and books were better than drugs. I read everything from cereal boxes to (gasp) the classics. Reading was more than an escape; it was a magical bubble of words that kept me safe from the poison of a world I could not control or change or understand.
I thank God that there were long sentences and short sentences and stories in those books that kept me safe until I could write my own.
Linda (Can’t Quit) Zern
“What is that smell?” I said, sniffing the air like an elephant sensing danger or a circus tent. I was in our family office.
Number two son mumbled, “What smell? He did not look up from his computer.
Sniffing loudly, I said, “That. Funky.” Sniff, sniff. “Smell.”
The mumbler mumbled something else. I was left to my own conclusions.
“That smell . . . you can’t smell that? It smells like bat guano in a crock pot.”
The mumbler may have shrugged, but I was already on my hands and knees sniffing behind various pieces of office furniture. Our cat blinked and stretched as I pushed the futon she was draped over away from the wall. She may have shrugged.
A trail of wispy feathers spun wildly as I sniffed my way along the baseboards behind the futon. My hand landed in something gunky, just as I noticed a gicky stain on the back of the futon skirt. I knew at once what I was looking at—a crime scene.
I studied the swirl of feathers around my head. I measured the gicky stain. I sniffed some more.
“Either it’s bat guano in a crock pot or something is very dead,” I said, to absolutely no one; son number two had left the crime scene.
Suspicious, I thought. Make a note.
Pushing the futon farther into the room, I uncovered the source of the smell. Immediately, I began my investigation.
Out loud, I reported, “The victim seems to have been deceased for extended period of time judging from the amount of gicky gunk that has been allowed to soak into the grout. Victim appears to have been a bird (note wings, feathers, and beak.) The body may have been placed under the futon in a ritualistic fashion with the head pointing to the wall socket and the feet pointing to the ottoman—possible occult overtones.”
The cat stretched, meowed, picked a feather from her teeth, and jumped from her perch on the futon.
I prepared to start my interviews with everyone even slightly connected to the office, futon, ottoman, or baseboards.
My questions included: How could you not have smelled that smell? At any time were you aware that there was a dead bird corpse under the futon in the office—melting? Did you know about said bird corpse and simply ignored it so that you wouldn’t have to clean it up? Where were you every minute of your life for the last two weeks? HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY NOT SMELL THAT? Let me see your nostrils.
Everyone had an alibi. I was back to square one.
But then I formulated a theory to explain the inability of absolutely everyone in this family to smell a decomposing animal under the office futon except for ME!!! Mostly, I live with boys—big grownup boys. And it is my belief that because of a propensity they have to sit at their computers in a haze of their own bio-methane they are no longer able to detect the presence of a dead body in the same room due to an advanced case of dead nose syndrome. Son number two swears that he does not produce bio-methane—ever. And husband number one swears that everyone produces bio-methane at least and on an average of twelve times a day. I’ve got my nose on both of them.
It’s just a theory. DNA testing will, of course, prove inconclusive.
What it comes down to is this. I had to dispose of the corpse (I used a dust pan), strip the ruffled skirt off of the futon, vacuum up the bed feathers, and scrub the grout with bleach. I also had to dispose of a dead field mouse, two dead moles, and a dead snake. (Note: Not all on the same day.)
There’s only one conclusion that can be made. That’s right. I’ve got a serial killer on my hands.
Linda (Book ‘Em) Zern
The shadows of cranes, vultures, and eagles coast across the ground of our farm, and at night the lonely cries of Whippoorwills float through the air like ghosts through fog and mist. It’s hard not to be charmed by the nature thumping all around us. That’s one reason we moved here, to be surrounded by the thumping of nature, and to have horses, and butterfly gardens, and grandchildren, and quiet weekends in the country—surrounded by the thump of nature, of course.
Country living is like having an obsessive-compulsive hobby, and my husband and I are obsessive-compulsive hobby farmers. We bought six acres in Saint Cloud, and then we bought three horses and had someone give us a dog. There’s a cat, but she came with the place. We don’t raise corn, or soybeans, or veal. A hobby farm is a lot like a black hole—stuff (like money) goes in but nothing (like money) comes out.
My husband has a real job. He fiddles around with computer related software during the week and makes money. I have a real job. I fiddle around with words on paper. I barely make enough money to pay for the paper, but we both play hobby farm on the weekends: by mowing, chopping, digging, burning, nailing, pressure washing, and sheath cleaning. The real point of our hobby farm is horses—the brushing, the riding, the watering, and the feeding of horses, and then there are questions of gelding hygiene, of course.
One of the horses in our stable is an old sickle-hocked gelding in an advanced stage of aging, or as I like to say, “He has two good legs, one bad leg, and one hoof on a banana peel.” Sonny is a rescue horse, and once upon a time, he must have been something to look at—now he’s a broken down paint horse standing in the shade of a live oak—nursing a bad attitude and gas. Also once, he was a boy horse, but now he’s a gelding with a high pitched whinny, arthritic hips, and sheath issues. He gives our hobby farm an air of slow moving southern charm and the feel of days gone by—sometimes.
Sometimes he needs his sheath cleaned—mostly in the fragrant, gentle spring.
“Honey,” I said to my husband, one fragrant and gentle spring, “I think that it’s time to clean old Sonny’s sheath.” The sun drifted over the barn like a fried egg. Flies buzzed in groggy, dopey circles. Horses pooped.
My husband looked mildly suspicious, his hands instinctively clenching a pitchfork, his knuckles growing white.
“Sonny’s what?”
“His sheath,” I repeated, leaning against the barn door and waving my hand vaguely in the direction of the paddock. “Think, sword and scabbard, like in pirate fighting.”
His knuckles started to look like bloodless doorknobs.
“Scabbard! Sheath! What are you talking about?”
“You know the thing that the sword goes into—the scabbard—you know, the thing that protects the sword.” I pantomimed putting an invisible sword into an invisible scabbard. “Sonny’s scabbard (i.e. his sheath) needs cleaning.” I crossed my arms across my chest confident in my diagnosis.
Frown lines creased my husband’s forehead, as he pondered all the potential symbolic sword related possibilities. Leaning on the pitchfork like a D.O.T. worker on a break and standing in a puddle of horse droppings, the slow light of understanding crept into his face. Horror etched harsh lines under his eyes.
He looked at the old grouch of a horse napping in the shade next to the barn, and said, “You can’t possibly mean . . .” He bit his lip, and I though I detected the glint of a single tear in his eye. “That someone has to reach up and . . . grab or clean . . . inside his . . . with what? And how? And more importantly for the love of all that’s decent—why?!”
“Because boy horses, who are geldings, get waxy gick buildup if you don’t clean their . . .”
“Yea, yea, yea, sword holder.” His sarcasm hid despair and mild panic. “I get it.”
Sonny slapped at one boney hip with his tail. He snorted, shook his head at some imagined slight, and then farted.
“Now there are a couple of ways that you can do this. You can wait until he goes to the bathroom and drops his . . .”
“I am not standing out here waiting for that old grump to pee.”
“Or you can go up in there and grab it.”
The horror spread from my husband’s face to his entire body. His limbs went rigid right before he dropped the pitchfork. Then his hands flew to his mouth, and through gritted teeth he asked, “Clean it with what?”
“Well, I’ve seen people use Vaseline, or warm soapy water, or . . .”
Sonny decided at that very moment to drop his sword and urinate.
Snapping to attention, I yelled, “Hurry Sherwood, run for the Vaseline.” He froze like a hunted rabbit staring into a rattlesnake den.
“Hurry man, now’s our chance.” I rolled up my sleeves, and squared my shoulders. Sherwood turned and stumbled into the gloom of the barn like a man planning to boil water for an emergency birth on a kitchen table.
“And Sherwood,” I yelled. He paused and looked back. “Don’t forget the rubber gloves.”
He didn’t.
That’s one reason we moved here, to be surrounded by the thumping of nature, and to have horses, and butterfly gardens, and grandchildren, and quiet weekends in the country, and to be up to our elbows in nature, of course. In the fragrant and gentle spring, the American Bald Eagles swoop down from their massive nest behind our house to tear our neighbor’s baby lambs bloody bit from bloody bit. Watching the eagles take turns turning the baby lambs into Bald Eagle jerky, my husband took my hand and asked, “I wonder if PETA knows about this?”
“I think there’s a lot PETA doesn’t know about Mother Nature,” I sighed.
An eagle’s shadow drifted over the swayed back of our old rescue horse, Sonny, as he dozed in the shade of a live oak.
