Linda L. Zern's Blog, page 6

In The Beginning, There Was Literature

Walking across my college campus after one of my Medieval Literature classes, I overheard the following conversation from my fellow students:“I don’t need to hear this Bible shit,” the young man said.“Yeah. You’re right. I don’t need this religion bull shit,” his girlfriend agreed.“How was I supposed to know that unicorns were considered a symbol for that Jesus guy?” he retorted. “Christ!”I sighed.First of all, it’s true. Unicorns, in the Middle Ages, were considered a symbol for the God of the Christian faith. They symbolized purity, uniqueness, and holiness.Later, my Medieval Literature professor sadly informed me, “Linda, every semester, it gets harder and harder to find anyone who’s even heard of Genesis, let alone read it. Try teaching a class on Medieval Literature to people who have no working knowledge of their own heritage.”And so, it goes.Once upon a time, the King James’ version of the Bible was our national textbook. We taught children to read from it. We gave them an appreciation of story because of it. We catalogued human nature in it. We shared our heritage through it. And to our children we imparted a basic system of rules that allowed for a common culture.Literature, writing, poetry, story, message, premise, metaphor, and simile: it’s all in there. The language of the King James’ version of the Bible is challenging and beautiful. The stories are compelling and dramatic. Close to Elizabethan English, it stretches our comprehension. It’s an AP course in words and language, and it’s free.Reading the Bible doesn’t have to be about religion, if you don’t want it to be. That’s what I wish I would have said to the young man in the above conversation. And then I would have asked him, “Is it any wonder that the average reading level of the American public has fallen to, according to the United Stated Department of Health and Human Services, a seventh-grade level?”Recently, while reading The New Testament, I came across a phrase that spoke volumes to me as a writer. To the Philippians, Paul said, “I joy.” What a beautiful way to express a fundamental human state of being: happiness. He is happy. Clear. Concise. Elegant. I’ve never read it expressed like that anywhere else, and I’ve read a lot.In my opinion, I am a better writer for having studied the language and story of the Bible, and I can appreciate the power of symbols—like unicorns. Free the speech. Read. Everything. Always. And I hope you will not be afraid to think deeply about, “Why the world wags and who wags it.” (From, The Once and Future King, by T. H. White, published the year I was born.)Linda (I Joy) Zern

Double Bubble Trouble - Happy Anniversary

In honor of our upcoming wedding anniversary I would like to hie back to a simpler time; a time when my husband and I realized we were outnumbered by the children, and we were forced to institute the following rule: The first one in the marriage to break and run had to take the kids with them—all the crazy, gum chomping, kids. Good times.


When Sherwood and I were young we produced a lot of little kids, a lot of grubby, grimy little kids, who because of their love affair with dirt and grime required a ton of hosing off—also bathing. When these little kids took baths they sometimes chewed huge wads of bubble gum. I didn’t mind; it kept them quiet. (For a while they tried to bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with them into the tub, but I put the hoodoo on that right away.) 

In the early days and even though we had a lot of filthy children, we had only one bathroom. It had one bathtub. One fine evening, Sherwood decided to take a bath in our one and only bathtub, the very same tub our children had used earlier that evening. 

From the bathroom I heard the haunting boom of my husband’s voice.

“Linda, get in here.” His voice was thick with some emotion I found hard to identify. It was repugnance.

Naked and dripping, he stood leaning against the sink, his arms braced against the porcelain, bent slightly forward at the waist. He was not smiling or winking. 

“Look at this.” He pointed to his hairy damp backside bits. He added, “Is that what I think it is?”

Me, I’m a funny girl, I asked, “Is this a test?” I did not look.

“No, I mean it. Look at my butt.”

“I’m not looking at your butt. You can’t make me.”

He pointed harder at his backside, completely devoid of any spirit of good-natured high jinx. There was more back and forth, denial and insistence and such, but I’ll spare you. I finally realized that this might be a serious situation causing real distress for my husband because he’d been standing there leaning against the sink, naked and pointing at himself for, well, longer than was good for either one of us. 

I bent down and I did look.

Sure enough, there it was, a wad of Double Bubble chewing gum the size of a hamster’s head nestled in . . . ummm. . . well, just nestled.

I said, “Oops.”

He said, “Get it off.”

I asked, “How?”

It was a good question. I believe I missed the chapter in Home Economics dealing with “butt hair gum removal.”

I’d heard a rumor once—something club soda—stains or something, but I didn’t think club soda was going to apply in this case. I knew you could use ice to freeze gum and then chip it off of stuff, but chipping seemed the wrong sort of action to take. Pulling was right out. Shaving/cutting seemed promising, but it was going to be close work.

I can remember hoping that my hand was going to be steady enough, what with the laughing and all.

The real problem is that there just isn’t any kind of hotline for this. I blame the government.

Let me just report that the operation was a success, and I employed a combination of techniques.

To the children and now grandchildren I would like to say, “Let this be a lesson to you. Never chew gum in the bathtub. Chewing gum in the bathtub can make your father have to have his posterior shaved. There are reasons for family rules. Rules are our friends, and YaYa doesn’t make this stuff up. She has experience. She’s lived.”

Linda (Steady Now) Zern 

The Daily Grind

Because I am so engrossing and we live in an era that celebrates the glory of accomplishing absolutely nothing, I’d like to share with my friends and family a day in my fascinating, engrossing life.
3:00am – I am awakened from a troubled sleep by a circus troop of raccoons assaulting the family trashcans.
3:13am – Motion sensor light comes on as the raccoons form “HUMAN” pyramid. That’s right; I said HUMAN. I imagine the raccoon heap now measures 4’ 11” inches in height and comes up to my chin.
3:20am – I race outside in my fluffy bathrobe with a broom to confront raccoon troop. Trip over garbage slung thirty feet in all directions. Realize raccoons have thrown invisibility cloak over themselves.
3:27am – Shake broom at nothing. Watch hair on arms stand up when the coyotes start howling.
3:28am – Go back to bed. Attempt to sleep.
5:00am – QUIT trying to attempt to sleep.
6:00am – Say a simple prayer of thanks that every man-jack of us have lived to see another day. (Note: We will be the first to admit that our family may occasionally merit Biblical destruction.)
6:09am – Check out cable news. Feel vindicated that every prediction I’ve ever made is coming true. Turn up the volume when it’s reported that a woman in North Carolina was attacked in her sleep IN HER BED by a surly—also rabid—raccoon. 
6:12am – Shuffle to the bathroom and because I’ve caught my great grandmother’s arthritis, I daydream about my granddaughters having to push me to the mailbox in a wheelchair every day. They will chatter happily as they push. Say a prayer of gratitude for such a wonderful granddaughters.
6:31am – Limbs and appendages begin to bend. Postpone nursing home reservation.
7:27am – Feed good animals (not garbage eating night marauders) stuff.
9:00am – Go to yoga and during meditation time, when I’m supposed to be emptying my mind of all stressful thoughts, I try to calculate the force necessary to kill a raccoon with a rock.
10:07am – Declare yoga a bust. Decide to try combat kick boxing next time.
Noon – Eat macaroni or rice or beans. I’m not kidding.
12:00pm to When-I-run-out-of-steam-or-the-coyotes-howl: I scribble and scribble words on virtual paper. Words that no one may ever read, but I still feel compelled to write, in spite of the fact that it makes me look like an agoraphobic shut-in.
Bedtime – When the sun sets and the chickens go to sleep, because I’m saving precious energy and resources for future generations—also I can work in bed while wearing pajamas. Don’t be jealous.
Tomorrow – Rinse and Repeat


Linda (Night Stalker and Fascinating Person) Zern



  

POOP SHOES AND QUARANTINE

On the flight from L.A. to Australia they hand you a skinny yellow card and tell you to fill it out, declaring stuff. Do you have any fruit, nuts, porn, or chicken poop on your shoes? And you’d better, by golly, fess up or they fine you—big hefty bucks.

Honesty is the cheapest policy.

So we declared. No fruit. No nuts. No porn. But things got hinky with the chicken poop question. Well, actually it was more a question of possible exposure to chicken poop.

The question that tripped us up?

Have you within the last thirty days been exposed to animals that poop or produce assorted dingle berries in a rural setting?  (I’m paraphrasing.)

The answer was a resounding, “You bet. Why just this morning or yesterday morning or tomorrow morning before the world turned on its axis, we were hip deep in animals that poop.” We checked the box for yes.

In Australia, railing through the immigration and customs line, holding our skinny yellow card at the ready we prepared to declare our familiarity with organic farm animal by-product.

A pre-screener, a lovely woman of possible Asian descent, took our skinny yellow card, made note of our honesty on question number ten or maybe it was twelve and declared us quarantined, but not before looking at our shoes with squinty eyes.

Panicked, my husband, scrambled to explain our damning poop answer, “We have horses. They poop. We had to feed them before we left Florida, thus the reason for their pooping—all the feeding and eating. The horses not us.” Sweat broke out on his forehead.

I stroked his arm, calming him, and said, “I think she just wants to make sure we haven’t brought our muck-out boots or packed bags of manure in our luggage. That’s all.”

The pre-screener squinted harder at our shoes, made a check on our card, and then pointed us to the quarantine area.

An official of the Australian immigration and customs department squinted some more at our shoes, quizzed us on our manure exposure, possibly sniffed us, laughed a bit when we declared our bodies poop free, stamped our card, and then waved us through the door into the great down under.

On the trip from Sidney to Melbourne, the third plane ride of our twenty-seven hour global trip, I got a bit punch drunk and started to laugh. Snorting through my nose, I leaned over and confessed, “Babe, I hate to admit this, but I think I might have had some chicken sh*t on my shoes, but I was afraid to say anything.”

Horrified, he clamped his hand over my mouth. I licked the palm of his hand. He let me go.

“Kidding! I’m just kidding. But wouldn’t that be crazy to be locked up abroad for contraband chicken poo shoes?” I looked deep in his eyes. “Hey, it may not be a sixty million dollar Air Force One trip on the taxpayer’s dime, but it’s already been quite an adventure.”

He winked. I smiled. And then I double-checked the bottom of my shoes just to be sure I wasn’t breaking quarantine or smuggling dingle berries.

Linda (All Clear) Zern

Loving Goats

In the weak sunshine of a Florida winter, it is customary for some Floridians to sit on their septic tanks, their faces tipped up to the sky, their sinuses exposed to the gentle medicinal comfort of the sun’s warmth, their hope as raw as their throats that God and nature will heal them of their Ebola-Rhino-Flu-Plague. 

Okay, sometimes I pull a lawn chair over to the septic tank and sit in the sun and hope that it will make me feel better when I’m sick. Sometimes, Phillip, my son-in-law, brings the grandkids over and sits on the septic tank with me. What can I say; it’s Saint Cloud. 

Once upon a time, we (Philip and I) sat in the sun on the septic tank. I was feeling as weak as two kittens in a sinking sack from Ebola-Rhino-Flu-Plague, while Conner and Zoe (the grand-kidlets) cavorted merrily under a Japanese Plum tree. 

Zoe sang, “Fruit-fruit-fruit, I want two fruits.” Conner pooped in his pants.

The world spun gently, right up to the point when Conner, poop in drawers, stumbled in the direction of a strange, horned, white goat that had mysteriously appeared in our yard, having journeyed from somewhere beyond next door.

“Phillip, grab that boy before Billy Goat Gruff knocks your kid down.”

The goat flipped his scraggly beard in the direction of my voice. Phillip ran and scooped Conner up, setting him next to me in my pool of medicinal sunshine on the septic tank. The goat, a smallish—no higher than my knee variety—with dirty blond hair and “come hither” yellow devil eyes, started a slow determined trot in our direction.

Phillip, never a lover of goats or farm creatures in general, said, “What does it want with us?” He sounded nervous—also squeamish. 

“Oh, he’s probably just seeing what’s what.” I tried to sound confident.

The goat kept trotting.

I closed my eyes in exhaustion brought on by the Ebola-Rhino-Flu-Plague. The odor of goat, BOY goat, engulfed me, and wow, did he smell close! When I opened my eyes, it was to the sight of this stinker of a goat trying to French kiss the sleeve of my shirt and the sound of obscene noises of goat love. I bolted out of my lawn chair.

I yelled, “Or he could be looking for a date.”

The goat made a lunge at my leg. I dodged.

“Grab the kids before it’s too late—this stinky goat is in full on goat whoopee love mode.”

Phillip scooped up Conner but Zoe, misunderstanding what I had said, began running wildly around waving and yelling, “Go away stinger goat. Go away.”

Confused, but hopeful, the goat surveyed the scene and then lunged at the closest leg—Phillip’s leg.

Zoe waved and yelled, “Leave my daddy’s leg alone.”

“It’s having its’ way with your leg,” I screamed, as I ripped the garden house from the side of the house.

“Run!” I ordered.

Expecting a torrent of water, I turned the spigot on full blast, but lying advertising and crap marketing had given me a false sense of security in my new never-kink hose. A weak drip of water taunted me, and I cringed to see more crimps and kinks than hose.

Phillip shrieked.

Zoe shrieked. “Bad Stinger Goat!!”

I whipped the hose from side to side to un-kink the kinks and to defend whatever honor Phillip had left in his right leg. The goat continued to lust.

Finally, the hose kinks came free and I fire-hosed that nasty, stinker of a goat. The goat loved it. The distraction gave Phillip enough of a head start that he, Conner, and Zoe made it to the screened porch. I brought up the rear, not two steps ahead of the now wet and super rank horn-dog of a goat.

What I saw in my son-in-law’s eyes still brings a shudder to my soul. What he said next, I cannot forget.

“I showed fear,” he said. “I showed fear.” He hung his head. 

Conner tried to pet the goat through the porch screen. I tipped over a lawn table and shoved it against the screen door.

“You smell like a bad stinger goat,” I said, avoiding Phillip’s eyes. “I hope you have a change of clothes.” 

Before he finished slinking off to wash himself, I said, “We will never speak of this.” His chin collapsed onto his chest. He continued slinking. Somewhere in the yard a goat bawled his loneliness. 

This is the story that I started my website with several years ago. To catch up on all my tales of hose kinks, goat attacks, and family shame check out www.zippityzerns.com

The Case for Continued Hunkering After Hurricane Season

The saddest part of the end of hurricane season is the cessation of the use of the word hunker.
What a fabulous word and society only cracks it out and dusts it off when a soul-crushing, city-destroying hurricane is on its way. That's unfortunate. Very few words stand up to the word hunker in both multiple uses and varied meanings.
I've told the story before of the 'possum we found after it had crawled, crept, snuck into our garage only to stuff itself into the underside of a grandkid's riding toy. The 'possum was waiting for night to fall so it could stumble over to the cat's food and stuff itself stupid.
Our daughter, a thousand months pregnant, claimed that she'd seen the 'possum wobble into the garage and disappear into the bottom of the Happy Tots Pedal Truck. We didn't believe her. We thought she was drunk on pregnancy hormones. She wasn't.
When my husband tipped over the riding toy, a mammal with approximately ten-thousand teeth, snarled its howdy-do.
That toothy beast had hunkered down inside that riding toy. We poked the toy. We shook it. We rolled it over and over. That 'possum didn't budge. Finally, we had to turn the hose on it to pry it out of there. Soaked, miffed, and wildly uncomfortable the 'possum shuffled off to hunker down under the garden bridge, and that, Dear Readers, is a fine, fine example of what it means to hunker.
When hurricanes threaten, the word hunker flies around like a kid on a pedal truck. Get food, water, batteries, and some food for the cat because life, as you know it, will be like someone with a giant garden hose trying to pry you out of your safe place. The power will fail. Inside will be hotter than outside. Your air will cease to be conditioned. Day will turn to night. You will feel threatened, frightened, and annoyed but hang on tight unless you have a bridge you can scurry off to hunker under for a bit.
Love the word. We should use it for more stuff than killer storms:
Life is hard, but I think I'll hunker down and give it my best.
Hunker down and keep the faith.
Hunkering down, I refused to be offended.
They tried to shake me out of my faith and hope and charity, but I hunkered down.
You can't make me quit because I'm hunkered down like a 'possum stuffed under a garden bridge.
Move along; I'm hunkering down.
Or I'm getting ready for the next swirling monster of wind and rain so that I can hunker down when the storm howls.
Let's keep the hunkering going. That's all I'm saying.
Linda (Playing 'Possum) Zern            

The Lesson of the CRAYON CLOG UP

Starting first grade in Titusville, Florida during the space race of the 1960’s was an exciting time. We were on the cutting edge of the future. Our dads worked at Cape Kennedy. Our moms baked cookies. And we studied the “new” math.Our fathers beat the Russians to the moon. Our mothers started to go to work and divorce our fathers. And the “new” math meant that most of us never learned our basic math facts. It was an exciting time. My elementary school had over a thousand students. We were still using the Dick and Jane reading series, and my teacher was very excited to be able to hand us our very own set of Crayola crayons—basic colors.We quickly learned that when the principal came into our classroom, there was trouble. Big trouble. Someone in our class had taken their complimentary crayons into our bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. Anarchy. The toilet backed up; the bathroom was rendered inoperable, and the government issued box of crayons declared a dead loss.The principal reamed the entire class out. What kind of person abuses their crayons in such an ungrateful way? How does it feel to break the potty? Why would anyone do such a destructive thing? There will be no recess until someone confesses. No one did.I remember feeling horrible and guilty. Except that I wasn’t. My crayons were tucked safely away in my desk. I know because I checked. The angry lecture went on and on. I continued to feel horrible and guilty. Except that I wasn’t.At a certain point, I began to feel something else. Resentment. I hadn’t thrown my crayons in the potty and flushed. I hadn’t clogged the public toilet. I wasn’t the criminal. Why was I getting punished?See Jane get miffed. See Dick bristle. See Spot run away in disgust.I have no idea if the anarchist was ever found out or prosecuted. I only know that punishing the innocent for the criminal behavior of others is—wrong. I learned this in first grade on a sunny day in Florida, when I should have been swinging on the swing set at recess. Linda (Don’t Tread on Me) Zern

DRAMA QUEEN

Drama QueenI am a writer and therefore drama runs through my veins like a red tide on the ocean. I used to think that mysteries would be hard to write because I could never figure out ‘who done it.’ But now, I see that murder mysterious are easy: someone is dead; someone is going to be dead; someone is thinking about making someone dead. Drama. Built in. And readers love it. Mysteries top the Amazon best seller charts every single year.Which is weird because social media like Facebook is covered in anti-drama memes. “Get rid of the drama in your life. Go on a cruise. Live in a moss-covered cave.”It’s a crock. Human beings love drama. Our games are full of it. Our entertainment drips with it. Our literature is not literature without it—conflict, opposition, and goals thwarted.Drama is queen and I, for one, embrace it. A story, even a children’s story, must contain elements of drama and conflict or we are just humming in the dark. Grimm’s Fairy Tales were, in their original forms, cautionary tales designed to warn children and their parents about the inherent dangers in the dank, scary forests of our lives, and we’re still telling the tales. Sure, we’ve watered them down some with show tunes, but we could never imagine Snow White without the poisoned apple. Drama gets a bad rap, and it shouldn’t. It’s why I love writing dystopian fiction. The apocalypse drips with drama. And we love it. I love it. Lights go out, electric fails, and we are thrust into the landscape of struggle and survival. And we love it!  Sex is a big deal again. Food is a life and death struggle. Enemies abound. Drama. Cool. I do have to laugh, though, when I read the constant touting of all women in dystopian literature as strong, kick-A women. I’m not sure that’s true or should be true. Isn’t it more interesting to have a regular woman given to pedicures and migraines who becomes a kick-A woman capable of skinning a cat and then boiling it? Just a dramatic thought. But there’s a downside. I am a writer. My kids don’t call me for two days, and I’ve got them dead in a ditch. It’s a professional hazard. Oh, and by the way, I can imagine skinning a cat. My great-grandmother refused to eat rabbit all her days. Why? Because during the real apocalypse of the Great Depression butchers in Chicago would skin cats, chop off their heads and feet, and sell them as rabbit. My great-grandmother never got over it, and she was as kick-A as they come.On a Facebook page, followed by writer types, the discussion faded into whether or not writers should kill off pets in their stories or is that too offensive, too harsh for a modern readership? I commented, “I write dystopian books. Bad things happen.”Chew on that.So, here we are—to drama or not drama. In my opinion, kick-A women take drama, stick it in a blender, throw in an egg, and then swallow it down like the ‘hair of the dog’ that bit them. Or we read chick-lit, which can be fun too.Linda (Life is Drama) Zern

H is for Hysterical Blindness

One of the hardest parts of the aging process is knowing when “the jig is up.” It’s important to understand that when a person reaches a certain age, everything starts to hurt: feet, knuckles, muscles, neck, and hair. True. My hair hurts, but then I wear it in a grandma bun a lot more these days, perhaps part of the problem.Here’s the dilemma. When everything hurts, how do you know which hurt is vile enough to require a quick call to 911?I get up in the morning, hit the floor, and proceed to shuffle to the bathroom like a zombie in search of zombie snack food, my feet, legs, knees, and hips protesting loudly.“Am I dying?” I said to my husband recently, as I shuff-shuffled to the potty.“Do you want to be?” he asked, answering my question with a question. Still in bed, he was balancing a Pepsi on his stomach as he held a pecan twirl to his lips with his right hand—his version of breakfast. NOTE: He has zero “bad” cholesterol. I’ve had borderline high, bad cholesterol since I was twelve. I live on vegetables and pickle juice. Life is NOT fair.Two days again, I woke up, got up, hit the floor, and couldn’t see anything. The whole world had gone fuzzy—super fuzzy. “What the what?”My first thought? Overnight stroke.Second thought? Hysterical blindness.My third and final conclusion. Allergies: rectified by allergy drops and a warm wash cloth.Sigh. I tell everyone I had hysterical blindness. It makes for a better story, and I’m all about the storytelling. And so, I shuff-shuffle through life trying to decide if the pain in my hair is bad enough to warrant a lobotomy or a deep tissue search on Web MD.My oldest daughter went to her doctor with a lump in her wrist which she had pre-diagnosed, after a thorough Google search, as “Viking’s Disease.” She told her doctor, “I have Viking’s Disease.” Note: Viking’s Disease is a malady effecting Scandinavians. It leaves their hands and fingers weirdly twisted and deformed.He said, “Good guess. But no . . .”She had a benign cyst.My bout with hysterical blindness has taught me a couple of things about health care in America. 1) Care is an interesting word. 2) Unless you’re clawing at your own face or foaming, people are probably more interested in what the English royal family is dissing about each other than your hysterical blindness. 3) Web MD is your doctor’s least favorite website. And 4) Caring about health care is exhausting.And so, I keep right on shuffling until I can’t anymore, hoping that by the time my jig is up I get struck by lightning.Linda (Electric Light Parade) Zern

Down on the Hobby Farm

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.