I promise you there is more to this than it appears. Just keep reading.
“Exactly what would a raccoon want to eat the most?”
Yes, our eight-year-old Peter asked this. Yes, I know what wretchedly mean creatures raccoons can be and I know they are smart, can be trained as pets, and I also know they can have rabies.
“What time does Ace Hardware close in North Carolina?”
“What time do we have to leave by to get to Ace Hardware back home before 7:00?”
“Please do not say no before I say all of this. Promise mom? Let me say EVERYTHING before you tell me no because I have thought about this and I know I can hold the live trap on my lap on the way home because I know the car is already full from our suitcases and us and the dog but it is a short drive from the hardware store to our house and I am afraid if we don’t go buy my live trap until after we go home and unpack the car Ace Hardware will be closed and I will have to wait until tomorrow to go buy my live trap.”
- Don’t we totally look like we can fit a live trap?”
WTF, WTF, WTF!!!!
I am going to kill my husband and my father-in-law for showing Peter my father-in-law’s traps.
Oh yes, my FIL still traps. Yes, it is barbaric and no he will never stop. Don’t yell at me in the comments as I have been trying to get this man to vote for the right person every election for the twenty-one years I have known him and there is no changing him.
He lives on the marsh his French fur trapping and Native American ancestors lived on.
They have just changed the dwellings in which they sleep. Currently, my father-in-law resides in a modular home, (do not call it a double-wide or else they will knock your teeth out as it has a full unfinished basement and a back-porch.)
The motor home has been forever “for sale” on the back forty. I felt the need to snap some photos of it in case one of those shows like American Pickers or Antiques Road Show stops by and decides the “seventies mobile” needs to be in a museum. All the years I spent trying to keep this monster out of the background in the pictures I take while we are in Michigan and now I am snapping pictures of it to make us laugh when we are old.
- “A Mere Blessing” is painted across the front. I have never seen this man go to church a single Sunday.
I have known my husband long enough to remember the old farm-house they knocked over with a tractor in 1991. They put the modular on the exact spot the farm-house once sat.
I wrote a little about my husband’s childhood here in my story about my “WTF” license plate coming in the mail, randomly.
Jim’s dad even still sells the pelts and I even have to hear, every freaking year, how he got better prices in 1984.
Will someone please bring back wearing dead animals so I don’t have to hear my FIL complain about the prices anymore. Oh, and you have to make wearing MUSKRAT coats cool, (again?)
I still married my husband after watching his father, (duration of six dating years or as Jim says while I was waiting to see if he actually got into medical school) sit in front of the television, in the living room, with a five gallon bucket, and dead animals in a pile while he stretched their fur on wire thingies and then hang them all over the basement ceiling to dry.
I know that sentence is weird but that is how I would say it if you were sitting across from me.
Think about how much fun it is to trip the circuit while blow drying your hair, (when you are in town visiting) and you have to venture into the basement or as I like to call it…
The Dead Zone.
There is no switch to flip to turn on the basement light. You have to walk across the basement, in the pitch dark, and feel above your head for the chain to pull.
THERE ARE DEAD THINGS HANGING ALL OVER FROM THE RAFTERS ABOVE YOUR HEAD!!!
We come from a long line of weird. We both have to have a lot of weird behind us for this to not faze me. Ok, it fazes me…but for the love of God there is dead $hit dangling from the ceilings where I have to sleep!
Have you looked at a picture of me? (!!!)
This is me taking my own picture in San Francisco recently. I am smiling because behind is Union Square and I can see Macy’s from my hotel window, all half a dozen or so stories. I was happy because even if I couldn’t be shopping with the people all of the time I could stare at the people all walking around inside like a Richard Scarry Storytime book. I am not a good photographer and so…no Macy’s but I swear it is there…in all its glory!
It makes me happy and don’t judge! I am keeping the economy moving.
Dead former fluffy critters hanging above me with holes where their eyes used to be DOES NOT MAKE ME WARM AND FUZZY!
I do not have pictures of me at my father-in-law’s house holding my thumb up and smiling at what was formerly a mink but now is drying on a misshapen wire coat-hanger.
Don’t I just look like the kind of girl who would marry a man with a “Pet cemetary” in his basement?
I am so happy that our little guy doesn’t want to kill anything. He just wants to take a close up look and let it go, unless muskrat coats come back (???) in style and the prices of a water-rat pelt rise. Oh, I’m kidding! Stop it. We are animal lovers and if nothing else stimulators of the economy lovers! Why can’t my husband be from San Francisco?
-Abbie, allthatmakesyou.com
All that makes you smile, laugh, think, love, cry or cry laughing.
Story Ideas: This is new and a way for me to remember, possible, future things to write about as I am such a pro, bahahaha! If I don’t do it right here and now, it is gone like the wind. How can I remember the minute details of a situation but I cannot remember to write down a few ideas that pop in my head at the end of writing a story? Anyone else like that? I will make myself crazy trying to remember an idea, that I knew was good, but couldn’t write it down at that exact moment. I also like the idea of running it by y’all and you might be all, “good Lord I am not coming back for another story about her embarrassing herself by getting an appliance stuck in her hair, again!” and you can just tell me that before you stop “following” me and WordPress informs me I can no longer use their service as no one is reading my nonsense anymore and would I also like the phone number to a mental health professional? Anyway, feel free to comment and “shut it” if it’s about my lack of REAL writing skills. I know already.
-Remind me sometime to tell you the cool story about how my husband’s family acquired their last name. It is really awesome and could be complete horse$hit, but were going with it since anyone who really knows if it’s true is dead.
-Remind me to tell you a story about where I worked before I had kids as I have more hunting stories than my husband, (primarily because he doesn’t hunt ever.) Don’t I just look like a girl who can walk around Cabella’s and talk camo and expedition gear and yet I have never been hunting in my life. So much talent I have going to waste it is no wonder I have not mastered grammar when I am too busy playing “name that camo” while walking around walmart. It is really easy as it is nearly always “Mossy Oak.”
Want a window into my mind? This also leads me…
-Remind me to tell you about how I sold my soul and saved a line of trees behind our old house and below a power line, all because I ran out of my back door talking “hunting smack” and throwing names around like “Bill Jordon” and “Realtree Outdoors” with the utility guy. It was good fortune that he wore a size ten boot and it was even better that I have an uncanny skill at guessing a man’s (only size ten) shoe size from great distances, (such as up in a tree.) Thank you Bill Jordon for the hats you signed for me to give to my groomsmen and sorry Jim’s friend that no longer was getting a Bill Jordon hat at rehearsal dinner. You may only understand this if your are from “hunting country” where your vacation time is planned around when opening season is.
PS, Anyone with any advice for “homesick?” I have a nine-year-old niece that is homesick and has a week to go until she goes back to Michigan. I only was able to plunk this story out because my darling husband picked her up like a sack of potatoes and removed her from my hip and took her on a golf cart ride on the golf course in the dark. I am a bit worried he is out there telling her if she doesn’t let me sleep in bed with him tonight he will leave her out in the middle of no where with the toads that make the creepy “baaaahhhh bahhhh” sound like sheep. For shizzel, I am feeling a bit like Jack from “The Shining.”
Gotta go I hear them pulling in. I am sure I will have to go pet the toads they caught on the golf course cart ride.
For real, goodbye!
I have camo boots on but they didn’t get it in the picture.
Kidding.
Macy’s wins, always and forever.
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