We have draft horse girls.

I took to heart a tee-shirt I once saw that said something like…………..I like draft horses because they make my back-side look small.          Not an easy feat.

As a child in Ohio I remember laying on the ground by our side pasture fence with a big old brown horse on the other side.  (I now know as a Belgian Draft Horse).  I had my chin on my hands watching those big lips curl around the grass.  There was only a rusty livestock fence-wire between us.  I remember the hot air blowing on my face from every exhalation from those fuzzy nostrils.

It’s funny how certain memories stick.  My family all hate the next quote…………. “and the sun was setting behind us……”(it was).  Or, “it was a sunny day……..”  Or, “I can remember the snow flakes melting on my face.”  Or some-such-thing about the prevailing weather………………..I should have been a meteorologist.  I also must be a visual-memory-person or something.  I can remember the time of day;  the weather;  the bug crawling across my hand……….but boy-oh-boy those descriptive, side-notes bugged the living daylights out of my family!—————-it could have been parlayed into a really good career-path for me!

Give me a couple years and I won’t remember my middle name or my street address, but I’ll know if the day was sunny……………hopefully my horse will know her way home.

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Oh, wait—–You just can’t make these things up………………..

#####Time out#####

Sometimes you just have to stop what you’re doing and try to explain some details that if you hadn’t just experienced them yourself, you never would have believed it.

Multi-tasking is sometimes (and usually) a good thing.  Sometimes not so much.

###########This was a not so much time.

The Irish Wolfhounds HAD to go outside.  So I stopped my journaling but continued chatting on the phone while I grabbed the box of mothy, jumbo shells pasta (important prop)-(which I was going to open and toss in the back yard as a hide-and-seek-treat for the Wolfhounds).  Well, all six of the beasts took me out at the knees by the door as I was opening it. My priorities were keeping my feet underneath me and not dropping the box.  (The priorities should have been keeping my feet underneath me and hanging on to the door-knob—-forget the pasta).

So the hounds went by in a cacophonous whoosh, the doorknob was whisked out of my hands, said hounds piled up, doing the necessary right-hand turn to get out the porch opening and the door closed……………………..and the door closed……………

This particular door has one of those in-the-knob lock thingies that allows you to open it and unless you physically turn it to the unlocked position………………..it remains locked………………………………….and it remained locked.

It did remain……………closed………………..and locked.

The Wolfhounds are now cavorting and crunching their mothy pasta, and I am standing there locked out of my house, in my backyard, bare-footed, in my underpants……………..only my underpants…………………..and an empty box of pasta.

I’m in my sixties, I live in the boonies, I’m from the bra-less seventies, gravity has hit me hard (I’m not completely blind/I’ve got mirrors), it’s still a Florida/sub-tropical summer, I’m trying to keep the A/C bill to a minimum, I hate under-wires (but after more than sixty years of gravity, my girls just demoralize & laugh at lace (it’s reinforced-broad-cloth-tarp-material that they respect)…………………………………………………………….. and “it was a sunny day”.

I do a quick search of the surrounding woods—–you’d be surprised just how many errant hunters are lurking there (I’m not kidding)-(and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wandering around out there/just a bit more clad/only to finally focus on a camouflaged-something peeking around a tree trunk).

But this sunny morning was A-O-K……………..with regards to there being no hunters in the vicinity (that I could see with one good eye—–and yes, I’m blind in one eye…………..did I mention that?)

But now what am I going to do/other than get a strap-less tan?……………………..Wolfhounds are still cavorting/one eye tells me I have no voyeurs in my immediate vicinity…………………….BUT I HAVE AN EMPTY JUMBO SHELL PASTA BOX at the ready!!!

So I gingerly sneak around the side of the house (gingerly, because I am barefoot and we do have a total of eight dogs, plus wildlife, that do what bears do in the woods), I check out the driveway (no impromptu UPS/electric company/or Seventh Day Adventist)-(I do enjoy chatting with them…………just not today).

My younger daughter is in the side bedroom, laying on the bed, in the house, listening to Toby Keith &/or Keith Urban on her iPad………………I just have to partially scale a fence enough so I can reach the window and slap it with the  pasta box to get my (surprised) daughter’s attention………………..          Ah!  It worked!

Said younger daughter is not as surprised as I would think she should be seeing her bare-breasted, ancient mother, half-way-up a fence outside her window flailing an empty pasta box!!!?!!!…………………..oh, by the way, the post-surgery, knee re-hab is going swimmingly (I just thought I should throw that in there).

I get let back into the house under the scrutinous eyes of a judgy daughter.

 

Throughout all of this, I was on the phone with my friend Esther.  I just couldn’t reveal what was happening until I was behind doors, inside a dark house, with a tee shirt on……………….

Esther didn’t find any of this out of the ordinary (this is why I love her and she’s my friend).  She told me that she never would have known that all of that was occurring by my voice.  That I had a very good poker-voice and that I hadn’t interrupted her story (which was a good one about a riding/camping/RV-weekend with old friends).

***************Now I have to tell you that in the past when this has happened (I have to change that door now, because we all know I’m not changing my dressing habits at this stage of the game.) I have gone around the other side of the house, out the gate, up the chicken-coop-ramp and into the coop and THEN into the house (see earlier posts of the Stalag Coop series for further explanation of why this would work). But those times I was in a tee shirt and under pants…………………………………somehow this time, given the lack of a tee shirt, climbing through the coop just seemed rude.

Hey, I don’t make the rules here………………………………………I just follow them…………

             Yes, I do………………..