Tongue-In-Cheek … Foot-In-Mouth

Whenever I start a project (e.g., cutting the grass) I do NOT bother my wife.  HOWEVER, whenever my wife starts a project (e.g., everything) I always feel like I am at a rodeo, because she lassos me, drags me into the mission, and I end up the donkey doing most of the duty.

Take for instance last week.  Suddenly she realized that she didn’t like the orientation of our house, and she wanted it to be moved three inches to the left.  THIS WAS HER IDEA; I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!  But the next thing I knew, I had a noose around my neck, I was bent over, with one corner of the house resting in my hands, straining like a donkey, and I turn around ONLY to see my wife stretched out in a lawn chair, sipping a Diet Coke, and shouting out detailed directions to ME (a.k.a. DONKEY!)

Anyway, one of the projects my wife takes to heart is yard work.  She’s been digging and planting flowers until our NEW HAMPSHIRE yard now legally contains enough foliage to be officially classified by The Department of the Interior as a “tropical rain forest.”  Oh, and she doesn’t like it when someone messes with her flowering flora.  Note: this particular gardening gal will do absolutely anything to protect her germinating geraniums, to include covering up carnage to the cops.  “Yes,” you read that last part correctly.  So, if there are any officers reading this column who are involved in any missing person’s cases, I have a tip for you: they are probably buried in OUR YARD AND MY WIFE IS COVERING IT UP!  And I know this because of her flowers and what almost happened the other day. 

And I am not making any of this up.

It was October 19th, 2008, my daughter, Sara, who was working in the yard with my wife, came into the house holding something behind her back.  I was in the kitchen.

“Daddy, I need you to look at something.”

“Okay, peanut, what is it?”

“Mommy told me NOT to show it to you but—”

“What?”

“She’s been digging and planting flowers for hours and came across something.”

“So, show it to me.”

“If I show you it, and if you report it to the police, the authorities might dig up her flowers, and she would not be happy if that were to happen.”

“HUH?”

My wife walked in.  She looked at Sara.  “I told you to now show him.”

“I haven’t yet, mommy.”

“Okay, what the hell is going on around here?”

“I found something in the yard, okay?”

“And—”

“It’s a bone, and it might be human remains.”

“HUMAN REMAINS!  Seriously!  Hand me the phone.  I’m calling 911.”

“Wait.  Look, if it is a human bone, they will rope off the area, and they will dig up my day lilies just to get to the rests of the skeleton.  And I have worked so hard on digging and planting my flowers.  So, if it is a human skeleton, what do you say we keep this our little secret?”  (Wink)

“Okay (rub temples) so, let me get this straight: you’re saying that if Sara shows me the bone, and let’s just say for the sake of this argument the bone DOES turn out to be a human skull with an axe sticking out of it, I’m supposed to pretend its JUST the skull of an unfortunate squirrel, and I should JUST roll it into the neighbor’s yard, and pretend like nothing ever happened, BECAUSE your daylilies are at stake here?”

“Exactly.”  (Toothy Smile)

Fortunately, the bone turned out to be nothing but an old beef bone.  Well, fortunately for us, not so much for the cow.

But anyway, it was getting late and my wife asked me to please help her and Sara finish planting the flowers (did you hear the sound of the rope landing around my neck?)  She told me: “all she wanted me to do was to dig a trench, a little trench, and nothing else.”

“Dig a trench, a little trench, and nothing else” she said.  The Panama Canal should have been such a little TRENCH!   5,000,000 backbreaking hours later when I, the donkey, was finally finished digging the “little Drury Canal Trench,” and I’m being completely honest here, if I had stumbled across the skeletal remains of Jimmy Hoffa in his cement shoes, I wouldn’t have told nobody nothing about nothing, so fagetaboutit!

Copyright © 2008 Bill Drury.  All Rights Reserved.

Bill Drury is a humor columnist for The Carriage Towne News.  Contact him via snail mail c/o The Carriage Towne News, P.O. Box 100, Kingston, NH 03848, or email him @ Drury1234@Verizon.Net, or to go his website @ www.billedrury.com.