It Happened

"Mom," Makenna sobbed over the phone, "I've had an accident."

My heart stopped moving and my lungs ceased breathing. Then came the words I was waiting to hear: "I'm not hurt. Everyone is fine."

Having teenagers is scary for so many reasons. The number one reason for fear, in my opinion, is that they are legally able to place themselves in the driving position of a motorized vehicle and DRIVE AWAY. Whoever made this a legal activity did not have teenagers. My daughter thinks Raman Noodles constitutes a great breakfast, and she has lost her debit card three times over the summer. Yet, she is legally able to DRIVE AWAY.

And just to ensure that I will someday be very good friends with a heart doctor, my two sons are also now driving. These are the boys who drove a go-cart into the bonfire. Yes, the actual fire. Luckily my son's only accident since legally driving has been to crash my precious Jeep into a tree. Nobody was hurt.


Mike and I hightailed it over to the accident site where the police assured us that Makenna handled herself responsibly and was not at fault in any way. We hugged Makenna and her friends, who were shaking and chattering like frightened birds, and we spoke to the woman who had pulled out in front of Makenna's car, who was wandering like a zombie. I think the police were glad when they could finally leave.

"The most scary part," Makenna said, "was that even though I was responsible for what happened to everyone, I had no control over the situation. It just happened."

Ironic, I thought to myself as I watched her get into her sad, broken car, that is just how I feel.

Death Machine

Isn't there some unwritten law that a person should only defy death one way at a time? Because I would like to make a citizen's arrest. I saw a man riding a Harley. Riding a Harley is not bad, but, while placing his unhelmeted life on his death machine, he was also smoking.

First of all, how does a cigarette stay lit while being blasted by wind? Doesn't it blow out? Or, doesn't it - literally - blow out of a man's mouth and into the road? I experienced moped riding last year for the first time, and, while exhilarating, it was also quite windy. Things blew off of me all the time: my sunglasses, my headband, thirteen sacks of groceries I was trying to transport, my skirt. I don't want to talk about it. Admittedly, I raced that thing up to 25 mph, so the wind was quite strong. But, I have a feeling Mr. Harley was planning on going even faster. How does a measly cigarette stand a chance? I've seen the way people hold those in their lips. There must be another unspoken rule that, not being a smoker, I am unaware of. It must state that the cigarette should only barely touch the lips and only one millimeter of the cigarette is actually allowed to come in contact with saliva. When talking to someone in such a situation, it is impossible for me to tear my eyes away from the smoker's blatant dare to gravity. I just stare at the butt of the cigarette sitting precariously on the outer half of a lower lip and wait, with baited breath, hoping that it does, and then hoping that it does not fall to the ground. I'm torn.

That's not all though. This man, while placing his life on a death vehicle and simultaneously inhaling cancer, pulled out his cell phone and began texting. I nearly rolled down my window and yelled, "Excuse me! Both hands should be on your death machine at all times!" If I had his cell phone number, I would have texted him the phone number for the suicide prevention hotline. Clearly, he was looking to end it all.

What has this world come to?

That Dog

My dog will be the death of himself.

Just because everyone in the family is under the spell of his beauty and love, does not mean that we spoil him. It just means that he is the king of us.

When we moved to our new house, Arrow was convinced we had done so just for him. Not only did we provide him with plenty of room to run, he also suddenly acquired a forest, a pond, and cats.  The cats rue the day. It only got better after that because when spring rolled in he suddenly found himself the owner of geese, baby birds, and squirrels.

Why can't he be satisfied with that?

"I'm calling about your dog," the voice on the phone told me.
"Yes?" I said after deciding against pretending I only spoke Spanish.
"I think I have him. I work on a horse farm, and we have a husky here. He's a friendly fellow, but he keeps chasing the horses and making them panic."
"Sorry," I mumbled, trying to sound like a responsible adult.
"He's only trying to play, but he's gonna get himself hurt or get a horse hurt."
"I'll be right there."

And now we have to keep the friendly fellow on a leash where he sits and looks at all the freedom he once had. He cries and whines and barks. He walks in circles and gets himself tangled around trees. And, in some way which I cannot explain, he gets his leash wrapped around his legs, his chest and his tail until he cannot move.

What I really don't understand is this:  How can a dog, who does not have an opposable thumb, figure out how to open a door knob so that he can get inside, but he cannot figure out how to walk in an opposite direction so as to untangle himself?

Not one to embrace captivity, he turned into a canine Houdini - escaping at every possible minute. Sometimes he was caught in the act, but he usually just got away. Then I would get a phone call. So we had the brilliant idea to let him run around at night. The horses were safely asleep in their stables, and small children were locked up in their houses. So we let him loose. He ran like the wind. He raced like a bolt of lightening into the nearest cornfield and never looked back.


"What if he gets hurt?" I asked Mike. "Or, what if some horse was accidentally left outside, and Arrow hurts it? Or what if he never comes back home?"
"Let's watch a movie to get your mind off of it," Mike suggested.
"I guess we can look at a movie as we sit on the couch and worry."

Several hours later we heard a happy bark at the door. With relief racing through our bodies, we ran to the door and opened it. Arrow drug himself into the house, smelling of adventure and skunk, plopped himself onto the cool kitchen floor, and slept till noon the next day.

I washed him with vinegar. I washed him with tomato juice. I washed him with special apple anti-skunk shampoo. Didn't make a dent. He reeks.

I wonder what happened to the skunk.

Fire

We haven't had many good ol' Iowa thunderstorms this summer. It has been nothing but hot, dang hot, and dry. So, when we saw the sky darken and watched lightening dance across the sky, we were thrilled and ran outside to watch. We kept watching when Mike went inside to answer his phone, and we kept watching as Mike came back out.
"I have to go," he announced.
"What's up?" I asked, peeling my eyes from the flashing sky.
"A tree got struck by lightening on a property that I own."
"Did it fall down?"
"No, it's on fire and the fire department can't get the fire out."
"So the firemen are there?"
"Yes, but the heart of the tree is on fire, so I have to have a tree service come and cut it down while it is on fire and the firemen can't leave until the tree is down and the fire is out."

It seemed to me like an unusual occurrence, so I rushed out and bought some lottery tickets. Then I realized that the fire was a bad omen, not a good one. Because later we decided to have a bon fire.

"Dad needs you," Emery told me. "He is in the bathroom."
"Uh oh," I said. But it was a much different situation than I expected when I opened the bathroom door.
"I caught my legs on fire," Mike said.
"WHAT???" I panicked.
"I was starting the fire and it kind of exploded and caught my legs on fire."
"WHAT???" I repeated, because I did not go to nursing school.
 "Can you get some ice or something?"

So with a large bill from the tree service that I might have to sell plasma to pay, and blisters covering my husbands legs, I decided that fire is serious.

Where is Smokey The Bear when you need him?

Boys Aren't Men

I'm not an overly protective sort of mom. I don't usually worry or fret. I don't have a lot of rules, like eating in certain rooms, not watching certain shows, or not throwing aerosol cans into the bon fire. My kids don't have play clothes and church clothes. But they do have clothes, so I consider them lucky.

Even I got worried, though, when I dropped them off to work last week. They were doing a lot of work at a house that had been neglected for years. Some of their jobs were to paint the basement with waterproof paint, remove the vine from the brick exterior of the house, cut down the overgrown bushes, weed whack and mow, and spray the weeds. It was hard work. It was man work.

My boys are not yet men. Which was the main thought in my head when I saw the tools they unloaded from the truck to do the jobs on their list. It started fine with screwdrivers and paintbrushes. But when they both grabbed a chainsaw, fear seized my soul.

"Wait!" I commanded in my mom voice. "You guys aren't using those chainsaws are you?"
"Well, how else can we cut down these bushes?" they asked, logically and innocently.
"Any other way!" I told them. "You may use a regular saw, or a butter knife, or even a herring."
"Mom!" they groaned. "We know how to use chainsaws. Dad taught us."

I felt proud of myself as a mother when I drove away after forcing them to agree to a contract signed with their own blood stating that they would UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES use man tools without a REAL LIVE MAN watching them, and they would only use such tools in a way that would make a responsible mother HAPPY.

Then they sent me these pictures.

I've lost control.

Dog Hot

I may have mentioned that I have an Alaskan Husky. ALASKAN.

Not only is this poor dog out of his climate, he is in the middle of the most miserable heat wave in recent memory. The earth is scorched. The grass is dying. The sun is blazing. Just opening a door to the outside causes my children to run for ice to rub on their faces and necks.

Both me and my dog are going to great lengths to keep his furry body cool. I bought him a swimming pool for those times when he has be outside for more than ten seconds. When I water the flowers he treats the event as his own personal water park experience.


But he is even more creative than that. One time we shouted for him for ten minutes before finding him happily splashing in the leftover water from an earlier shower. He refused to exit that shower until the sun set.

Then he discovered that he could use his paw, although he does not have an opposable thumb, to remove the vent cover and place his entire head into the cool air coming from the vent in the floor. He slept that way for hours. He dreamed happy dreams of snow, ice, and sleds.

I tried his method and stuck my entire head into the refrigerator. It works.

He makes a good point. It's not just hot out there - it's dog hot.

The Hulk

Lately it has been a zillion degrees. It starts out hot and gets hotter through the day. It makes simple things hard, and it makes me grumpy. The air conditioning is trying, but in the case of air conditioning vs. a zillion degrees, a zillion degrees wins. I think the only way to really make it feel nice and cool inside my house during these oppressively hot days is to go outside for fifteen minutes and then reenter. Then it feels positively lovely for a few moments. 

I woke up to a disaster last week. The two pillows I use were flung in opposite directions across the room. The top sheet was yanked out, pulled up and over my head, and crammed into the space between the headboard and the mattress. The bottom sheet was peeled back from the mattress and lumped up under my feet. Even my husband's pillow was resting precariously on a floor lamp across the room. 

Since I was pretty sure that everything was tidy and neat when I fell asleep, I rubbed my eyes and took another look. Still a disaster. I looked across the top of the bare mattress at Mike to see what in the world he had done.

"You did it," he said, exhausted.

"I did what?"

"You did this mess."

"While I was asleep?" I asked, skeptical. 

"You kept saying you were hot and you tossed around, yanked at the sheets, threw stuff. All Night Long." 

"I do kind of remember being hot, but I thought I just folded the sheet back."

"Being hot turns you into The Hulk," he mumbled on his way back to a pillowless sleep.

The Hulk. That is something nobody has ever compared me to.

I think I like it.