Do you want to get a birdhouse? I asked Bernadette and she said sure so I drove down the highway a bit until it was safe to turn around and returned to the yard full of birdhouses, a fairly impossible to ignore distraction while driving between South Boston and Lynchburg, VA, on 501.
This is a lot of birdhouses is what we were both thinking and after a few minutes of roaming around, a tanned man with shortly cropped white hair and smooth skin came out and we talked to him about his birdhouses and he talked to us about the big labor day flea market in the area and his various properties and his father, now deceased, and a 37,000 dollar marble and a Honus Wagner baseball card that he hid under a cushion in his shed for a collector to find and a woman with big breasts, now deceased, who I ferreted out to be Anna Nicole Smith, and he said none of her stuff after her death is that valuable to collectors, not like it was while she was alive but one of the hottest things on the market right now is anything to do with Daisy Duke.
He didn't know why they made her blonde which flummoxed me for a second until we were able to determine he was talking about the most recent Dukes of Hazzard movie and I just said I hadn't seen it as if to end any discussion which would seriously consider a blonde Daisy Duke.I liked his bird houses as things to look at and paid no attention to the fact that the only bird we saw in any of them was dead. I have looked at handmade birdhouses before and knew they were hardly ever cheap and when the man said the bigger ones were a hundred and the smaller ones were sixty-five this supported for me that opinion of what is a not cheap birdhouse, but we knew we were going to buy one and I didn't want to haggle. Bernadette said it's what you do but by "you" she either meant any of you out there or any number of other people who are not me. I could have haggled him down 20 bucks and frankly it still would have been more than I wanted to pay. And in truth I am not against haggling; I have done it before and will do it again. I just wasn't feeling it that day.
The man opened up a couple of his sheds for us and we politely looked inside at some of his stuff. We were supposed to meet someone in Lynchburg for dinner before heading a couple of hours north to arrive back here at Mt. Pleasant. Well I guess we better go I said to Bernadette about ten minutes after she had said the same thing to me and in between which we had learned a few more of the interesting details about a man whose passion is birdhouses.