The Nest
I was thinking ahead. I ordered the poison, the pruner, the repellant, and a pair of protective bifocal sunglass goggles of a style that would make me look trailer park. I spent over 200 dollars (the deer repellant is very expensive; and the two guys I hired to kill my deer this winter apparently suck at it) so I also got a free Leatherman with my order. It is the starter model and only comes with a knife blade and a pair of pliers and a built in belt clip for when just carrying it in your pocket is not good enough or for when you really want to drive the chicks wild. Chicks, and I'm not even wearing my trailer park goggles when I say this, just love a guy who sports the multi-use pocket knife from his belt. Drives them crazy.
Moving along shy of light speed none of the above is pertinent. Or only marginally so. If you had goggles why weren't you wearing them? Just wasn't I respond. It wasn't Bernadette doing the asking because she doesn't know about the goggles. We don't tell each other everything until it's too late.
Last year I just used the chainsaw but I had the new pruners and was eager to play with them. I had already played with the Leatherman to the point of the only thing left to do was cut myself badly from not leaving well enough alone. Not realizing or accepting that the free gift only has two functions and no matter how many different ways I pried along its six sides I was never going to get more than two functions, a knife and a plier. As if a corkscrew or an awl was going to make my life that much better.
I am writing this with one eye closed and crying, but only from that one eye closed. Well I poked it with a thorn bush and it now just leaks two three hours at a time like a faucet with a dry rotted washer. I have some percocet so thats nice. Bernadette calls me Popeye for no other reason than she can't seem to help herself. She also gives me helpful advice but how seriously are you going to take someone who calls you Popeye for no other reason than she can't help herself? Which is somewhat pertinent because can I tell her something now without her repeating it to her brother who is out here helping me? No way to know until you know. Every minute of every day is a crapshoot.
So the brother is helping me out and today we moved inside to do a little clean up in the bighouse because some beginner crazy person girl moved in there over the winter and apparently cleaning up after herself was not part of her crazy person girl skill set. Hey crazy girl, did you steal that big spaghetti pot?
I'm looking under the kitchen sink for cleaning supplies while brother man vacuums (urgent update: single salty tear marches down my right your left cheek) and there is in the back a mouses nest of torn paper towels and...its been there awhile...before I left out of here early winter it was one of the things I saw and later told my local assistant I would be glad for him to take care of. The thing is by the time he got to it the crazy girl had moved in and she would not respond to his persistent knocking and when I finally insisted he use the key and enter so he could call me from the only working phone on the property and report to me the contents of a specific piece of mail or two, she came from a back room and said—I'm afraid. It's not like my local assistant was wearing bifocal sunglass goggles. She was just afraid, I suppose, that he was going to violate her like he violated that lock. But he's a good guy, not the violating type at all, which she would have realized if she opened the damn door once in a while. But he never got to that mouse nest is the thing.
I'm looking at it and the brother comes over because I said oh shit and that made him curious. I told him what it was and then he ask what it was made of. I said oh the usual, paper towels and dried snake skins, and that made him laugh sort of, because if or when, on those rare occasions I have any sense of humor at all it might be considered dry. It was then that I realized or thought I remembered something Bernadette told me once about him having a proper fear of snakes and so I laughed back sort of, in that way you do when you are happy that someone got your joke. A joke between two men about paper towels and snake skins. I was then very careful to get all the paper towel and probably to most what would fairly be considered a surprisingly large amount of shedded snake skin into the trash bag before brother man realized that the house in which he was spending the next several nights was on most nights already occupied. I don't know if Bernadette will tell her brother this anymore than I know the number of times I will be Popeye before becoming the next name on the list that includes some real doozies. Snake Eye McGillicuddy would be funny, once.
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