Val, Off Her Rocker

Last night I went to bed around midnight-thirty. I don't mean to be indelicate, but as I was sitting on the toilet in the master bathroom, I heard the wind a-howlin'. No. It was not just Hick and his breather in the boudoir. I heard that wind whooshing in from the northwest, battering against the cedar shingles on the front of the house.

Because Val is safety-conscious, and somewhat prone to anxiety when wind is concerned, this development triggered a trip to the living room to turn on a local channel and check for weather watches or warnings. After all, the pupils had been up in arms that afternoon, declaring that they heard tornadoes would be popping up by the time school dismissed, and they would be stuck on the buses. Yeah. You might pooh-pooh Val's choice of weather forecasters...but those kids are at least as accurate as TV meteorologists.

First I had to turn on the DISH and then the TV. Then I had to quickly crank down the volume left by deaf man Hick. Huh. No watches. No warnings. I tried all three local channels: 2, 4, and 5. Please. Don't even ask about channel 11.

As soon as I climbed into bed and situated my head on my magically-Hick-arm-free pillow, and flapped under Grandma's quilt topped with a $10 Walmart fleece blanket...I heard it. A scooting crash. That's what happens when porch furniture is flung by the wind until it hits part of the porch rails or house. It happened to Genius one time just as he was reaching for the doorknob, having run upstairs from our concrete-walled-and-ceilinged basement safe room to see if the warned-of tornado had passed over our homestead yet. He ran back to join me and The Pony like a cat who decides it must suddenly be in another room. Flying porch furniture is nothing to be sneezed at.

I didn't sneeze. But neither did I get out of bed and go stick my head out the front door. I could have been decapitated by a mesh metal chair, old-timey colored metal chairs, an indoor rocking chair, a wicker-seated high square stool acting as a table, or a pew. Yes. A pew. Hick brought it home. I'm guessing from an auction, because I don't recall him ever breaking into a church.

This morning, as I turned on my Shiba at the front window at 5:30 a.m., I peeped out the mini blinds and saw THIS:

YIKES! The mesh metal chair had slammed into the pew, and my rocking chair was all topsy-turvy against the cedar porch post. Meh. Nothing came through the front window. So I settled back in the La-Z-Boy for my recliner nap.

When Hick kept me from nodding off by emerging early at only 5:45, I called to him as he was going out the laundry room door to feed the fleabags. "Hey, you should see what the wind did to the rocking chair! Don't set it up. I'm going to have The Pony take a picture for me when it's light enough. But you'd better be careful on the way to work. There might be tree limbs down in the road." Let the record show that Hick takes a back roads route to hit the highway, a route lined with woods on both sides.

Let the record also show that this is my indoor rocking chair. Hick callously banished it to Porchville when he brought my mom's piano into the house to take its place. My rocking chair. The one Hick gave me to rock Baby Genius in. A couple of times. Because Baby Genius was not a fan of rocking. Which he demonstrated by howling and throwing out his arms in the startle reflex. Nor of a pacifier, which he demonstrated by propelling it out of his mouth for record distance like a world champion watermelon-seed spitter.

I heard Hick badmouthing my sweet, sweet Juno and favoring poor dumb Ann as he flung their dry food into their respective metal pans like a jai alai player hurling a goatskin ball out of his basket against the side of a corrugated-tin-walled BARn. Then I heard his footsteps around the back porch, across the side by the master bedroom, and around front. Then I heard a thump. And Hick came in the front door.

"What was that noise? You didn't set that rocking chair back up, did you?"

"Well, yeah."

"I told you not to! The Pony was going to get a picture of it for me! I TOLD you not to set it up!"

"No you didn't."

"Yes I did! You never listen."

"I didn't hear you, Val."

"You heard about the chair, didn't you? That's why you walked around. You only hear what you WANT to hear!"

"Fine! I'll go lay it back down!"

So there you have it. A recreation of what the 50 mph winds did to my porch furniture last night. Still, that wind can't hold a candle to blow-hard Val Thevictorian.

Here's a second view from photographer Pony:

I fear that it might have been smashed to smithereens if it went off the porch and into the rock garden. It's really an indoor chair, see...