No Longer Blocking Up the Scenery, But Blowin' My Mind (Part 1)

[Readers of my SuperSecret Blog can have the day off. You saw this last Wednesday.]

You know how your eye is drawn to something different? You have no conscious thought of a change, but your brain elbows you in the ribs, and says, "Looky there!" That's what happened when I returned home from a 45-minute trip to town last Sunday for my 44 oz Diet Coke.

As I drove along our property on the gravel road, I noticed that Hick's campaign signs were missing. Oh, don't worry. The world is safe. Hick himself is not running for office. But he'd allowed two candidates for local races to place their signs out front. It's not like we get a lot of traffic by here. But I guess you never know when somebody taking a headless body up past the homestead to dump in the septic tank of a vacant house might see them. Or the procession of law enforcement and coroner vehicles that follow...

Anyhoo...I just KNEW those signs had been there when I left. I was certain. Pretty sure. Thought they were. Because I'd looked down into the BARn field, to see if perhaps Hick had returned early from the Storage Unit Store, and might be puttering around over there. I'd left about 12:30, and it was now nearing 1:00. If business isn't booming, he leaves at noon. Surely, if those signs had been gone, I'd have noticed as I passed by the first time. And I didn't.

Once I parked T-Hoe in the garage, I called Hick.

"Did you take down your signs? Your campaign signs? They're laying in the yard."

"No. Why would I do that?"

"I don't know. At first, I thought they were gone. Like maybe the candidates came and took them back. But then I saw them laying flat in the grass."

"No. I didn't touch them. They were there when I came to my store at 8:00."

"I'm pretty sure they were there when I left for town, too. Now they're down."

"Huh. I'll look when I get back."

I asked for pictures before he set them back up. Hick said he was going to put something on Facebook about it, on the page that our enclave uses to communicate things like power outages and strange vehicles and INSULTS ABOUT HICK's ROADWORK!

I don't know why somebody would take down the signs. I don't even know what political party these candidates represent. Hick and I don't have a political affiliation. We vote for the candidate. One of these is a distant relative of Hick, running for county clerk. The other is a judge up for re-election, a guy whose brother was in my high school class, and who Hick went to fireman training with.

[Maybe Juno was on the case! Looks like she was sniffing something when Hick took the photo after he got home. If only she could talk!]

A few minutes later, Hick said he put the info on Facebook, and that he let people know he was not happy!

"Oh, great. Now you're going to start a war. It might have been your buddy, Buddy, playing a prank on you. Or maybe it was somebody mad about your bumpy roads!"

"Hah. They would have done it before now."

"Maybe it was kids."

"I think kids would have kicked them down, and they'd be bent."

"I think adults would have taken them! Not just laid them down."

About a half hour later, Hick said our neighbor next door put out some info. She'd seen kids walking down the road about an hour previous.

"See? I think it was kids."

"She didn't put out publicly who it looked like, but she told me. And I know that lady was having a birthday party for her teenage daughter today."

AHA! I'm pretty sure we have solved the mystery. Better yet, that lady is also on the Facebook page. So she knows darn good and well if those kids went for a walk. Not that she'll own up to anything. But it's enough that she knows kids were sighted in the area.

I would hope they at least get a good talking-to! A prank's a prank, but you don't go messing with stuff in the country. No siree, Bob! Hick is not a person concerned with revenge. But others might be.