Between Some Rocks and a Yard Space

Some days you’re the windshield, some days you’re the bug, and some days, you’re a backwoods past-her-prime school teacher in a Tahoe crushed under a flatbed truck hauling tons of freshly-harvested rock.

Thank goodness the last one did not come to fruition! The Pony and I met that flatbed truck down on the flat section of our gravel road yesterday afternoon. I was able to pull way over by the creek and let him pass. Another few yards, and we would have been pinned by a telephone pole, and a few more past that was the Great Chasm hill-curve, with nowhere to go but backwards for a quarter mile. Val is not good at backing. Have you heard? T-Hoe’s backup beeper is kaput.

Between the telephone pole and the Great Chasm, we passed a truck pulling a trailer loaded with a Bobcat. The mini bulldozer machine, not the animal. I scrunched T-Hoe off the roadside, up under some tree limbs and let it go by.

From the top of Great Chasm Hill, I spied a white truck cab through the woods, up by the neighbors’ barn. No way was I going to attempt Barn Hill with a flatbed truck loaded with tons of rock coming at me. That Barn Hill is as twisty-turny as a pig’s tail, and has ruts from running water three feet deep at alternate sides. Plus a big tree two feet off the road near the top.

“Pony. There’s another truck coming. I’m going to get over here out of his way and let him pass.” I turned onto our homestead road, backed up, and sat facing where that white truck would come out. And waited. And waited.

“Mom. There’s nothing coming.”

“It’s there! I saw it. He might be waiting for me to come up.”

“No. I didn’t see a truck.”

“Go look.”

“You want me to get out and go look?”

“Yes. You don’t have to climb up the hill, but go over to Great Chasm Hill, and look up through those trees.” The Pony trotted over. Looked. Ran up Great Chasm Hill. I assume he looked again. He was out of sight. Shortly, he returned.

“I see that truck. It’s stopped. I think he’s waiting for you.”

“Okay. We’ll try it. But I can’t back down this hill if he starts toward me.”

Up we went. There was the white truck cab hooked to a flatbed semi loaded with rock. It was parked at the top of the Barn Hill, on the wrong side of the road, by the tree. I had to drive on the neighbors’ yard to get around it.

Let the record show that no driver was in the truck. I could have waited an eternity for him to come down that hill. Hick reported that it was there when he came home at 5:00, and there were three guys working on it. He stopped to ask, and they said the brakes were locked up. Doesn’t make me any more confident about encountering them on the downhill.

“We’re leaving school later tomorrow, Pony, so we don’t run into this again. They must quit at 4:00 and haul out their spoils.”

I KNEW this was going to happen. Fie on the people who sell rocks off their land! Wait. That’s us. But not on the road we live on!

You Laughed When You Met a Woman Who Did Not Know England Is an Island, Until You Met a Man Who Cannot Even Find the Island

Let the record show that it’s official now. Thevictorian family is geographically challenged. As we have established, Val does not know her Europe, a deficiency which she attributes to her ninth grade geography teacher, a football coach who ran plays all hour with his team, and didn’t even know Little Val’s name until after 2^nd Quarter. A valedictorian can’t grow in a vacuum, you know. That guy might have cost me a fortune on Jeopardy. Let’s not even talk about the arrangement of Spain, Greece, and Italy.

The Pony can barely make his way from the homestead to bill-paying town without a map, a Garmin, and a trail of little chocolate donuts. It’s hard to recognize roads and landmarks when your nose is buried in a laptop.

Last night, I told The Pony to holler upstairs and ask Hick how far we live from the North-Of-Backroads County line. Hick hollered his response: “It depends. Three miles. Or 40 miles. Depending on which way you go.”

By that reasoning, I suppose we live three miles away, or 92,960,000 miles away.

Depending on whether you go around the sun to get there.

Don’t Pee on Val Thevictorian’s Tire and Tell Her You’re a Kitty

Alas, poor T-Hoe. He has it as bad as Little Miss Puffytail and Daddy Gator in those Quilted Northern commercials. He is a prisoner in that garage. He cannot get up and leave. He sees all. If only he could talk. I’m surprised he can’t, actually. Because he can do everything else when all his systems are GO, which they’re not right now, or for the past year, even, because Hick won’t get him fixed. Anyhoo…

This morning I followed The Pony through the garage door, after sweet-talking my sweet, sweet Juno who ran up on the porch to see me off, and was immediately slapped in the face (figuratively, not literally) with cat pee.

Surely you remember that my “new” kitchen table and six chairs reside in the garage, even after I cleaned off the old table because Hick said he was switching them out Saturday. I don’t want a cat peein’ on my kitchen table. Or chairs.

Surely you remember that Hick said he was locking the cat door in the big metal garage door. And then we found a cat inside the next day. So now I’m wondering if Hick understands the concept of LOCK. And why one of our cats was in the garage and peed on T-Hoe’s tire. It wasn’t even raining last night. Or all week. Cats don't go in there when the weather is good, unless they hear Hick rattling their kibble in the morning.

WAIT A MINUTE! Cats don’t pee on tires! AND they don’t pee a puddle the size of a medium seal. Yet there it was, on T-Hoe’s tire, spread out on the concrete floor. And the cats were on the porch. Something is fishy about this pee business.

WHAT IF…Hick really did lock the cat door? What if none of our animals had access to the garage? What if that possum or raccoon that I suspected of using our garage as a pooping place a while back could not get in the cat door, either? What if the record shows that Hick, The Pony and Val do not sleepwalk, and were not in the least bit…um…incontinent last night?

DUN DUN DUN!

What if a PERSON, with actual thumbs, not furry or padded or clawed paws, turned the doorknob of the people door to the garage, and went inside, and peed on T-Hoe’s tire?

What if?

Before you start folding a new tinfoil had to mail to Val because her old one seems to be wearing thin...get a load of THIS.

I backed out of the garage and started up the driveway. T-Hoe's back windshield wiper took a swipe. I never use that thing. I take pride in how thick the layer of dust on that back hatch can get. Just ask my sister the ex-mayor's wife. It keeps the lights of tailgaters out of my eyes. Besides, when it's clean, the dew and dust mix and make dirt drops. As long as there's already a dirt layer, there are no drops. Just an even surface. Like a window painted beige. I looked down and saw that the control knob had the lever moved over to the first position! Indeed. That wiper took another swipe as I glanced back. I put that lever to OFF forthwith!

But that's not all! I looked at the regular front windshield wiper control, and it was set on level 4 out of 5! It wasn't swiping, though. That one will come on all at once if enough raindrops hit the glass. But I keep it on OFF as well. I can't even remember the last time we had rain. I always turn the wipers off when I enter the garage.

Something is fishy in Backroads.

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Footnote to the feline impersonator: I wrote this at school (ON MY PLAN TIME, PEOPLE!) and sat down to watch the 5:00 local news when I got home. There was a story about a county next to us, I mean RIGHT next to US, about 3 miles away, in fact, where there has been a rash of break-ins to storage sheds and garages and even an attempt at home entry. They took five fishing poles from one guy's shed. We have 10 fishing poles in our garage.

Or DO we?

Maybe somebody is fishing in Backroads...