by MaryBeth

     You’ve gotta love wildlife.  When you live in the country they live with you.  And you know what they say, Love Your Neighbor.  We park our cars on the grass.  We live off a dirt road, up a dirt driveway, and we park on the grass.  This is apparently a huge invitation to all the country mice in the area to come make a home in the car.  No surprise since with kids, or at least my kids, there are plenty of tasty tidbits to be found in my car.  Meals on Wheels for Mice as it were.  My son was not helping by putting whatever he didn’t like from his lunch in the glove box, creating The Mouse Smorgasbord.  Getting license and registration took on a whole new meaning after that. Good thing I had those pliers.  Too bad about that officer though. I heard heart conditions run in his family.

      I was taking my Mom to the kids’ dance recital one time and let me say, my Mom is NOT a country gal.  She was dressed to the nines, and though polite, you could tell that when she got in my car, her first thought was “eeww.” OK, so it’s old and not the cleanest car in the lot, but it gets me from point A to point B, still, I’m a little self-conscious to see the juxtaposition of MY MOM and THE CAR.  There is something just not right there.  But she’s a good sport so off we go.  I was driving along, maybe 50 or so, and I see what looks like a piece of rubber gasket or something start flapping back and forth from under the front of the hood.  Well things coming apart in the car is nothing new, so I subconsciously note that I need a new gasket under the hood.  Then I realize…there IS no gasket under the hood.  I make an excuse to check the oil, pull over, lift the hood and a very surprised mouse pulls in his tail and looks at me.  “Keep your tail in.”  I tell him.  “My mother’s in the car.”  And we continue on to the recital.  After dropping my mother at the door I head over to the quick mart for some batteries for the camera.  It’s raining, so I have the wipers on intermittent.  As I am driving, I see movement under the wiper blade and sure enough here comes brazen Mister Mouse, up from under the hood.  As the wiper comes down he climbs up.  Now mind you I AM STILL DRIVING,  and you guessed it, the wiper goes up, he goes flying.  At the top of the arc he grabs the blade with both paws and manages to hang on for the trip down.  Now most people might have pulled over, he was on the driver’s side and all, and it’s kind of hard to focus properly with a mouse on your wiper but this is the best entertainment I’d had all week, and besides, this guy wasn’t getting off.  So rather than turn off the blades, I speed them up a little.  Just a little.  And there he goes again:  Ally oop,  Ally down.  This guy is one tough mouse and I want to see what he’s really worth, so I put the wipers on full and now he’s got a rhythm…piece of cake.  I’m still driving, mind you…So of course we have to see if he is truly the Olympian that he’s making himself out to be, so you guessed it, I put the wipers on FAST – he’s watching me as I do this, so he’s ready – boom, off he goes, he’s hanging on for dear life but it’s raining and things are slick and holy mackerel he’s going for the Gold  but his little paws are barely clinging to the blade and ….so I turn off the wipers because now I really have to go see my daughters dance, and we all know one thing: the girls may be cute in their little tutus, but

MR. Mouse will be One Tough Act to Follow.

by MaryBeth

When I lived in Alaska I had a dog.  Sky was half wolf and half husky and he was probably the smartest dumb dog I ever had.  He could play dumb better than Gracie Allen.  Oh for pete’s sake, she was an actress; how OLD am I?  Anyway this dog could make you think he was dumber than a box of rocks and then pull off a bakery heist like nobody’s business.  So this town I lived in was a tourist town and when the tourists started returning in the Spring, you’d have thought it was the Second Coming, the way the town spruced up and everyone put on their smiley face and pretended we all liked each other.  My friend Vicki lived right in the tourist district and she had a husky too, named Shay.  Shay was a beautiful little vixen and all the dogs in town loved her including Sky.  And when she came into heat they all loved her a little more.  Well one day Sky got away from me at my house, and I just knew where he was headed, so I high-tailed it down to Vicki’s, but a husky-wolf can definitely outrun a crazy woman who is trying to avoid another “Dog-At-Large” ticket and he did.  By the time I got to Vicki’s, there was a two dog love knot in the middle of the Main Street of the Tourist District.  Now some of you may not know the mating habits of the canine species, but take it from me, it is painful to witness.  Sure the first minute and a half are downright rapture, but the next 20 have got to make the poor fellow wish she had pulled the praying mantis bit and just bit his head off instead. So here is my dog and Shay, stopping traffic, going at it in front of all the cruise ship tourists on a lovely spring morning.  Once it starts, you can’t pry them apart for love or money.  Nature just has to take its course and that takes time. 

     So Vicki comes out on her front porch and sees what’s happening and we both know that the town policeman (and we were lucky to have one) was definitely not going to miss this and she could not afford another Dog-At-Large ticket either. (Alaska has dog issues that are a whole nother matter and they take them real serious.  We’d all rather have our hands slapped for drunk driving than deal with the Animal Enforcement Officer – who often doubles as the Town Coroner…)  So she says, “Let’s get them into my yard at least.”  Well you try moving two huskies who are stuck together tail to tail after the moment of truth.  It’s just like humans: all he wants to do is go to sleep but he can’t get away from her!  All he needs to do is just relax, but she keeps yanking him here and there to sniff stuff!  By now he’s at least 6 inches longer than he used to be, and it hurts, dag nabbit!  So he’s yelping, I’m pulling, Vicki’s pushing, and just as we get them in her yard, the police car arrives.

     “Ladies?”

     “Hi Joe.”

     “Problem?”

     “No Joe.”

     “Looks like Shay’s in heat.”

     “No, I don’t think so.”

     “Vicki, you know when Shay’s in heat you’ve got to keep her inside.”

     “I didn’t know she was in heat Joe.”

     “I’m writing you a ticket.”

     Now I can’t take it anymore, so I have to pipe up.

     “So you’re writing Vicki a ticket?  For what?”

     “Unrestrained dog-in-heat.”

     “Her dog’s in her yard.”

     “Doesn’t matter.  The males can’t help themselves.  Then we have dogs running all over town.”

     “So my dog gets away from me, runs down the middle of Main Street, jumps poor little Shay and she gets the ticket?”

     “Do you want a ticket?”  Silence.  “OK then.”  At this point the two dogs are trying anything and everything to separate, Shay is rolling on the ground, Sky’s manhood is being stretched to lengths that have got to require surgery and there is quite a crowd of Alaska Tourists gathered enjoying the show.  Pretty soon Jerry shows up.

     “Hey Jerry.”

     “Joe.”

     “What’s up?”

     “Getting a picture for the paper.”

     “Hold on, let me get my good side.”

     So the paper the following day was a nice picture of the town lawman writing two ladies a ticket in front of two huskies with their butts stuck together, and the only one smiling was Officer Joe.

by MaryBeth 

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     I just love insurance.  That seems like such a win-win situation.  May as well be playing the craps table in Atlantic City.  No wait, those odds are better.

     You see, out at the farm, we have a dead tree next to our house.  It’s a big tree.  A real big tree.  We wondered what we should do with such a big dead tree.  Chris thought maybe we could make it into the East Coast’s Only Drive-Thru Tree.  Put The Boy to work hollowing out a tunnel with his penknife.  Then maybe we’d finally make some money on the land for which we pay taxes. 

     I thought maybe we top it and build Sweetie a giant nest so she could live out her teenage years peacefully and we could still keep an eye on her from the second floor.  Of course the woodpeckers might pose her a bit of a challenge.  Those jackhammers are murder in the morning.  Talk about leaving a mark…

       When the tree first died we relied on our neighbors for advice.  Here in the country, your neighbors are pretty much your solution to any problem.   And if they can’t solve it, it probably isn’t worth solving. The only thing they could all agree on was that it was dead.   Being so close to the house on one side and the wires going up to the house on the other, no one wanted to advise much further than that.   Doing nothing with the tree seems like a good option to us.  Of course it does make for a good topic of conversation down at the diner.

     “Seen that dead tree up at their house?”

     “Yeah, I seen that.”  Head shake; coffee sip; lean back.

     “They gonna cut it?”

     “Don’t appear so.”  Head shake; coffee sip; lean forward.

     “She likes the woodpeckers.” Chuckle chuckle; head shake; coffee gulp.

     As the years have carried on, the Dead Tree has withstood ice storms and blizzards that have leveled many of its healthy peers.  Yet still it stands.  But it is only a question of time.  Trouble is, the only space to park our cars is under The Tree.

    So I called our insurance company.

     “If a tree limb falls on the cars, are we covered?”

     “Are they your cars?

     “Yes.”

     “Then no.”

     “What?”

     “We’ll cover your neighbors’ cars.”

     “I pay the insurance, but you’ll cover the neighbors’ cars?”

     “Right.”

     “Why?”

     “Your car insurance should cover yours.”

           So I called the car insurance.

     “No.”

     “Why not?”

     “Your homeowner’s should cover it.  It’s a tree.”

     “They say you should cover it.  They’re cars.”

     “They’re wrong.”

     So there she stands.  A bark peeling, limb dropping, woodpecker ridden giant, daring the common UPS man to pass under and risk certain delays in his appointed rounds.  Our boxes are now chucked out at the road.  I don’t blame him.  The kids have all gotten in the habit of holding their lunchboxes over their heads when they get out of the car.  For Christmas, we all got hard hats. Me, I just leave all the trash bags under it and use it as a trash compactor.  It works.

Before…                            After.