It was a once in a lifetime, dream-come-true cliché—a hunting trip for the men in our family through the wilds of Texas. It was a rugged, manly exercise in the production of testosterone. There were guns. There were animals sporting massive branching horns on their skulls. There were pop tarts. It was man heaven.

Disclaimer: Unlike a bunch of city folks raised on Disney and PBS, we are country people. We know that ducks don’t wear pants, that ‘possums have the most teeth of any mammal on earth, and that given a chance, a Bald Eagle will carry off your pure bred puppy to feed to its chicks—piece by bloody piece. Mother Nature is a
b . . . booger. Hunting is what animals do to animals, and if my biology teachers are right, well, then we’re animals. Right?

Sherwood went hunting with Aric and Adam in Texas and shot a white stage (a kind of elk.) Two hundred pounds of meat came in the mail and went into my freezer. Delicious. Frankly, I’d have eaten the hooves if they’d sent those.

The white stag’s mounted head came in a crate, on a semi—that stopped traffic on our street. The trucker, mumbling something about damage to the crate, insisted on cracking open the box.

“Lady, the last time I saw something like that I was at a ski lodge,” he said.

He wasn’t kidding.

Unfortunately, we don’t own a ski lodge, and it’s been a real challenge finding just the right spot to hang, Attila the White Stag.

“Not there. It’ll poke out the children’s eyes.”

“You cannot hang it there. It’ll breathe down my neck during Sunday dinner.”

“And if you hang it over the fireplace we’ll have to tear down the mantle so the horns don’t hit the roof.”

So now it’s on the wall of our bedroom, staring at me. Or it was.

Until yesterday, when Sherwood stumbling around in the dark looking for his pants, bent down and then stood up, smacking Attila the White Stag right off the wall.

Attila tumbled down off the wall and stabbed Sherwood in the thumb with his enormous horns.

I heard the unmistakable sounds of white stag violence and husband cussing, and jumped up out of a sound sleep screaming, “Oh no! It’s attacking!”

The screaming escalated—mine!

And that’s how Attila the White Stag continues wreaking revenge, beyond the grave.

Linda (Elk Burgers) Zern





 

My first Mother’s Day was a celebration of sleeping baby atop Poop Mountain.

Sherwood worked graveyard shift. He offered to “watch” the napping baby while I went to church. He didn’t mention that he would be napping while watching.

It’s a little reported but true fact that napping babies wake up. Napping husbands who work the graveyard shift not so much.

Our eight month old woke up. His father did not. Our eight month old, unable to rouse his father, entertained himself by sketching, smearing, wiping, trailing, painting, and possibly ingesting through his ear-holes—poop, his own. I came home from church to a Mother’s Day tribute of poop-encrusted child, napping—once again—on an artful poop mound. The nursery smelled like a scene from the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

I cried.

Three more children quickly followed. They also tended to poop. I cried a couple more times—off and on. They cried.

Then they laughed and brought me wads of flowers ripped from the ground, trailing roots and dirt. I taught them to read the great books of their people, and sacrifice for the good of others, and dance the dance of duty versus personal fulfillment. Mostly, I raised them not so much to kiss me but to kiss their children.

For this, I am accused by my silly, short-sighted, materialistic society to be a do-nothing, stay-at-home mom. I have nine grandchildren and if each of those children have spouses and produce four children . . . well, you do the math.

That first kid, the poop artist, he grew up and went to the Amazon as a warrior. Then he went to Greece, and Spain, and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Texas as another kind of warrior.

This Mother’s Day he sent me a zombie novel, a rifle, and a note:

Man, sometimes these college creative writing classes make me wish I’d been taken hostage by Somali pirates, raped to within an inch of my life, and saved by Seal Team Six.

That would put the razzle in my creative writing dazzle.

Let’s see; what have I got? Malignant cancer at twenty-six. Blah. Writing about cancer around here is the equivalent of writing yet another drink-drank-drunk tale of giggly good times and party trouble—mostly party trouble. Cancer is so passé.

Crap, I don’t know how to spell passé. Okay, what else?

When I was twelve we lived in the Bahamas in a two-bedroom duplex next to a croupier, and the woods burned down next to our side of the duplex while the Bahamian firemen watched. The croupier didn’t wake up; he worked nights, slept days. My dad worked as a “manager” at the one and only oil refinery on the island; that’s what he said. I think he was a spy. We lived in bathing suits. That’s probably where I got cancer.

No murders. No mayhem, other than the fire. No vampires. A few mobsters with huge get-away-homes, but they never bugged us. My brother got poison oak. I stepped on a sea urchin.

Next.

I guess I could write about my dad shooting up crap, when I was a kid. He shot that Blue Heron, shot up the barn trying to kill rats, shot my calico kitten in front of me. That’s pretty poignant stuff. Creative writing classes eat that kind of crap up with a spoon, but I’m not sure what the point would be. He was quite the drinker, my dad. Started young, kept it up. Liked to wet the boar’s ball sack down with water and then shock him in the testicles with an electric cattle prod. Good stuff. Gritty. Raw. Honest. Horror and shock and the worst kind of uncertainty.

Am I ready to take all that on? If I am, I’d better hurry, because I’m halfway to dead.

I can write funny. Sure. But I’m no David Sedaris. Not gay. Chose DNA over New York City. Never did dope and I only use alcohol to clean my glasses. I’ve had to wipe my butt with a plane ticket before and cut bubble gum out of my husband’s bottom hair but nothing hip or cool or stoned. You can tell I’m not hip, because I used the word bottom instead of ass when talking about my husband’s ass.

So, what else?

Let’s see. I’ve only had one sexual partner in my entire life, and sure, he’s Super Man and adores me and we still can’t get enough of each other even after thirty plus years but the cutting edge of sexuality—hardly. No skeletons, no closets, although we have done “it” in a closet and a hayloft and . . .

Okay, so I watched the Apollo rockets rumble towards the moon from my front yard in Titusville with all the other kids whose dads worked at the Cape, and I went to segregated schools in the South, once upon a bad old time. And I know a Polish woman with a tattoo she got when she was a small girl—at Auschwitz. I wrote a short story about her but the community college kids thought the story was about a woman who got old and saggy and her tattoo got ugly. Sigh.

So I fell into the generation gap and drowned. Well, what did I expect; I have scars older than most of the students I go to school with. It’s not their fault.

Maybe, the war stories?

I could write about getting that phone call from Iraq, the one where my kid is so stoned on synthetic morphine, he can barely speak. But he’s fine he slurs and on his way home—just an accident. Don’t cry, Mom. The magnesium burns aren’t that bad, he tells me.

And suddenly I’m learning more about magnesium flares than I care to know. Magnesium burns at 3200 degrees Fahrenheit. It can melt engine blocks. It melted his Kevlar body armor.

It takes him five days, flat on his stomach to get home: Bagdad, Germany, D.C., Chicago and the world’s premier burn doctors telling him at every stop that he’s looking at skin graphs, potential infection, potential rejection, and months of hospitalization and therapy.

But all along there have been prayers and fasting that have gone up to our God’s heaven like incense from the tabernacle in the wilderness of our afflictions.

Finally he reaches Brook Medical Center in San Antonio where the doctor’s tell him, “SSG Zern, we can’t explain it, but you’ve begun to heal and healthy skin is growing over the third degree burns. We’re releasing you to the barracks to recuperate.”

Ah, but that smacks of faith and religion and miracles and we all know how that plays in some circles.

Damn.

What I wouldn’t give for a good Somali pirate kidnapping.

Okay, that’s it; I got nothing.

Nothing to write about.



**Grist: Ground grain. Something that can be turned to one’s advantage.











 

“I drowned one of the ducks.”

It’s never a good sign when you start out the day by drowning an aquatic bird.

What? I didn’t do it. Sherwood, my husband and boyfriend of thirty plus years, did.

But it’s my fault.

I told him what to do, just not often enough or clearly enough or slowly enough or enough.

When I noticed that our four new ducklings ($3.99 at Tractor Supply) were starting to walk like Quasimodo, I jumped on the Internet, typed in “ducks lurching about like a character in a French novel”, eavesdropped on several duck blogs, and learned that ducklings being raised in giant rubber buckets occasionally fail to develop proper leg strength. Therapy to develop proper duck muscles included thirty minutes per day of swimming about in water of a sufficient depth.

That’s what I told my husband. Thirty minutes.

NOT – place ducklings in bucket of water and leave, until one drowns, remove remaining ducklings. Confess.

When he confessed what had happened, I said, “You don’t listen.”

He said, “Oh, I listen. I just don’t hear you.”

In truth, Sherwood felt horrible about the accidently drowning. Especially in light of the fact that he’s been working on a state of the art duck pen, complete with antique iron tub and surrounding concrete decking. He’s been working on the duck pen for about a year, because his first duck construction efforts resembled the work of a drunken computer programmer and my husband, a computer programmer, doesn’t drink.

Raising baby ducks has a learning curve like everything else, and duck farming ain’t for sissies. But like all learning curves it’s extremely helpful if hearing and listening become part of the duck therapy experience, before . . .

. . . somebody has to die.

Linda (Duck Out) Zern








 

Secrets of a Relapsed Shoe Shopper
Or
How to Think in Circles



Being a girl beats being a sharp stick in the eye.

I love being a girl. I love dressing up and makeup and hairdos and having long eyelashes. That’s how you know you’re a girl, if you have long eyelashes, but everyone knows that.

Being a girl beats being someone who has to wear ugly shoes. Have you seen boy shoes? Plain. Flat. Cloned. Cow. Flesh. There, now you’ve seen boy shoes.

I love being a girl, because the shoes are “too cha-cha for words.” Except that I’m not supposed to love shoes, because it’s wrong and vain and superficial and materialistic and . . . I only have two feet and . . .what do I need all those shoes for, and if God had wanted me to have 100 pairs of shoes He would have made me a centipede . . . and . . .

So I went on the NO shoe-shopping wagon for months and months, but no one told me what a good job I was doing NOT buying shoes. In fact, no one mentioned my NOT buying shoes at all. It was highly anti-gratifying and kind of sad when no one sends me anything in the mail except the county, making sure that I know the government is trying to knock down every tree between my house and Macy’s.

So then I overpaid the Macy’s credit card by a bit. What? It happens. Besides, I really don’t eat very much so I must have sent the food money to Macy’s department store, by accident.

But then I realized that no one had patted my head and told me what a good girl I’d been for NOT buying shoes, and since I wasn’t comfortable with Macy’s having all of my food money in the form of a credit, and then there was this amazing spring shoe sale . . .

So I bought four pair of shoes to eat up the credit on my account, but I went over by a couple of bucks, and now I owe Macy’s money for shoes, and that’s how I fell off the NO shoe-shopping wagon and landed on my feet, wearing a dynamite pair of Easter floral pumps.

Linda (Too Cha-Cha for Words) Zern




 

Hey Boy Dudes and Girl Dudes,


I found pot in my garage yesterday. I should end this communication right here. No, that would be cruelly unusual. Okay, so I found pot in the garage yesterday.

I was throwing some storage boxes around, pretending to simplify and organize, when one of the box lids came loose. Stuff flew out. Bending, I scooped up a bit of desiccated leaves and seeds wrapped neatly in clear plastic wrap and tied with a blue twist tie.

“What’s this?” I mumbled to no one in particular. I shook the bag in front of my face. Seeds jumped.

“Wow, this sure looks like pot,” I said, also to no one in particular. Our cat, Charlie, meowed.

I glanced at her with narrowed eyes and asked, “Charlie, are you smoking pot?” She meowed again, and that’s when I got paranoid.

First, I made a mental note that the pot had flown out of the box belonging to the kid that I’ve always suspected of everything. Then I made phone calls. I called my husband, my best friend, my oldest daughter, and a drug awareness hotline. I also confronted the only kid at home, with the righteous flourish of an 11th century crusader.

I said, “Sherwood, what’s the worst thing parents can find in their own home?”

My husband said, “A used condom.”

“No. Good answer, but wrong,” I corrected him. “The answer is pot. What should I do with it?”

He said, “Sell it.”

I hung up the phone and tried my best friend Mindy. I said, “I found pot.”

Mindy said, “Really, where?”

I said, “On top of some Mother’s Day cards and Boy Scout awards.”

She said, “How much is there?”

I said, “A nickel bag.” I actually used the words nickel bag. I don’t even know what that means.

“What should I do with it?” I asked.

She said, “Flush it.”

I called Heather, the oldest daughter. “I found pot in the garage,” I said. “I think your dad is smoking pot.”

Heather laughed—sort of.

“What should I do with it?”

First, she offered to take it to college and give it to her reprobate dancer friends, then she said, “Flush it.”

I shook the plastic baggy at Maren, the youngest daughter, and said, “Is this yours? And is this why you’ve been in seventeen car accidents in two years?”

Maren said, “Nope, I’m just a really bad driver. I don’t need marijuana to make it worse.”

I asked, “What should I do with it?”

“Smoke it,” she said. My paranoia grew.

What if there was a kilo of pot hidden in the Christmas decorations? What if the neighbors were hiding their stash in our garage? What if the pot had been there awhile and we have been transporting it across state lines every time we moved? Would that make us drug mules or drug traffickers?
Going into my super mom crime scene investigator persona, I started pawing through the suspect storage box. That’s when I found the plastic bag full of black cocaine.

When Adam came home, I shook the pot and the black cocaine at him.

“What’s this?” I accused.

He took the plastic bags stuffed with drugs from me. He handed the bag of black cocaine back to me and said, “Well, this is dirt.” He handed the other bag back to me and said, “And these are grass seeds.”

I shouted, “Exactly! Grass, marijuana, ganja, wacky tobaccy—DOPE.”

He spoke slowly and clearly and said, “No, I mean grass like, ‘I’m going to mow the grass.’ It’s an object lesson from church. My Sunday school teacher gave it to me.”

I stared at the pot and the black cocaine.

He continued, “You know—seeds, fertile soil, faith, planting, harvest.”

“Wow, that’s a relief. I thought our cat was smoking pot in the garage.”

Adam laughed—sort of.

That’s how my Monday went. Do I feel stupid? Gosh no. I feel I learned an important lesson—I know now who really loves me. Mindy really loves me, and Heather really loves me, because they told me to flush the drugs, thereby avoiding capture or death in a drug shoot-out. In contrast, Maren tried to get me hooked on drugs, and Sherwood tried to turn me into a drug pusher. Adam just tries to avoid me as much as possible.


Have a great, drug-free week,

Linda (Sell it, Flush it, Smoke it) Zern

 

“Wow! Was she good looking?!”

I couldn’t decide if my husband was making an emphatic declaration or asking a question about the woman who had administered his lie detector test. It bugged me.

“The deputy was good looking. Check. But what did she ask you?”

“Everything.”

There are times when holding a conversation with Sherwood, my husband of thirty plus years, is a bit like being in a police interrogation.

“So give me an example of ‘everything,’” I prompted. Then I adjusted the interrogation room light to shine more squarely into his eyes. I was trying to pry information out of him about the lie detector test he had taken to qualify for the Osceola County Volunteer Mounted Posse. Kitty, his horse, has her lie detector test next week.

“You know. Did I ever do drugs? Do I know any felons? Am I related to any felons? Is there anything in my past that I could have been arrested for and wasn’t? Any domestic violence? But this was before the actual lie detector test. We were just chatting.”

“And . . .” I prompted.

“And I said, ‘No, kind of, yes, possibly and does my wife throwing pancakes at me count?”

I felt myself pale.
“You ratted me out. How could you do that? You ratted me out to the Osceola county sheriff’s office. I can’t believe you.”

He looked sheepish.

“Did I mention that the officer was really good looking?”

“Arrrggggg! But did you explain? There were extenuating circumstances and that it was justifiable pancake violence? That you were already playing softball nine days a week. That I had four little kids, six and under. And that you were wanting to join your seventeenth softball league? Did you? Did you? And that I just snapped and the pancakes were there on the griddle, and then they were in my hand, but I don’t remember how they got in my hand or when I started throwing them at you? And that Aric, who was all of six, yelled, ‘Incoming!!’ and then he dragged all his siblings to safety. And is it any wonder that he joined the Army? Did you tell her that part?”

“Yes. Some. Not true. True. Hardly seventeen . . .”

And that’s when I commenced to beating on him with a rubber hose.

Actually, I’d like to join the Osceola Volunteer Mounted Posse myself, but I’m afraid I can’t pass the lie detector test, seeing as how I have a rather checkered past and all. Oh, I didn’t go streaking (naked) on motorcycles or anything like that the way MY HUSBAND DID but I have had a bit of an Irish temper and you know how those people can get.

Linda (Hotcakes) Zern












 

I cannot run for public office—ever. There’s a potential YouTube video. It won’t be flattering.

Somewhere in the bowels of our local box store lurks a security video where I can be seen devolving into the circling, snarling matriarch of a hyena pack.

Because . . .while trying to do the right thing and return my buggy to the buggy corral, I may or may not have rolled that buggy in front of a little old lady who resembled a wizened Mother Goose.

Note: Buggy is southern for shopping cart. Mother Goose is southern for an elderly woman pushing a mean buggy.

Let the record show that Mother Goose was completely out of sync, going in the down, and up the out. She’s lucky she wasn’t buggy crushed. Forced to walk three—possibly four—steps out of her way, she blamed me.

“People are so rude these days. You pulled right out in front of me,” she said.

For a disorienting minute, I thought I might have been rolling down the interstate in my convertible buggy.

It’s important to note that ninety-nine percent of the time in these confrontational shopping buggy-parking situations, I generally say something like, “Sorry. You are so right; rude isn’t a big enough four-letter word for what I am.” Then I grovel.

This time, for reasons only my hormone soaked reptilian brain might fathom, I did not grovel. I bristled.

Seizing on the driving/parking metaphor, I hiked up my arthritic right hip, slapped the back (buttocks) portion, and while hopping about on one foot, chanted, “Next time signal! Put your blinker on, put your blinker on, put . . .”

Then it got really weird.

Mother Goose hiked up her more arthritic hip, slapped her buttocks region, and shuffle-shuffle-hopping, shot back, “YOU! Put your blinker on, put your blinker
on . . .”

Circling each other while slapping, chanting and shuffle hopping, we were like two woozy dogs with six legs between us. Hackles were visible and raised. My opponent had age and experience on her side, however, and eventually, I retreated to the neutral territory of the restroom, where I splashed water on my face and checked for multiple personalities. It’s possible that the bad me frightened a security guard and confused some cashiers.

Later, I realized that a security camera had recorded the entire incident. That out there in cyber-verse-land exists a video of me slapping my butt and insulting a nine hundred-year old, Mother Goose look alike.

That’s why I can never run for public office. There’s a video. Just my luck, it’s not a sex video; those things never seem to be a problem for anyone.





 

I try not to wear maxi skirts; they tend to make me look like I belong to a cult of hippy dwarfs. No disrespect to hippies or Snow White’s buds or cults. Long skirts also tend to wrap around my ankles, hooking my heels in an aggressive and hostile manner.

Long skirts are just this side of death traps, in my opinion.

So if you see me wandering about in a long, heel-hooking skirt, it’s because I’m hiding something.

Two weeks ago, last Sunday I had to wear a maxi skirt to church. I was hiding fire ant pus bites that covered my leg flesh from my ankles to my knees.

Ant pus bites that I received while standing in a ditch next to our street, Kissimmee Park Road. I was standing in the ditch putting a halter on Rosie the Pony that was having a high old time snacking on the bucket of feed I use to trap equine jail breakers.

A bucket of feed that I had set in an enormous fire ant hill, because I was distracted by the wailing of the fire engine that went roaring down our country lane at the exact time of Rosie the Pony’s escape attempt.

A fire ant hill that poured forth enough fire breathing ants to fill the bucket and leap onto Rosie the Pony’s nose and cause her to snort fire ant laden nostril snot onto my person, while their angry ant co-drones raced up my shins to gnaw on my age spots.

Age spots that were soon covered with fire ant pus bites, while Sarah, my daughter-in-law, directed traffic: the fire engine, assorted pickup trucks, the neighbor—come to help, possibly a goat pulling a cart.

Sarah, my daughter-in-law, who hearing my howling yelps for assistance grabbed the bucket filled with fire ants and handed it to Emma, the granddaughter, who thought that Rosie the Pony had been trotting over to say, “Hi, Emma,” when Emma was holding the front gate open for the family van.

Rosie the Pony who had not been trotting over to say, “Hi, Emma,” but to say, more along the lines of, “Wow, you people are morons,” as she bolted for the sweet, sweet grass of the ditch.

Sweet, sweet grass that hid a gigantic fire ant hill filled to the brim with fire ant pus makers, whose attack required me to have to wear a frumpy skirt to church.

Or as Emma wailed, “Hey, Mom, this bucket is full of fire ants.”


Country Living Lessons Learned:

**Ponies trotting toward an open gate may have ulterior motives.
**The grass is always greener in the ditch.
**Maxi skirts make good cloaking devices in a pinch.

Linda (Beware Attack Ants) Zern



























 

I evolved sarcasm as a protection, the way roses evolved thorns and for basically the same reason—to keep from being devoured by goats.

As a kid, I was puny. I was slow. I was knobby. I never did climb that dopey rope. I got sick of being bitten by my kid brother, made fun of by my elementary school peers, and belittled by the marauders of Rose Marie Drive, also known as the neighbor’s kids.

“Those are some big-time words coming out of your knobby mouth, puny, little girl.”

When I failed to grow a spiked dinosaur tail so that I could crush human bones, I honed the venom of the cutting remark. Turns out, I had a knack. I raised sarcasm to a high and lofty weapon. What I lacked in brawn, I made up for in perfectly delivered snidery.

My brother later complained that I always “made him feel stupid.”

My mother complained that it wasn’t what I said but “how I said it” that made it difficult to be related to me.

My sister cried. A lot. But that could have been baby-of-the-family issues.

Eventually, I rendered several people unconscious with the savage efficiency of my sarcasm.

“Back away, little man, or I will kill you, cook you, eat you, and pick my teeth with your bones.” And they bought it. It’s all in the delivery: tone, inflection, facial ticks, sneering lip curl, dismissive eyebrow flip.

Which makes this social media/facebooking experience beyond frustrating, but we prone-to-evolving creatures must learn to adapt or die, mustn’t we? Those little faces made out of punctuation marks, while darling, seem so inadequate when trying to convey the depth of my _________________(fill in the blank.) Extra points awarded for originality and the ability to guess what I’m thinking at this very second in time (i.e. mind reading.)

I’m working on a Snark-Code to go with the one emoticon I feel confident typing.

I might write something like:

That idea of yours is close to being what we, in the south, like to call ‘mealy-mouthed.’

Followed by:

(Imagine me saying this while using a comical southern accent and an adorable wink, thus diluting the sharpness of the insult.)

Or . . .

Yes, absolutely, everyone is entitled to ride a unicorn to pick up their happy cash from the big money dump truck of joy provided by all the wickedly rich, rich, rich people in Hollywood and Martha’s Vineyard. (Please envision me rolling my eyes so hard up in my head that I go blind.)

And finally . . .

Wow! (When you hear me saying this single word in your head, draw it way, way out and turn it into a ten or eleven syllables that can mean either cool, fool, yikes, you cannot possible think that’s good/smart/funny/truthful!)

So be warned. I have thorns.

But it’s not all my fault that I’m sharp-thorned harpy, and I’m not really bad.

I evolved this way.

Linda (Spike-Tail) Zern