Hello to You and You and You,

    As many, if not most, of you know our oldest son is serving in Iraq on his second tour of duty.  Often people, upon hearing of our son’s military service, will remark, “Aren’t you worried out of your mind? It’s so dangerous over there.”

    “Over there!” I stutter.  “Over there is NOTHING compared to right here.” Shaking their heads, they pat me on the head like I’m some kind of handicapped cocker spaniel and assume that I have become possessed by the ghosts of dead Republicans from the Vietnam war era.

    But I’m not kidding. Give me an honest, in your face terrorist high on opium any day over the stuff mother nature can throw at you, on you, or into you.

    With terrorists there’s a certain pure, clean honesty. You know that they are trying to kill you, but with Sonny, my husband’s arthritic cranky gelding (horse) the IED attack will come from left field and with absolutely no warning or body armor.  One minute you’re brushing the old crab apple (Sonny the horse, not Sherwood my husband) and then you try to get on the old he-devil for a ride (again—Sonny the horse, not Sherwood the husband) and Sonny will decide that he’s not much in the mood for exercise in the form of being ridden by a human. So back on his hind legs he’ll rear.

    Now up to the point where this actually happened to my husband, we thought Sonny had one hoof on a banana peel and another hoof in a pit dug by a backhoe. But we had done a dumb thing. We had started giving the old fool (horse not husband) vitamins, shots, worm medicine, glucosamine chondritin (for bad joints) and the old fool (I think by now you’ve got it) had secretly started to feel better. So all of a sudden he’s Trigger posing for a center fold in a magazine spread of Horse and Rider.

    The reality is Sonny is not Trigger.  He’s not even Hidalgo at the end of that race, and he does have issues (stiffness, pain, swelling, sickle hocks, not to mention he falls over—on occasion and occasionally on people.)

    So there I was watching my husband get on his horse when the horse took offense, reared back on his arthritic hind legs, Sherwood (a fairly new and inexperienced rider who recently had knee surgery and has his own limping & ligament issues) instinctively jerked back on the horse’s bridle, sending the horse farther back on his bad back legs, and back and back and . . . over they fell . . . horse, rider, swell new saddle, nifty cool cowboy hat—the works.

    And my whole life flashed in front of my eyes.

    Sonny rolled off of Sherwood.  Sherwood rolled off of the ground.  And the screaming spectators cancelled their calls to 911.   Sherwood Zern is alive and well today because God knows that I don’t know where the insurance policy is with the “crushed flat by an enormous fat old horse clause.”

    That’s only one example of the crazy danger lurking right in front of your swollen, puffy, eyes closed to slits face. If you’re Adam, our twenty-one-year-old-son-still-living-at-home-son-but trying-real-hard-to-become-a-small-business-owner, then one fire ant bite and it’s curtains.  Somewhere between growing up semi-naked in the swamps of Geneva, Florida, serving a mission in the deserts of Nevada, and playing paintball in the pine barrens of Saint Cloud, Adam has developed an allergy to fire ant bites so severe that the last time he rolled around in an ant hill unawares he looked like something left for dead by—well, fire ants—face turned all red, skin blotched up, eyes puffed up, hot flashes raced up and down his boney body, toes tingled, and he couldn’t feel his fingers so that he can continue to pull the trigger on his paintball gun. 

    He wanted to know if I had some epinephrine handy. I told him that I didn’t even have any Epsom salts, but that he could rub down with some body lotion I’d just gotten from HSN—chocolate scented.

    If you think that’s bad.  Zoe, our three-year old granddaughter, caught a wild Cardinal (bird, not ball player) the other day and the hideous thing bit her.  In addition, I’ve actually been known to say to my son-in-law, Phillip, “Hop up, honey, I need to kill the black widow spider you’re sitting on.”

    Iraq! Dangerous! Try my backyard, if the horses don’t fall on you,  ants poison you, or birds bite you ‘til you bleed, then a black widow spider will sneak up behind you and inject deadly toxin into your butt.  There I’ve said it.

    I’ll tell you what’s dangerous—life and living.  So stay frosty out there. It’s a jungle, desert, temperate zone, or semi-tropical rain forest, and if it doesn’t bite, it spits (and I’m talking about the toddlers.)

Linda (Take Cover) Zern

    

   

Linda (Copy Right 2007) Zern

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