You Don't Know $%#&

I will call her Dee.  Dee has been my friend since we met in kindergarten.  Even if we don't see each other for a dozen years, we pick up the conversation as though we left it yesterday.  She will forgive me for telling this tale.

Dee has a house--the farmlette, she calls it--in the boondocks of Crawford County.   Over the years she has kept horses (although she would rather have a camel), turkeys, chickens, cats, dogs and a lop-eared rabbit or two.  Her home is a comfortable, homey conglomeration of stuff from her world travels and auctions.  Creative touches abound.  Outdoors, from her once Moroccan styled deck, your can see scads of flowers and a flourishing vegetable garden.

The vegetables are really the heart of the story, regardless of how long it took me to get there.

From the first day of the season the garden boasts lettuces, onions and herbs.  No peas.  Dee hates peas.  It has cucumbers on wires, tomatoes in cages, rows of beans on poles--all of it neatly fenced to keep out marauding critters.  Nice thought, anyway.  The pesky woodchuck found his way in to the buffet, inviting his friends to share the free meal.

Well, Dee was not happy with that woodchuck.  She would take out her .22 on a regular basis, clean it and load it and wait for the rodent (or is it a ruminant?) to show up.

One lovely summer day, after  "Chuck" and his buddies had decimated the green beans, Dee was livid.  She guided the horses to the barn, out of harm's way.  She took her precious .22 and sat on the back porch.  It was open season for groundhogs.

She saw it then.  The bugger was in the horse pasture, sitting calm as could be.  He never twitched an ear as she got up, cocked the .22 and fired.  Now, Dee is as good a shot as I am, maybe better.  She knew she hit the blasted thing.  Still it sat.

Reloading, she aimed again. BANG!!  Still it sat.  Disgusted,  she walked out into the field to find out how the little devil could take several bullets and not fall down.

Could be because it wasn't a groundhog at all, but a nicely shaped pile of horse manure, a bit worse for wear from the bullet holes through it.

Well, I roared! My sides hurt.  I laughed till I hiccuped.  She was not amused.  I couldn't help myself.  I kept picturing my pal plugging away at a bunch of dung.

I suppose you're going to tell everybody about this, she gritted.

Yes, Dee, nearly twenty years have passed and I am still telling the tale.  It is too good not to share.

The moral today?  Sometimes the things that bug us most are no more than a pile of doo-doo.