So yesterday was scheduled to be a pretty chill relaxing no-sweat day. I decided to make a couple of loaves of zucchini bread while the plants were producing in full swing so I could share a loaf with my grandmother. Now, cooking in a house with no A/C is kind of a trick. You want to be dressed in as little as possible while still meeting the sanitation codes and you want to have the oven on as little as you can manage. Obviously, out here on the compound, that doesn't usually pose an issue -- there's no one out here to care that I'm bakin' in my skivvies. Which is why it was really strange that during my Annie-Get-Your-Clothes-On routine there was a furious banging on my front door followed by repetitive doorbell ringing. The incessant door bell ringing is kind of my mom's hallmark since we moved in next door. I'm not going to lie, it's 100% as annoying as it sounds. I threw down my spatula and ran to the door only to find myself greeting......the treasure hunter. No joke. There's a guy from the other end of town who comes to our properties and uses a metal detector to find indian head pennies and old Civil War-era buttons. (This is his "job." I couldn't even begin to make this stuff up.) Anyway, I don't think that treasure-hunter-dude (THD) even noticed that I looked like a naughty hilljack June Cleaver, he was that panic stricken. In a long rush of full-on freak out he tells me, "Old man B's cows are out!" Now, hold the press while I roll my eyes. This guy's cows are ALWAYS out. And before it was cows, it was horses. Before the horses were peacocks. Before the peacocks, back when I was 3 and still took an afternoon nap, it was pigs strewn out all over the back yard. For obvious reasons they didn't ask this guy build the Berlin wall. So I thank THD for his diligence and call my mom. She answers her phone with, "Whatt'd he want?" That's right, THD had tried knocking on her door first and, get this because this is actually funny, she didn't go to the door because SHE WASN'T WEARING ENOUGH CLOTHES. Yeah, I've decided not to dig too deep into the co-clotheslessness. So I relay the cow news to my mom in a completely monotone voice (because really, these cows are ALWAYS out). My mom says a word I've elected not to use on my blog and hangs up without further discussion. 15 minutes later I get a wailing call from across the street when she discovers that those green bean plants which were not trampled, were eaten. But my mom, being hard-core like she is, rounds them all back into the fence and shuts the gate. Crises averted......
....until the squirrel explodes.
Okay, so we have a gaggle (herd? murder? pack?) of squirrels that spend their lives dancing on the power lines that hang over the road. I'm not sure what this little bushy guy did to the line, but the pop from outside and the immediate loss of power was proof that it was fatal. So I throw on public appropriate garments and walk out the front door to survey the damage just as my mother is walking down her porch steps in the same endeavor. It really struck me in that moment that (a) I am my mother (b) I live a pretty weird life when the excitement for my day is scouting the remains of an electrocuted squirrel.
All of this eclipsed the failure that was my zucchini bread effort, so there were some silver linings.
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