Thursday, September 23, 2010

What the Autumnal Equinox Brought Me!

NASA warned that Wednesday was a rare autumnal equinox around here and to watch out! The moon would appear inflated and there would  be a rare glow, with Jupiter hovering nearby.  So when I awoke for the third day with a raging sinus headache (or allergy?) I was not encouraged.
(I'm getting a CAT scan of my sinuses this morning). Jen came to clean, which cheered me, and I managed to paint and read a little, comforting myself that the second episode of Survivor would be on at 8pm and I could distract myself with pizza and silly women in bikinis, this series featuring the old versus the young, except that Survivor's opinion of old is 40, not 80. My practice is to bring Kodi in before dark, to avoid any night critters, but it was a hot night and he seemed so blissed out sprawled in the patio on the cool cement...so I decided to procrastinate until the first commercial.  Suddenly about 8:09 I heard a single bark.  I leaped to my feet. Then the odor struck me.  Skunk! Kodi was nowhere to be seen.  I armed myself with a spoonful of peanut butter, which usually attracts him. Leash and flashlight in the other hand, bedroom slippers flopping, head throbbing, I stumbled around the greenhouse, through the orchard, down the paths, calling, Kodi, Kodi.  No response.  The moon mocked me. The odor grew more intense.  I cursed the moon and all the planets, my headache, and especially my own inertia.  Finally I caught him down the front bank.  Of course now we both smelled like skunk.  I coaxed him inside to the laundry room, where on the top shelf of a cupboard I found an old bottle of "Skunk-Off".  It probably had not seen daylight in ten years.  At nine and a half, I think it was his first encounter with a skunk.  Memories of other days and other dogs saddened me.  I remembered forty some years ago when Lee and I came home from work to find our two Schnauzer puppies had played tug of war with a banana slug.  That was the worst! Meanwhile, here was I alone to deal with Kodi.  I doused and scrubbed for about twenty minutes.  Then I closed him in for the solution to do its work. Still the whole house reeked.   I got back to the tv just in time to see the ending.  Apparently the "young" lost the challenge, and one was being eliminated.  Meanwhile, this old woman was facing her own test of survival.  

1 comment:

Sandy Delehanty said...

Hi Bonnie,

I've been catching up on the blog posts I missed while in Italy, with limited internet access.

Here's a few small town Halloween stories:

First of all, your Mother was right about the sport of outhouse tipping on Halloween. It was still good sport in the 1950's and early part of the 1960's in my home town of Fort Jones California (population 525). My brother and I took part in all kinds of hijinks on halloween, out house tipping, window soaping, rotten tomatoe wars, and pumpkin bombing. With only one deputy sherrif in the 21 mile long valley, we never worried about getting in trouble with the law. Especially since our parents had done the same thing as kids themselves.

Dan and I would pick the last of the tomatoes off the vines in early October and stash them in gunny sacks to await Halloween and the "Great Tomatoe Wars". On Halloween we would climb in the back of our friend Myron's pickup truck with a half a dozen high school friends, and the gunny sacks of smelly smooshie tomatoes. We would lie down in the bed so the truck appeared empty and patrol town looking for enemies (usually kids from the nearby town of Etna.) When we spotted a group of kids we would let fly with the tomatoes. Of course they had tomatoes too and the war was on!

My brother invented "Pumpkin Bombing" when he was in 8th grade and not invited to ride in the high school kids trucks. I was in high school and riding in a pickup loaded with kids and tomatoes. Dan decided he would bomb the trucks of high school kids from the hill above main street. But instead of tomatoes, he hid pumpkins on the hill. Hiding above the bank on the hillside he waited for a target to drive by below. I was riding in the back of the first pickup that he targeted. When Myron drove the pickup truck below Dan's hiding spot he dropped a pumpkin on the pickup truck. It landed hard on the cab and Myron hit the brakes yelling "What ta !*&$#?" A car behind us hit the brakes and stopped too just as Dan let fly with another pumpkin. The second pumpkin bombed the car behind us landing squarely on top of the red light on top of the Deputy Sherrif's car! The sherrif was too old and fat to climb the hill so Dan got away.

Happy Halloween, Sandy