Book Excerpts

Still working on the book...here are two excerpts for you presented with my loving husband's full permission.

Heard in the car coming home from a date one night…I'm not saying it was in my car, but...

Wife: “Do you like my hair short?”
Husband: “Sure”
Wife: “What color should I dye it next?”
Husband: “Why?”
Wife: “I’m just tired of it, you know?”
Husband: “Hair requires a lot of upkeep and effort.”
Wife’s thought bubble: “Huh?”

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So what does he do when I scream, “BUG”? Well, if UGA is not playing at the time, he gets up, rolls his eyes at me, grabs a flimsy mailer and scrapes it off the wall.

Do you know what happens when you scrape a bug off the wall instead of hitting it as hard as you can with your shoe? It falls on the floor and runs behind the nearest piece of furniture. And it laughs at you the whole way. What does your big strong man then do? He looks at you and says, “Well, there you go.”

I’m sorry, there who goes? How did that help?

You did not just take care of the problem. I try to explain to him that now there is a live bug hiding in my house. I will spend the next two days sitting with my back not touching any of the furniture, never being barefoot, checking the ceiling corners, shaking out my shoes and looking under the covers because somewhere, someplace there is a non dead bug in my house…who now knows we are looking for him.

His retort has something to do with me smashing bugs until it looks like there’s been a shooting at our house.

Truthfully, I feel quite deceived that I unknowingly married a man who wouldn’t sit at the front door of our log cabin in the Minnesota territory with a shot gun across his lap, our dog Jack at his side in an all night vigil so that he can fend off the wolves from our land and keep the family and our chickens safe from harm while I prepare flapjacks on the cook stove and darn socks. By the way, please don't ask me what a flapjack is or what it means to darn.

One year, he was out mowing the lawn and edging around our patio when he came across the world’s smallest snake. Did he bludgeon it to death with a hoe like I would have preferred? Did he grab it by the tail and crack it like a whip in order to break its neck like my great grandfather used to do to Water Moccasins? No, he backed up, dropped the edger and left it there. I have not been in the backyard in 18 months. My son is really starting to resent me.