Remember Paul Harvey? Remember how he always had those great “The Rest of the Story” stories?
Well, here is mine.
S2 just wrote all about his First Deer the other day.
We are just so super excited for him, don’t get me wrong. But to understand the whole of his story, we must go back to this summer. Back when it was so hot we didn’t mind sitting in air conditioning. Back when I took all four boys to Hunter’s Safety where I scored 100 percent on my test. And in that class I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would never ever go hunting.
It happened when they started talking about gutting animals. I had just reached down to grab my gourmet blueberry muffin when the talk of “field dressing an animal” came up as topic. Field Dressing is not actually putting a dress on an animal, just so you know. It’s taking the guts out. All my boys were enthralled. I was trying not to loudly gag. And it was hours before I could eat that muffin.
Once upon a time I used to think that I could be a pioneer. The older I get, the more I realize I am pretty sure I don’t have what it would take to be a pioneer. I am all for harvesting your own garden and meat, I am all for teaching the boys where their food comes from. But the actual act of hunting? Um, I don’t think I have it in me.
Melanie Shankle has me beat on that. But I did think of her as the boys washed all in their no scent shampoo and as I type this I am staring at a tote filled with clothes washed in the scent of dirt – that is a real thing – and left outside in the tote to take on the outdoor scent to make hunting better. I think of her perfume samples and laugh. (You can read about that scene in her book.)
S4 was not going to go hunting so we decided we would go see Big Hero 6. He and I worked on planning our day and were looking forward to doing non hunting things when Jake informed me I wouldn’t have a vehicle.
“Wait, what?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“I’m taking the suburban tomorrow,” he told me.
“Wait, what?” was all I could ask again because WHAT?!?!
“You could drive the truck,” he offered. The truck is his pride and joy. And it barely runs. He would argue it runs great because it has so much Dodge power but I would argue against that. You can hear this truck long before you see it, the windows don’t work and all we really use it for is hauling wood. I had to tread carefully here.
“Does it even have gas in it?’
“You should have plenty to get to the gas station,” he assured me. Except I wasn’t assured.
“Just don’t put the deer IN the suburban. She wouldn’t like that.” Because my suburban is AWESOME and I love her dearly and I knew she would go to bat for me so I had to for her.
“Oh, it’ll be fine. You’ll never even know we put a deer in there.”
So when I got the text message of S2’s amazingly happy grin at harvesting his first deer while I was still in bed dreaming happy dreams, I am ashamed to say my text messages sent back were in this rapid order….
“NO WAY!!!!!! Awesome!!!!”
“Do NOT put it IN the suburban.”
“His grin is great.” :)
Yes, dear readers, I said “do not put in the suburban” before “his grin is great”.
So then my husband sent me this photo….
And said, “Makeup sales and deer extermination. How can you beat that?” because he is clever like that. And I saw all my Mary Kay sales going down the drain because in that moment I knew exactly what my next photos would be…
Yup.
Dead deer in the back of the suburban.
And here is where I have more to admit. My faithful wonderful suburban is home all these hours and I do not have the heart to even go out to check on her. It’s as if we are both trying to make believe this awfulness did not happen to us so we are avoiding each other completely. Jake even ran to get milk for me so I didn’t have to drive her yet.
But the boys were home and safe and cutting up deer meat and I pulled out the crock pot for our fresh meat dinner, congratulating S2 on putting meat on the table for this evenings meal. I cut up potatoes that we had grown ourselves and added them to the roast. And later I put my hands into the dough of made from scratch rolls to go with our meal. We were making a big deal out of this for S2, as we should.
Except at meal time it wasn’t so great.
As we remarked at how amazingly tender the roast we were eating was, S4 suddenly let out a cry from the next room and began to puke in a bucket. Not because of the dinner, no, because he was hit with a flu bug this afternoon. And with that S2 began to gag on his food at the table and that pretty much ruined our moment. Our moment that was going pretty awesome because it was just the three of us at the table (I don’t know if that has ever happened) because S1 was hunting with friends at their farm, S3 was zonked out asleep for a few hours at this point and S4 was on the couch watching the Jungle Book. Well, watching until he began to puke.
On a bright note, S2 has a LOT of leftovers to make an great brag worthy lunch for school on Monday.
And that, dear friends, is the rest of the story.
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