She looked me dead on, seriousness etched all over her face, took a deep breath and asked me “Denise, as my friend, tell me the God’s honest truth. Do I (pause)…do I smell like skunk?”
Because REAL friends don’t let their friends they love smell like skunk, as we all know.
This is when I knew that I was about to get A STORY and as the days passed and I kept repeating it and laughing hysterically every time I thought of it, I asked my friend if I could share her story. She has agreed and your day is about to get memorable because this is a story one cannot soon forget. I have changed the names of my friends to offer them some privacy.
One sunny HOT (and hot is key to this story) Tuesday, I was thankful it wasn’t as hot as it had been the day before and was getting myself ready for work at the library. It was an odd day where every one of my boys was gone save one, who happened to be sound asleep still in his bed.
It was an odd day as I was completely ready for work early and was attempting to not move too much to not sweat too much before heading to work. I had just picked up a new kind of coffee from Mugshots (Summer Sunrise) and my tea kettle had just whistled when I received a text from my friend Jazzy. “Are you home?”
I replied that I was and as I had about 20 minutes before work, she arrived soon after where I she commented on how she loved my vintage yellow dress and I poured her coffee in my two fiesta mugs.
This is when she took a deep breath, looked me dead on and asked, “Denise, as my friend, tell me the God’s honest truth. Do I smell like skunk?”
This question took me by surprise and I am pretty sure it showed. But Jazzy is my dear friend so I took a big deep sniff. “No. I don’t smell a skunk.” Really, that is love because what if I HAD smelled skunk and choked and tears had sprung from my eyes. Truly, I do love that Jazzy. “Whhhhhhyyyyyy?”
“Well, we caught skunk. Well, I suppose I should start at the beginning. We have a woodchuck.”
Woodchucks are notorious for tearing apart gardens and wrecking havoc in yards. So Jazzy and her nearing a century old father, Elmer, have been attempting to trap said woodchuck for quite some time. Elmer believes in the old school way of doing things and so has been using conibear traps for all of time because that’s the trap that works. But Jazzy just couldn’t take the conibear trap anymore and finally convinced her father to purchase a live trap. Because when you must kill a varmint eating your garden, you want to do it humanely. Anyhow, Elmer succumbed to his daughter’s pleading and against his better judgement, they purchased one.
Jazzy asked her big time farming friend what was her best plan of action for catching the fat woodchuck that was eating all their garden and she followed his instructions completely. It was her idea to purchase the live trap and so she would do the work for it. She felt it was only fair.
On Monday, Jazzy set the live trap right in the path (basically a woodchuck main highway) that it had into her garden and she baited it as instructed and went to sleep dreaming of catching that nasty varmint.
The next morning she could see from the window that he had in fact caught a big one. For a brief moment she thought she spied white but then knew it was just the light and it was the big brown woodchuck. But when she went out with her dad to get check the trap, they stopped far from the trap. Because there, staring evilly, was a skunk.
Skunks are evil.
Elmer thought up the plan to throw a nearby tarp over the trap. This should – should being the key word – keep the skunk from spraying them. So, nearing a century old Elmer on one end and Jazzy on the other, they slowly and carefully moved to throw the tarp onto the skunk. But at the very last moment, Jazzy chickened out and the tarp didn’t cover the skunk on her end.
Elmer knew he had better shoot fast and he took aim to shoot the skunk in the live trap but as the day seemed to have it out for them, he missed.
All of this made the skunk very very very very mad and it sprayed a very very very very much amount of skunk spray.
Through the stink bomb, Jazzy said, “Well, now what do we do?”
And Elmer, tears streaming from his eyes from the terrible stench, answered with “Throw another tarp on the skunk!”
So they threw another tarp on the skunk and the thought was surely the skunk would not survive the 90 plus degree day. Tomorrow the skunk would be dead and the skunk problem would be solved.
All day they stayed away from the live trap and Jazzy spent a restless evening thinking about how awful this all was through the lingering stench of the sprayed skunk. So, early in the morning she gave herself a pep talk. “Jazzy, you were the brilliant one who thought of a live trap. You got us into this problem, now you get us out of it!”
At 5:30 in the morning, when it was just light, she went out to check on the skunk and the terrible evil thing was still looking evilly at her. And she just didn’t know what to do next. It was supposed to dead. She was started by a banging on the inside of the house window. Elmer, who was never awake at 5:30 in the morning, was banging on the window and hollering “Hold on!”
He stumbled outdoors with his gun and this time he shot that thing.
They stood there as the scent became overpowering again.
“Well, now what do we do?” Jazzy asked. Because while she had given herself a pep talk, the pep talk did not include touching the now very nasty live trap.
“We’ll take it to Sam’s farm,” Elmer said decisively.
Sam is Jazzy’s brother and he owns quite a large spread very near where they lived so Elmer tossed the live trap holding the dead skunk into the trunk of his car and they took off.
The ride wasn’t long but it wasn’t even half way there when Elmer said, “Boy, Jazzy, I knew I stunk but do I smell that bad?”
And Jazzy had to admit the smell was overpoweringly horrific.
Then Elmer said what Jazzy had been thinking but was afraid to voice. “I hope I killed that skunk and it’s not just back there alive still.”
Because can you even imagine?
You are now so I’ll let you think on that nightmare.
They arrived at Sam’s farm and Elmer tossed that live trap and the yes it was truly fully dead skunk as far away behind the barn as he possible could. Good riddance nasty skunk!
Except when the skunk landed they realized that they had yet another issue.
The farm is a working farm and there is a large pig pen out there. And that pig pen was overflowing with water.
Sam was already gone to work and Jazzy, having the morning she was having, had forgotten her phone. Elmer was about to wade into the pen but Jazzy, who had gotten them in this mess anyhow, waded into the pig slop and manure to get to the faucet that was broken and spewing water.
“We’ll have to shut it off at the well!” Elmer declared decisively and headed in that direction.
Jazzy, wading her way out of the pig slop, had all she could do to stop her nearing a century old father from “just gonna jump into that well and shut it off” as he planned. Thankfully, they couldn’t find the well in an overgrown part of the field and so they decided the best thing they could do was return home.
So, back into the car that smelled of skunk sat Jazzy and Elmer who were both smelling of pig manure as well as the skunk smell and drove silently home where they then had this conversation on the phone.
“Hello, Sam? It’s Jazzy. Dad and I were out for a little drive this morning and we happened to drive by the farm and noticed that the pig pen looked flooded. It was. We looked for the well, you know how Dad is, but didn’t find it so you’ll want to get that taken care of sooner than later. Oh, no problem. And, oh by the way, there is a dead skunk in a live trap behind the barn. You have a good day now!”
Jazzy sipped her coffee. “All this, Denise, before 6:30 in the morning.”
I had been spellbound by the story but started laughing so hard. “Thank you! Thank you for telling me this hilarious story! This is just what I needed to hear today!”
Jazzy shrugged. Like it was the least she could do for a friend.
I laughed to myself all that day.
But the story didn’t end there.
The next day I unexpectedly found myself at my parents home. Long story. We visited for about half an hour in which time I had to retell this hilarious story to them. We were all laughing when my dad randomly said, “I don’t mind the smell of skunk so much.”
My dad also feeds turkey buzzards and they hang around my parents home. But that’s another story.
The very next morning, my mom who had FIVE people staying over at her home for a tractor show, texted me to say that they had caught a skunk in the live trap last night. That it has sprayed everywhere. That the smell was awful and Dad even had to dig up the dirt to get the smell to tone down and Dad takes back what he said about the smell of skunk. It must have been awful. He didn’t even feed the skunk to the turkey buzzards.
I was laughing over my mom’s text when Myrna, Alicia’s mom, stopped into the library to tell us she was setting a live trap that night to catch a raccoon that was terrorizing her. “Don’t do it!” we cried, “All anyone is catching this week is skunks!”
Because one thing Jazzy has taught us well this week…friends don’t let friends smell like skunk.
The post Because Friends Don’t Let Friends Smell Like Skunk appeared first on Life With Four Boys.