Excerpt from "Bush Hogs and Other Swine"

 

                                                Husbands to the Rescue

 

            Although I would like to think our family is like the Cleavers in “Leave It to Beaver,” the truth is, the TV sitcom we most closely resemble is “I Love Lucy.” If Lucille Ball were reincarnated and wanted to write some new episodes, Buck Fevre’s wife, Dotty, and I have decided she could use us for inspiration.

            The plot was always the same: Lucy would take it into her head to do something – redecorate the entire house or learn to be a tap dancer – that she knew her husband, Ricky, would disapprove of, so she would figure a way to get it done behind his back. She always envisioned presenting him with the fait accompli and proudly telling him, as he gazed in amazement at the results of her cleverness and efficiency, that she had saved a bundle. Of course, it never turned out that way. Lucy would get tangled up in endless rolls of wet wallpaper, knock over the ladder with the paint bucket and be crying on the floor when Ricky came home. 

            “Lucy,” Ricky would begin in that ominous Cuban accent, “you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

            “Oh, Ricky,” she would wail, “I was just trying to make you happy and save some money.”

            In the end, Lucy’s loving husband would melt and rescue his darling bride. The house got redecorated, but it cost Ricky a bundle.

            Like Lucy, Dotty and I are always starting projects that we know our husbands won’t approve of, then we hit a snag and have to ask for their help. In my case, Cricket is frequently having to rescue me from farm chores gone awry.

            One time I was determined to fertilize the pasture, but I didn’t know how to hitch the equipment to the tractor. Then I learned that the feed store rented out a fertilizer wagon that didn’t need the tractor’s PTO. They would fill it with customized fertilizer and you could pull it around the pasture with a pickup. Cricket had already told me in no uncertain terms fertilizing would have to wait until he took care of 47 other chores around the place. I was thrilled that I could get the fertilizing done without bothering him, and, like Lucy, I envisioned presenting him with fertilized fields and receiving his grateful praise.

            Of course, it didn’t turn out that way. The day I knew Cricket would be gone long enough for me to get the job done came after a heavy rainfall. I stubbornly pressed ahead, hauling the wagon 15 or 20 yards before getting bogged down in the mud. The wagon was fully loaded and the non-four-wheel-drive truck could not pull it out of the morass.

            I wasn’t sitting on the floor crying when Cricket came home, but I felt like it. We had to wait a couple days for things to dry out, paying extra rent on the wagon, of course, and then it took Cricket two more days to get the tractor running, unhitch the truck and pull it out, hitch up the wagon and pull it out, then spread the fertilizer with the tractor.

            The pasture got fertilized but I definitely had some ‘splainin’ to do.

            Dotty Fevre’s mishaps usually involve moving furniture, and I have often played the role of Ethel, helping rearrange Lucy’s furniture to disguise the new sofa she wasn’t supposed to buy.

            Once Dotty acquired an enormous dresser that seemed perfect for a bedroom upstairs. Buck had reasonably pointed out that the 10-ton dresser could not be carried up the narrow, turned stairs, even by the Olympic gold medal weight-lifting team. But Dotty believes, correctly, that Buck can do anything she needs him to do. Thus inspired, he and the boys managed to get the dresser upstairs and into the bedroom without knocking down the railing or scraping off too much paint.

            The only problem was, once she saw the dresser in the bedroom, Dotty knew it was wrong wrong wrong. She had the wit not to say so while Buck and the boys were still panting from the exertion, but it preyed on her mind. So one day when Buck was out of town, she browbeat the boys into helping her bring the dresser back downstairs. But when they tried to lift it over the newel post where the stairway turns, the dresser got stuck in the narrow stairwell, and they couldn’t get it up or down. For a couple of days, until Buck got home, the boys had to crawl under the dresser to get to their rooms.

            When you’re having a Lucy moment, the worst part is anticipating your husband’s discovery of your predicament.

            I’m told that Buck does an excellent Cuban accent.

​

Excerpt from "Bush Hogs and Other Swine"