Ah, Thanksgiving. Such a beautiful day, the air was crisp and clear. The last embers of fall color highlighted the trees. The waters were calm. The sky was a far away soft pale blue. We drove at a leisurely pace to the Inn for our Thanksgiving feast. Scott admired the Inn, so charming; just the right vestige of casual elegance overlaid the formality of the room and the occasion. Scott thought this place was so perfect; it looked more like a movie set than anything he'd ever seen on the Fox lot. I pointed out that this place was a location site during the shooting of The Wedding Crashers, a movie we had just recently watched on TV. . . that explained it.
In any event, as I said, peace and serenity abounded, cheerful smiles all around, the staff was gracious, all was rosy but for -- the occasional rifle fire that cracked through the air. Since the first whiff of morning sky, and throughout the day 'bang bang bang' shattered the peace. Yes, yes, I understand that it's hunting season but I'm a stranger in this foreign land. No one else blinked, all was normal, pass the Brussel sprouts, while silently I screamed 'run, Bambi, run'. Eager hunters, in their quest for venison, tucked a flyer into our entry way asking about renting some of our property during the hunting season. Jeez. Apparently it's not uncommon and since we do have three acres of forest land, it appeared to be a reasonable request, albeit one that we turned down. Again, we learned something new about this foreign land in which we were living (at least we spoke the language). So there we were, dining on turkey, while Rudolph, Donner, Blitzen, et al. were madly heading for the trees, hoping their pelts matched the forest colors, otherwise they were dead meat, literally.
In addition to deer season, it's also duck season. Oh Donald, we hardly knew ye. Crisp, Peking, a la orange, duck, Huey, Dewey and Louie duck. I tried not to think about the poor animals running, swimming or diving for their lives in the great outdoors. Scott reminded me that earlier in the week the turkey we were eating was likewise enjoying its peaceful life, so I should shut up and enjoy the meal. He did have a point.
While we were dining, a question came up about the length of our marriage. I allowed that we had been married for many years. Scott thought we were married for several years. We've been married for 6.5 years. How many years have we been married, several or many.
That question hung in the air until we returned home to find the place strewn with dead animals (I'm not exaggerating). While we had no answer to the several/many conundrum, at least the mystery of the last black mouse was solved. It had succumbed to the lure of peanut butter and found itself pretty much beheaded. There was another dead 'thing' in one of the traps. We have two kinds of traps in the house: one is the old fashioned kind, like at grandmother's country house, or at least at my grandmother's country house, that has a spring-snap that chokes a poor mouse to death, quick and efficient, while the second, newer kind, is made up of a bed of glue. The poor animal is stuck in it, remember the La Brea tar pits, until it finally croaks. I think the former older model is more humane, plus it makes a nice whack sound when something has been caught. The latter type only informs when the pitiful screams of the little mouse reach human ears. 'You poor thing, I feel sorry for you, but you really ought not to have broken into our home.' It doesn't stop with mice though. The glue catches everything that crawls over the trap. We've observed some horrifyingly creepy critters, always with the same question 'what the hell is it', and the same answer 'I don't know, but I'm glad it's dead'. Anyway, back to the mouse. This last one, before it was guillotined, ate a good chunk of Scott's chocolate bar; ergo, no pity on his part. He was angry, he got screwed out of a perfectly good almond toffee with nuts bar. Personally, I think he could have eaten around it. After all, the bubonic plague isn't really the scourge that it was in the 16th century. There are antibiotics for the plague today, but Scott wasn't showing any mercy. He had his mouth all set to devour that chocolate bar and now he was ticked off; no redemption for Mickey, or Minnie, as the case may be.
A little later in the evening, while still rubbing our Buddha bellies from the former feast and enjoying something silly on TV, we heard another thwack. Once again the angel of death had visited our home. Scott suggested I hop into the kitchen and take a look. 'No way. You go, you're the man.' I repeated my brother Fred's admonition about being a man. No matter how equal the sexes, when there's a noise downstairs in the middle of the night, you don't send your wife down to check it out. So Scott manned up, while I followed three paces behind, and lo there it was, another dead mouse. We were excited, appalled, apprehensive -- and finally, accepting, this is our new life: Mickey, Bambi, Donald, life is precarious, sometimes violent, and always short if the prey is not fast. As for us -- it's good to be at the top of the food chain. So ends our Thanksgiving weekend.
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