You know what it is here in the South in May?
Hot.
And for those of you where it's still, you know, 44 or whatever? That's fine. Don't feel inadequate. It's cute..on you. Really. It's fine.
So I was out there yesterday, edging my lawn and weeding and now somebody wrote and told me I just killed all the bees by weeding the dandelions and now I feel bad, because I do feel bad about that whole bee thing. You know, how all the honeybees are going extinct or whatever? And I know your first response is, "Great! Who needs bees?!" But, you know, we do. And now I just CONTRIBUTED to the problem and I feel like a dink.
Anyway, I was out there with my edger, because seriously nothing gets me going like my lawn edger. I do not know when I became this person. I used to be the person who stood outside the convenience store in her skin-tight Jordache jeans, waiting for just the right person to ask if he or she would buy for her, and now I am gettin' all excited about my lawn edger.
But you know what's annoying? My edger has to be plugged in, so I plug it in in the house, then I have to run an extension cord out the window, then the dang thing comes unplugged all the time outside, just when I'm gettin' my groove on out there.
Plus also, I was halfway done and I ran out of cord. And Marvin was at band practice and I had no idea where more extension cords were. I mean, why would I know that? I am a girl.
Fortunately for me, though, he came home for a minute, on his way from band practice to go SEE a band with his bandmates. Because they need to become completely deaf as quickly as possible. And did I mention they were going to an outdoor concert and it was hot as Hades?
"There are more extension cords in the attic," said Marvin, his face flushed as he grabbed water for himself and his band friend Ron. "They're over by the Christmas decorations."
There is nowhere I'd rather go, after a day in the hot yard, than that cool, refreshing attic. I don't even know why the voles like to live up there. What are they, masochists? They have on FUR COATS. When Winston goes up there to eat them, he must burn his cat tongue.
Marvin has attached a stupid yellow ribbon around the old oak handle of the attic, which is ludicrous because it's not like we have 80-foot ceilings or anything. You could grab that attic handle if you were five feet tall. Mostly it just gets in the way, and then when you are climbing the attic stairs you slide around on it, which is convenient and not at all terrifying.
And why were the extension cords over by the Christmas decorations, anyway? I wondered, as I gasped for breath in that RIDICULOUS heat. Words cannot describe how much hotter it was in that attic. I was immediately slick like a coal miner.
Once I got over there, where the Rubbermaid containers were woefully melting atop the cheery silver and magenta Christmas decorations, I remembered my Christmas balls. Remember those? The happy Christmas lights I hang when it is snappy and brisk outside? When my attic is kind of cool and pleasant? When the voles are snug in the insulation and not peeling off their fur and fanning themselves as they were yesterday? Anyway, those happy giant lit Christmas balls require 75,000 feet of extension cords which probably similarly kill bees. Someone please write in and tell me.
Slippery-ly, I grabbed a cord.
Okay. You know I have told you before that Marvin, who has many good qualities and is a fine figure of a person, is a terrible slob.
Here is the one place in life he is not a slob. When it comes to cords? Marvin is Felix Unger. Our vacuum cleaner? The cord is always tidied up in this perfect figure eight. Same with the 850,000 extension cords up there on the surface of the sun. He had them all WOUND UP together in this perfect configuration of the number eight. The number eight is apparently big with Marvin when it comes to cords.
I am at this point almost 100% liquid, and I cannot, CANNOT, for the life of me, untwist the cords. I am pulling, I am tugging, I am starting to melt into the floor of the attic like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Finally, with many swears, one cords breaks free, and with many pieces of my DNA left behind in little balls like pieces of mercury, I leave the attic and head for what now feels like the cool 89-degree yard.
And Marvin? I hate to tell you, but your figure-eight cords are now a figure pflffffthhhh.
I go back to my beloved edger to plug in my new piece of extension, so I can finish my exciting edging...
...and I realize I have grabbed a piece of cord that has a stupid panel on it. It has one of those panels so you can plug in a whole bunch of plugs to it at once. It will not work with my edger. And oh, you should have seen me try. You should have seen me try to plug the edger into that panel like I was Forrest Gump.
It was then that I threw the kind of fit my father used to throw.
My father has mellowed through the years, but he used to have the tantrums, with the yelling and the swearing and the throwing of objects. It was a sight.
Did I ever tell you the pot pie story?
When I was a kid, back before there were microwaves, my father was home alone. I do not know where my mother and I were. He got hungry, so he decided to make himself a pot pie. He had to preheat the oven, so he did that.
In the meantime, he was down in the basement, like he always was on weekends, drinking Cokes and watching sports. Oh, he was anticipating his pot pie.
Finally, the oven was hot enough and he put in that pot pie. They took, like, 45 minutes to cook. He was getting hungrier and hungrier. Finally, it was ready, and he came upstairs, and it smelled so good.
He opened the oven, pulled it out, and the pot pie flipped onto the floor.
He said he had a fit like the world had never seen. I am truly sorry to have missed it.
Anyway, the neighbors, I'm sure, got a similar treat yesterday when I saw that stupid stupid stupid panel on my extension cord yesterday.
It occurs to me in the cool light of reason today that I probably could have just unplugged one of the other extensions and replaced one of those with the panel, but instead I went back inside, grabbed the yellow ribbon for the short-statured who do not live here, went back up into the bowels of hell, went to the now-phflllth-shaped cords, got a new one, went down the attic stairs that were slippery with the yellow stupid ribbon, plugged the new cord in, and edged the frickin' lawn.
The whole point of this story was that at the end of the day I was hot and when Marvin got home he was hot, and Tallulah decided that it was an excellent night to lie between us and spoon.
She never spoons. Or at least she rarely does. But no. Last night she was by the light of the silvery moon, wanting to spoon. With her hot self.
I kept thinking of that scene in Twilight where Bella is out in the woods nearly freezing to death, and Jacob gets in her sleeping bag and warms her up, because since he's HALF DOG he is above normal human body temperature and can save her.
Yes, I did just mention Twilight. Shut up.
