So. This morning, my dumb dogs deposited a dead groundhog in my garage sometime between Eric’s departure and our frantic get-in-the-van-or-we-will-miss-the-bus hoopla.
I saw them wandering around the back yard with Pip, my BIL’s dog, about 6:30 a.m., and figure they had dropped off the dead thing IN my garage, you know, for safe-keeping, lest some other animal find their treasure and steal away with it.
So on this Thursday morning, we had created THREE, count them THREE, quick costumes in honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday. We had done the speech homework since we have speech on Thursdays and we didn’t think of it until 7:30 on Thursday morning. I got the lunches made. We did the normal chores. I remembered to write in all three agendas that we would do after-school differently because of the PTO meeting today. I mean, I was ON TOP OF IT.
And then Alex skips outside (because he’s always ready first) at like 8:15 and hollers back in the open garage door (because we don’t close garage doors), “Hey MOM, the dogs left a whistlepig in the garage, and I think it’s dead.”
SO if you don’t know, a whistle pig is what Curious George called a groundhog, and what my son was, with great excitement, telling me is that THERE WAS A DEAD THING IN MY GARAGE!!!
Which is a problem, y’all. Because dead things creep me out. CREEP.ME.OUT. As in, make my skin crawl and make me squeal and make my insides all twist up. And my husband is gone, and there’s no one to dispose of the dumb thing except me. So I pull on my big-girl panties and go into the garage.
And EWWWWWWW. It’s all curled up and its two pointy buck teeth are all sticking out at me, and its fur is all sticking out like the dogs rubbed some Bed Head hair putty into it after they killed it.
Even worse, the only implement for removal is a rake with very short metal tines. And I really need a shovel, too. But I can’t find one because at some point all the garden tools got moved back to the other garage so they’re nowhere to be found. AND Eric now keeps that garage locked and I have NO idea where the key is.
So now I’m left with a sadly insufficient tool and a heavy gross dead thing in my garage. The dogs are nowhere to be seen (I called for them but they ignored me), and my son is giggling like a little boy who’s all excited about a dead thing in the garage. OH and then out comes Megan to see the dumb, dead thing WITH HER TOAST still IN her hand.
GAH!!!
So finally, I decide I’m just going to have to DO this thing. I can DO this, people. So I try to get my short-tined rake under it, and it just flops off. Ack! Ack! Ack! I walked ALL the way AROUND the van (because I’m certainly not getting close to the gross thing), and try to get it that way.
And in one final attempt to deal with the situation without being late for school, I use the rake to literally pull the little carcass out of the garage and onto the gravel where it flops over and stares at me, with its paws all curled up and its teeth just sticking out at me.
My children are in the garage all excited, and I’m so glad they’re laughing about it because I’m trying to not let my creeped out, nearly-in-tears self fall apart RIGHT in front of their eyes. And that was as good as I could do. I went BACK around the van so I didn’t have to walk by its dead glassy eyeballs and pointy teeth, and I went back inside.
LESS than five minutes later, the dogs returned and hauled their precious prize somewhere farther away from my van. Which made getting out of the house for the bus that much easier.
But in consequence of doing something as GROSS as leaving a DEAD thing in my garage, when we left for the morning, I closed both garage doors, thus banishing them to the outside for the day. Dumb dogs.
And that is the story of the dead groundhog and my sad, creeped-out self. The end.
