1. Your twelve year-old daughter comes home from Safety Day at school with a package of goodies that contain ear plugs (for using when shooting a gun or running heavy farm machinery), scads of fliers on West Nile Virus, brochures from a farmers' life insurance company and a Buck knife catalogue.
2. Regardless of how hard you work to correct her, your nine year-old pronounces "hundred" as "hunnerd."
3. The 'possums walk back and forth under the porch swing late at night while you're sitting out enjoying the quiet. If you put out cat food, you can pet them.
4. Your elderly neighbor shows up asking if you'd like a turkey if he gets one this season, and then tells you if he sees one out of season, he'll bring that by, too.
5. He does this because you stopped last month to see if you could help him get his wayward cow back in the field (and off the road), and he's appreciative.
6. Rain falls steadily in your front yard, but the sky in your back yard is perfectly clear.
7. You begin finding ticks in February and March.
8. You are captured in conversation with an intense kindergartener who tells you more about running a hog operation than most adults could ever begin to imagine. And much more than you really wanted to know.
9. Your grandmother and your father both kept skunks as pets when they were kids.
10. Every morning when you open your eyes and look out the window, you are certain there is no more beautiful place on earth.
4 comments:
You know, I am quite fond of possums. Mosk city folks think they are hideous. I don't know, maybe it is something like a mother looking at her newborn with the pointed head. Ya just gotta love 'em cuase you think no one else will. Of course you can pet theme here. The scurry like hell with their little ones hanging on for dear life.
And yes, like it or not, most that have been here will agree, "There is no place like Missouri.
Skunks as pets, sigh. The elementary principal had to put one down (with a tranquilizer gun) outside the school this week. It took a big, apparantly angry, nap under the building.
You can still smell it.
Dawn--I didn't know you had lived in Missouri! Small world.
Michael--A friend of ours from England came to visit for a week, and when we asked her if there was anything she'd especially like to see, she promptly said, "A 'possum." We were flabbergasted and greatly amused. (And, yes, she did get to see one during her stay here, to her great delight.)
Great Scott--My condolences. Good thing this is the last day of school. :)
I just now saw this. Hilarious! I'm homesick!!
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