My descriptions of aches and pains vex Jim, if only because I can never describe an ailment without getting all sorts of vivid. I offer as proof this post, "Pain, Pitchforks, and Porcupines. Cover your eyes Jim, because I am going to describe the headache that I had last Thursday.
Quick and dirty: It felt like I had a nickel wedged between my eye socket and my eyeball. The nickel was new. And shiny, too. I never like it when that headache comes to town.
I tried all afternoon to shake the headache. Excedrin. Water. Coffee. Midol. The nickel stayed put. What I really needed was a warm compress and sleep. Lots and lots of sleep.
When Connor arrived home from school, he and Natalie asked so earnestly if they could ride their bicycles around the pond. I hemmed. I hawed. I thought that perhaps the fresh air and movement might do me some good, so off we went.
"It'll just have to be a short adventure," I said as we tumbled out the garage. "Just once around the pond. When I say it's time to go home, what time is it?"
"Time to go home," Connor and Natalie answered in unison. We've had this conversation a time or two.
"No fussing, no fighting . . . "
"No alligator biting," they said in unison again, finishing my go-to saying.
Our evening walks tend toward the happy, blissful side. We roam. We explore. We breathe the air. It's good. We thump-thump-thump over footbridges. (Read "Evening Constitutional," which wasn't without its drama, but it all ended well.) We find fossils and practice our mad paleontology skills. (Read "Behold the Fossil Hunters.") We get all a-flutter. (Read "Flit. Float. Fleetly Flee. Fly.")
Connor pedaled like a wild man down the sidewalk. Natalie followed far behind, Fred-Flintstoning her way along instead of using her tricycle's pedals. Trouser and I performed an awkward, impromptu twirly dance there in the driveway as I tried unravel her leash from my legs.
Trouser and I, having finally sorted each other out, made our way down the sidewalk.
"Oh! Look at those cows and those sweet little calves!" Natalie said, practically melting into a heap of delight.
Cows? In that field?
The field at the end of our street is usually vacant during the day. There's an old abandoned farm house.
Coyote howls seem to come from that direction at night. And although there are cows at the other end of the street, there are none at this end.
I ponder where the cows might have come from and who the rancher might be when I realize that the animals that are terribly close to Connor and really quite large are not cows at all but feral hogs. Wild boars. Razorbacks. Nasty, vicious, disease-ridden creatures.
I think of the wild boar in The Lord of the Flies. I think about a TLC documentary about feral hogs. I think about their tusks.
I call sternly to Connor: "Come back, Connor. Quickly. Come back."
He hadn't noticed the hogs—I count four massive adult hogs and a mass of 15 or so babies—but he turns and pedals quickly to me, anyway, sensing some sort of something in my tone.
We confer with neighbors about what to do. Ignore them? Call someone? I call animal control, which transfers me to the county sheriff's office, which sends my call over to animal control again, which bounces my call over to the city police department. No one seems to know what to do, despite hogs being really quite prevalent in Texas.
My cell's battery is waning, and Natalie and Connor are obsessed with the idea of a bicycle ride. A Chinook flies over head, and the smaller hogs scatter back toward the treeline in fright. I vow to search the Web later in the evening to find out who I should contact about the hogs, and we head off in the opposite direction of our original walk.
The rest of our explore is uneventful. We see ducks, turtles, and fire ants. We enter our yard through the back gate to avoid having to go past the field where the hogs were—and might still be—noshing away.
We fumble our way to the front yard, where I enter a code into a keypad near the garage door. Enter the code, and the garage door will open. A nice little convenience so we don't have to take a key with us on walks or to the pool.
Except, this time, the door will not open. I try the code again and again and, after a few minutes, again. I had similar trouble earlier in the week and finally charmed the garage door into opening by hitting the squishy button for the last number of our code on a bit of an angle. I try that tact, but still the door doesn't open.
"Let's go around back," I say. "Maybe we left the back door unlocked."
I knew we hadn't. I'm a safety girl. I was right. The back door is locked and dead-bolted.
We traipse back to the front of the house, where I weigh my options. Jim is in Houston and has an early evening flight. He'll arrive home after dark. I could ask a neighbor for help, but I had already pestered one neighbor for help with the hogs. The neighbors on the other side have a new baby, and so, enough on their plate. I could call a friend who lives several blocks away, but what would we do? Hole up at her house until Jim arrived home? Walk to her house in the dark?
I look at my young charges. Trouser sits in the driveway, staring at the garage door, as if willing it to open. Connor has begun to get a sense that we are in a bit of a pickle. Natalie— sweet Natalie—plucks leaves off a shrub and suggests that I use them as keys.
The sun is sinking. The air, turning more and more crisp. We're cold, we're hungry. Connor and Natalie, still recovering from colds and sinus infections, have goopy, drippy noses. I, meanwhile, still have a nickel wedged between my eye socket and my eyeball. This sucks donkey balls.
I try to lift the garage door. (As if.) I try a window. Connor begins sobbing. He is cold and tired and worried about the darkness and the hogs and the coyotes that we hear at night.
Natalie gasps and says, "I know! We can go in the front door!" The concept of locks and keys is lost on her. I call Jim, whose flight is about ready to take off, and let him know of our little predicament.
I text our neighbor, the one with the newborn, asking if perhaps her husband, a firefighter, could help. He tries to help us break into our own home for the better part of an hour, but it turns out that we have a rather secure home. Curses.
He offers to have us come over, to warm up, but I don't want to expose the new baby to Connor and Natalie's colds, so I decline.
Connor, Natalie, Trouser, and I stand in the driveway while darkness falls. A woman drives by, asking if we have seen her lost dog. A man jogs by. I consider calling a locksmith, but worry about draining my cell battery as I search for one to call. (In my cold, headachy, "I hate it when I have to be the grown up" state, it doesn't even occur to me to ask a neighbor to call a locksmith, any locksmith.)
I try the code again. And again. And 20 more times on the off chance that the keypad would come around and decide to function properly. Nothing.
The neighbor across the street arrives home and asks if we're OK. I explain our situation. He and his wife have preemie twins at home, and, again, I don't want to expose them to our germs.
He runs back across the street, pulls his cars out of his garage, sets up lawn chairs, and says, "I just brought home pasta for dinner. We'll share with you."
In the meantime, Jim's flight lands, but he is still an hour-plus from home. He contacts a few locksmiths while he waits to deplane and catch a shuttle to his car.
Natalie, Connor, Trouser, and I sit and shiver and just want to be inside our home. I can't stop thinking about heating pads and electric blankets and piping hot showers and my bed. My comfy-cozy bed. Oh, how I love that place.
Jim, unaware that our neighbors have shared their carryout with us, has arranged for a pizza delivery. I offer it to our neighbors. ("We ate your pasta. Would you like our pizza?") Natalie and Connor grow restless. Trouser is anxious as all get-out. "Can we go home? Can we go home? Can we go home?" her eyes say as she stares at me, boring holes into me, wondering, "What the hell kind of adventure is this?"
And finally, finally, at long last, I hear the rumble of Jim's car, which holds Jim and his house key and a garage door opener. Our knight in shining armor.
Connor and Natalie holler, "Daddy!"
He opens the garage. I thank our neighbor so much that I get the sense that I've overdone it. We walk into our home sweet home. Our warm, feral-hog free home.
Back when we were standing in our driveway, wondering what to do, I thought once or twice, "When this is through, a beer will taste really, really nice." I envisioned a bottle of crisp 1554.
But now that we were inside our home, toasty and warm, I forgo the beer, pop a Motrin PM—I'm wild that way—shuffle the little ones off to bed, and crawl into my own bed.
Home at last.
I will never, ever leave home without a key again.
©Jennifer Linney. All Rights Reserved.
