June 1, 2024
Hunting Rabbits
I woke up a few minutes before my wife. She tried to sleep in, but the dogs were extra loud this morning, so she got out of bed. Morning coffees on Saturdays were always a special event. With a full night’s sleep between the end of the work week and the beginning of the weekend, this time was always full of excitement.
We made plans to go into Wilson for breakfast. I suggested we do the grocery shopping while we were there. While my wife usually took care of this alone, I knew she appreciated the occasional tag along. This would save her a trip back to town.
Before we left, we placed our new registration stickers on our cars. In North Carolina, this meant placing a reflective, waterproof decal on part of the license plate. I remembered that years ago, Texas used to do this before moving to registration stickers on the windshield. When I was a patrol officer, I got pretty good at reading the numbers on the windshields as cars passed by. These small decals would have been more difficult to see, but these days, officers just ran license plates through a database that tracked registration.
I had a savory breakfast and the size of a piece of ham that came with my meal surprised me. It was the size of an evening steak. I ate a small piece of it, and we ended up taking the rest home for the dogs. After breakfast, we still had a few minutes before Marshalls opened, so we visited Puddles Auto Wash, where we ran the car through their car wash machine. It always did a great job.
Our next stop was Marshalls to pick up new toys for the dogs. After, we stopped by Target to grab water and to, you know, walk wifey around Target because that was a thing. A stop at Lidl filled the car with groceries. When we were ready to check out, there was a lady blocking the aisle, yapping away with her friend. I politely asked her to excuse us so we could pass by and she looked at me and told me I should have said something. I thought I just did. People can be so weird.
After buying groceries, we stopped to fill up my car with gas and then we made an impromptu stop at Culver’s for some ice cream. We knocked out the morning shopping relatively quickly, but being out in public always drained me. After living in the woods for two years, I had become accustomed to the quiet.
My wife and I kept our lives drama free, so it was always a little tiring to brush up against other people’s tension. Sometimes, it felt like they were trying to pull me into their world to share the problems they created for themselves. While I loved helping people in need, it felt different when the need was something they worked hard to maintain, fully capable, yet unwilling, to resolve their own issues.
When we arrived home, we put away the groceries and then, as surreptitiously as possible, we cut the tags off of the dogs’ toys. Kilo knew exactly what was going on. I stuffed a squeaky rabbit toy in my hoodie’s pocket and walked out the front door into the tree line of the pine grove. There, I placed the toy bunny behind some brush near a tree.
We took Kilo out front and she immediately went nuts. She wasn’t sure what was going on until we said the magical words: find it. She shot off like a rocket, nose to the ground. Within thirty seconds, she was proudly toting her rabbit back to the house. She chewed the toy up for thirty minutes straight, destroying it, releasing a toy ball that once formed the rabbit’s body.
I dozed off on the couch, tired from the morning’s excitement. After a brief nap, I woke up and had a snack and coffee with my wife at the dining room table. About a half hour later, she took over the couch while I went to my office to write and edit videos. She fell asleep, napping for an hour, before waking up, feeling refreshed.
When she awoke, we walked outside and sat in the garden area together. The new seat cushions were more comfortable than the old ones, making the seating area even more pleasant. The garden area was getting more full. There were peppers and tomatoes growing while several plants were flowering.
Later, we made a quick run into Bailey to grab some more groceries at the Piggly Wiggly. This was our preferred place to buy meat, and today we bought two fat ribeyes, two packages of chicken wings, and some chicken tenderloins. I told my wife about a creamy horseradish sauce I loved that used to come with a ribeye at the Outback Steakhouse. We looked at the condiment aisle and found two different brands that looked unappealing. My wife did a quick search on her phone and then grabbed a small jar of horseradish and a pack of sour cream.
When we arrived home, I placed the chicken wings into two large ziplock bags filled with marinade. My wife was busy in the kitchen making an impromptu cheesecake with Oreos. While she was making art in the kitchen, I went outside, cleaned the backyard, and then made a trash run. While driving down the dirt road that led away from the house, I saw a large doe standing out in a crop field. When she saw my car, she ran off, stopping just outside the tree line.
After I returned to the house, I drove into the pasture to park my car because my wife wanted to mow the front yard. Before parking, I drove out to a small patch of tall grass and drove over it a few times, trying to mat it down. The previous owners had buried large bales of hay in the ground, without removing the plastic that enveloped it. We had to avoid mowing the area because the plastic was coming out of the ground and getting sucked into the mower blades. We tried digging it up by hand the year before, but the plastic was too deep into the ground.
My wife mowed the front and back yards while I worked in the house. In the evening I cut wood while my wife started up the fire pit. We spent the evening outdoors, eating grilled chicken wings for dinner and slices of fresh cheesecake for dessert. Everyone and everything was out enjoying the night. All around, the fireflies flashed as the birds sang. A herd of deer were feeding on the side of the house. The day started out busy, but the evening was perfectly slow.