Journal of a Living Lady #115

 

Nancy White Kelly

 

          This is a true story about eight grapefruit and a dead rooster. First, let me say emphatically that I do not like fruit, especially citrus fruit. I will eat berries and maybe a banana if it is pristine, but other than that, I detest fresh fruit. Anybody who sends me a fruit basket when I am sick is no close friend of mine. My real friends know better and send me chocolate instead. That’s milk chocolate, not dark chocolate.

When I was a baby, I would break out in hives anytime my mother tried to force orange juice down me. Don’t give me lemons either. Ditto for grapefruit.  Don’t like it. Don’t want it. Don’t even care to smell it or see it.

Now, Buddy loves fruit. This is one of those areas we had to compromise on when we married. No fruit in the house, but he can have it outside in his workshop. He is sneaky sometimes. Just last week I discovered eight yellow grapefruit tightly tied in a double plastic grocery bag in the rear of the lowest shelf in our refrigerator. I may have cancer, but I am not blind. Just as I was contemplating how to delicately handle this situation, Buddy interrupted me with the wildest story I ever heard.

We have a mini-farm. Previously I told you how our rooster roster kept mysteriously increasing.  Finally, we gave away two Rhode Island Red roosters and sold four more at the flea market. We kept our favorite one, Big Red.  The very next day, to my dismay,  I found Big Red deader than dirt in the middle of our pasture. I couldn’t believe it. We went from seven roosters to none in twenty- four hours. Buddy buried the big guy over the pasture fence near the ditch. That was the day before this one.

Here I was standing in the kitchen contemplating my grapefruit search and destroy mission when Buddy informed me that Big Red was right back in the pasture in the exact same spot I had found him deceased. 

“Is he still dead?” I asked.

“Yep,” Buddy replied. “Lying in the very position he was in yesterday, face down and feathers spread.”

To say we were puzzled is an understatement. Was this a joke?  Had Big Red only fainted? Could he have revived himself, kicked out of the shallow grave, and flown over the fence? Did he return to the familiar pasture only to expire for real?

Who knows? The Lord knows we don’t.

Buddy buried Big Red again in a different spot. I forgot about the grapefruit. Until today.

“What did you do with all those grapefruit?” Buddy finally asked, thinking I probably threw them out.

“I didn’t touch them,” I replied.

“They were in the  back of the refrigerator,” Buddy said with a sigh, rubbing his puzzled brow.

Buddy doesn’t lie and I don’t drink. But the grapefruit is gone. The rooster too. There is a large vacant spot in the refrigerator. There is also an empty hole where Big Red was buried the second time.

This will always be a mystery to us. Just hope we don’t hear that there is a big rooster in Florida pitching in the grapefruit league.

 

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