Damn It!

"Look! Look! There's one of the bastards now!" I said to BigD, jumping up to look for a ball.

"Eww.. I think it's humping the top of your fence."

"He's mocking me!" I grabbed our giant beach ball and ran full force toward the fence, screaming and then hurling the ball at the fence with one final war cry. "go away!!"

"Oh my gawd." BigD said. "You're really losing it, aren't you?" she laughed at my freakish behavior as I sank back down onto the deck next to her to finish my cigarette, moaning and groaning all the way. "Is it the home-schooling? The Man? What's the problem, really?"

"They're chewing off the heads of my sunflowers!!!! Before they even bloom!" I gestured wildly, sputtering my outrage between drags on my cigarette. "You know how I feel about the sunflowers!"

"yeah yeah.."

"They have to be the biggest, tallest, brightest sunflowers! I planted them, and weeded them, and watered them, and fed them and just when they're FINALLY going to bloom the goddamn squirrel comes along and CHEWS THE HEAD OFF."

"What are you going to do?" she was laughing and shrugging the problem off.

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do. It's fuckin' war! I'm thinking I'll somehow attach skewers to the top of the fence. And since The Man is never going to get around to it, I'm going to put cage stuff over the top of the compost so they can't steal shit out of it anymore…"  Just then Little Man came barreling out the back door toward us.

"Ball, Mama? You run with ball?" he asked making both of us laugh that he had spotted me outside playing ball without him.

"Yeah. Mama was running with the ball" I admitted.

"Hey! Look, it's back!" BigD pointed at the fence and sure enough, there was the squirrel, staring at us malevolently. I was off the deck running in a flash, yelling and hollering loudly.

Little Man was right on my heals yelling "Shoo!" followed by a string of unexpected "Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!" s. The commotion died down and BigD and I sat back down on the porch, panting a little. Okay, that might have just been me.

"Did I say damn it?" I asked her wonderingly

"No. Not right now anyway."

"Wow. Context and everything. I love that boy."

"Yeah. He's adorable." she said sardonically.

"I was thinking we might need a dog to chase the squirrels off but that's stupid, there are three trainable children already shitting and eating us out of house and home and they don't have fleas!"

"You're not going to teach the kids to chase and be mean to squirrels!" BigD said

"They're driving me to extremes, BigD! Something has to be done! Look! It's already coming back!" I rolled a ball toward Little Man, saying  "Get it! Get it, damn it!"