By Buster McNutt
There are things I will miss when we move back to Tennessee. Where else but in North Central Florida would you have a Pricilla Baptist Church that sells fruitcakes over the Christmas holidays and around Easter offers concealed carry permit classes. No doubt they use the leftover fruitcakes as practice targets. Or maybe I have it all wrong and the concealed permit classes are so you can legally walk into the local e-cigarette-and-bait store packing a fruitcake under your Gators hoodie. Personally, I don’t own a fruitcake and have never contributed to the NFA (National Fruitcake Association, but I’m thinking you already figured that out.) Roseanne Barr was their national chairman until she made that comment about a beagle being the love child of a bee and an eagle, which got all the dog lovers standing up on their hind legs, shedding all over the furniture, and relieving themselves on the nearest tire.
It’s probably a good thing I don’t own a lethal fruitcake, because there’s a better than even chance I would use it on my 90-years-and-change-old neighbor who, whenever I walk over to his house to give him his mail that our 80-years-and-change-old mail carrier put in my mailbox “by mistake” … where was I going with this…Oh yes, whenever I see this neighbor he always asks me if I’ve heard the one about the cat who limps into the Old West saloon and tells the bartender he’s looking for the man who shot his paw. Fruitcakes don’t kill people, but bad jokes certainly might.
There are any number of things I could say about our dirt roads, but that would be beneath me (two, three, four… “Oh, I get it!”). Dirt roads have rocketed to the top tier, along with colonoscopies, liver flavored smoothies, “personal injury” lawyer commercials, and plagues of zombie locusts on my list of things that I am just so over. People who complain about the occasional “hard road” pothole need to walk a mile in one of our dirt road sinkholes. Losing a hubcap is a minor boo boo – losing a whole car is a much tougher slobber knocker!
And then there is “Shanty Town,” our local trailer park and resisted-living center. I’m not saying they cater to an older crowd, but the guy at the welcome center is named Matt, and I’ve been told his last name is Thusila. It’s a Bible thing.
I’ll definitely miss the annual Watermelon Bus Parade. These are old school buses that have had their tops cut off and seats removed so they can haul more melons. When watermelon season is over some of the buses are sent to the local correctional facility to train the inmates, so they can get jobs driving real school busses when they get out, although I’m not sure leaving jail and chauffeuring a busload of unruly children wouldn’t constitute cruel and unusual punishment in some of the more liberal states. I’ve heard that NASCAR is considering a watermelon bus racing series to help with their dwindling attendance and to attract a younger audience. I think Danica Patrick should be a natural at melon racing. Maybe that bus driver from The Simpsons as well.
Just last week they spotted the first Burmese python at the county line. Apparently it had hitched a ride up from the Everglades in a returning watermelon bus. It’s a real problem in the Everglades area, where the pythons have eaten most of the native animals, including more than a few alligators, as well as a tourist’s Kia Soul. I’m thinking the snake had been watching TV commercials and figured there might be some hamsters inside. About a week later they found the car in a large pile of python poop, but the owner hasn’t shown a lot of interest in coming by to dig it out.
I certainly won’t miss having to put the mesh screen on my tailpipes during snake mating season. For some reason a snake in heat looks at a hot tailpipe and sees a big flashing No-Tell-Motel sign. And when snakes get their whoopee on, they forget all about their 9-to-5 job, which is mostly shedding skin, getting run over by cars, and eating mice, although not in that order, unless they are zombie snakes. This past year we’ve had more than our share of field mice. It got so bad that about once a week I’d tape a bunch of those sticky mouse glue traps to my tires, and ride around the yard “harvesting” the mice. When I’m done I just put the mouse-filled glue traps next to the dirt road, and within an hour or so a swarm of giant fungus gnats flies by and carries them off. Add to that the ignition-wire-and-brake-hose-eating squirrels, kamikaze deer, and the occasional tire-munching alligator — rural Florida makes Jurassic Park look like a petting zoo in comparison.
But the good news is that our county’s Python Number One died, and in doing so may have given us the solution for the python epidemic in South Florida. They did an autopsy on the dead python, and in its stomach you’ll never guess what they found. Or, maybe you will if you’ve been paying attention or if you normally read my articles from the ending to the beginning. Which is really annoying. That’s right; they found an undigested Pricilla Baptist Church fruitcake! The Lord does work in mysterious ways.
And he really doesn’t like snakes. I’m not so sure about fruitcakes. •
