slideshow

Before I moved back to Kentucky, my wife and I and our three children lived in Atlanta, Georgia. While living in Atlanta, I enjoyed working in our yard. Boy, do I have a story to tell you about one of my misadventures doing some yard work.

So… One day my wife was going to mow the grass and I reminded her to roll up the hose because it would be hard to see in the grass and she would run over it. I have told her to roll it back up when she is finished with it but she never listens.

My wife has a severe case of husband-deafness and didn’t roll up the hose. And just like I figured, over it she went and chopped the hose in pieces. Being the good husband that I am, I picked at her about it for about a week then went and bought a new hose.

Fast forward til a day I took off of work from the church and was going to mow some so she wouldn’t have so much to mow when she got home. Kristie did a lot of the mowing and I was in charge of the flowerbed. Martha Stewart had nothing on me.

Anyways, I piled my fat self on the mower and started happily running around the yard in the Dale Earnhardt gear the wife told me to never mow in, and then I heard it.. CHOMP CHOMP..

I looked back, wondering if that was the neighbor I just ran over and see little pieces of the garden hose. I had watered the flowers the night before and I hadn’t rolled up the hose. Well, I knew there was NO WAY I could tell her what I had done because I had picked at her about it so long when she did it. So, I jumped in the car and ran over to the closest hardware store and I got a new hose. I was sooooo proud of myself that I had gotten away with it. That is, until I got home.

We had used the other hose for a few weeks (before I made it into straws) and it was all dirty and stuff. and the new hose neared glowed because it was so clean! So, I drug it up and down the backyard in the dirt about 10 times and then pulled it through the grass some so it would look like it had been used a lot. I knew I had her then. She would never know I had done the same stupid thing that she had done. I was so excited with myself for being so smart.

The next day, she was going to water the flowers and off across the yard she went, dragging the hose with her. I was standing in the window watching her and thinking all along how smart I really am, UNTIL… she ran outta hose way before she ran outta flowerbed. She couldn’t get to the other end of the flowerbed with the hose like she had two days ago. I watched her out the window, pulling on the hose so hard that I thought she was going to drag the house up the hill by the hose.

She came back to see if it was snagged on something. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then it hit me! We had a 30-foot hose in the beginning and I, in my rush to get the replacement hose, had bought a 15-footer.

So… I went out the door dreading what I had to do. She was standing there with the hose in her hand looking back at where it was connected to the house, and you could tell by the look on her face, she had no clue what was going on.

I tried to tell her that I had heard on the radio that if you left a garden hose lying in the sun, it would shrink. She didn’t fall for that one. So I told her a little drizzle of rain we had the night before caused it to draw up. Nope, didn’t work. All at once, she looked at me and I swear I saw a light bulb go off in her head. “You did it too, didn’t you? Come on, fess up; you ran it over too, didn’t you?”

What could I say? I just dropped my head and turned and crawled back into the house.

God Bless and Go Cats!

Rev. Scott Murphy is the Pastor at the First Christian Church in Russellville.