You know what I've been missing the last couple months? Random visits with Meat & Tater.
My neighbors have been on a long adventure up north. They dropped in a couple nights ago with a quart jar of eggnog. And cups.
"Come on in and move those coats off that chair. Sit down."
"Dang SJ, warm enough in here? Why are you wearing a toboggan in the house?"
Tater pushed past Meat and gave me a big hug. "Feels good to me." She stepped back, reached out and pulled my hat off.
"You had hair when we left. What happened?"
"It fell out again. Right after y'all left. You know what they say about losing body heat through your head? It's true when you're bald."
I grabbed the hat back and pulled it over my head. Meat had plopped onto the couch, unlidded the jar and was pouring eggnog into a cup. Tater picked the coats off the chair and dropped them on Meat.
"You're going to make me spill more of your precious family nog," he snarled. "Here SJ, you've got to try this stuff," in a voice thicker than the contents of the cup he offered me.
I took it. "It's been pretty stir crazy around here. Sounds like you went to Vermont. Where else?"
Their responses overlapped which was confusing.
"Meat went swimming in the Bay of Fundy."
"Tater shot Bullwinkle."
"Wait...what? Tater?"
"We went rafting on tidal bores in the Bay of Fundy, it was fun until we hit a wave that stood the raft up and threw Meat right out. Then it was really fun!"
"The Bay of Fundy, huh? Why'd you go there?"
"We were in Portland Maine waiting for her brothers to show up. I saw a sign for a ferry to the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia. Just sounded like someplace I wanted to go. We hung out a couple of days. Worth it."
"We hung out there 4 days Meat. We were a day late getting back to my brothers in Maine. It was totally worth it."
"Okay. So who shot who?" I was halfway through my cup of nog, very tasty but one was enough.
"Tater's brothers got us a moose permit in Maine. We went driving off in the woods a hundred miles from the closest gas station. The whole first day we listened to the brothers debate which land we were supposed to hunt on. One thought it was on the left side of the gravel road, the other thought it was on the right side of the gravel road. Next morning, Tater rolled out of the camper to four moose standing in the gravel road between the two pieces of land. So she shot the biggest one. Hunt over."
"I was just really sick of listening to Beavis and Butthead trying to remember where they've been hunting every five years since we were kids."
"If they've been hunting there that long, why couldn't they remember where it was?"
Tater handed her empty cup to Meat. "Not sure, but family eggnog season coinciding with moose season might be a clue. Fill her up honey."