Beech Tree News Network

My husband, Garey, doesn’t believe in the yes/no answer.  You will quickly find this out if you ask him a question about anything.  Case in point: question, “Did you get the wash bays cleaned up?” answer, “I guess everybody with a 4-wheeler got it out and went muddin this weekend.  Oh, and some trucker cleaned out some kind of sludge and threw it all over the truck bay walls.  That took a good forty-five minutes to clean up.  And I noticed a guy with a Razor that looked like it’d been to every deer stand in the county pulling in the parking lot as I was pulling out, so I’ll have to go back down there and clean up after him later.”  So is that a no?
    It’s worse if you ask him a sports question.  We’ve been tearing out old flooring so I can have new material put down in the kitchen, dining room and bathroom.  We worked on it all day Saturday then that night I plopped down on the couch to watch the Tennessee/Texas A&M football game.  I fell asleep before the game ended, so the next morning I asked Garey who won. 
You’d think after forty years I’d have figured out I could save myself a lot of time by just looking up the results on line. Evidently, I don’t have that much sense, because I found myself listening to a twenty-minute play-by-play that went something like this: “Tennessee was down 28 to 7 then came back in the final quarter to tie it up 35 to 35.  In the last seconds, A&M was set to kick a field goal, so Tennessee called three time-outs so they could chill the kicker.  It worked, the kicker missed.  The game went into overtime with both teams coming away with a field goal.  In the second overtime, Tennessee scored a field goal, but A&M got the ball and scored a touchdown.”  So, A&M won, I gather.
I’ve noticed our granddaughter, Sabria, has her grandfather’s gift for back story.  Recently, she was at our house after she’d lost her second tooth.  “I see that you’ve lost another tooth,” I commented.
“Let me tell you the true story,” she said.  “I got a quilt off my bed because I wanted to play queen.  I wrapped it around my shoulders and tried to tie it, but my hands weren’t strong enough so I put one end of the quilt in my mouth and pulled the other end with my hands, and my tooth came out.  Quilts are good for pulling teeth,” she beamed.       
As a writer, I concede there are times when stories need back stories in order to make sense, like the story Garey and my son-in-law, Scott, told me on Saturday after they’d taken our old flooring off.  Earlier in the week, our friend, Greg, told Garey he could dump the flooring into a brush pile he was planning to burn later this fall. 
After Scott and Garey arrived with a load, Greg climbed into the bed of the truck in order to help Garey off load the pile.  The two decided on the 1-2-3 toss method.  Garey has always been a 1-2-toss on 3 person.  Unbeknownst to Garey, Greg is a 1-2-3 toss guy.  Herein lies a recipe for disaster.  After the 1-2 count, Garey tossed his end of the flooring on the 3 count.  Greg didn’t, which meant he was still attached to the flooring that Garey had just tossed into a brush pile. 
Evidently, the brush pile was full of green briars, and if Garey’s and Scott’s description of the wounds on Greg’s legs are anywhere near accurate, I will need to factor in a quart of Campho-Phenique, Greg’s antiseptic of choice, when figuring the final cost of the new floor.