I think everybody is a little bit weird. I also believe that the secret to ultimate happiness is finding people who are compatibly weird. This is a story of compatible weirdness.
My husband was a very well respected builder in the county. I was a very well respected writer. But at home, we lived our own crazy life living on our wooded property, communing with the wildlife and enjoying the nature around us. We were sort of wilderness weirdos, even though we lived pretty much in a city.
Anyway, I wrote for some very upscale magazines. The kind where I had to go into super ritzy mansions during the day and talk to the owners or the builders and write an article about them. Very upscale. I was riding around with the editor of one of the magazines one day, visiting various upscale homes, and she wanted to go to my house. That was a hard NO.
Earlier in the day she told me that she hated birds because they sometimes poop on her car. As a writer of articles about wildlife, I had written entire articles about how cool it can be to find animal poop (also known as scat) out in nature and to try to figure out what “critter” had been on the property. I have rocks and snake skins and sticks and owl feathers and other items from nature all over this house. She probably would have been appalled.
But the main reason I wouldn’t let her go to my house that day was because I knew my husband was home boiling the skin off of a deer skull on the grill in the backyard. He had hunter friends and he would get the skulls and make beautiful European mounts. He was really good at it and they were quite beautiful. Anyway, if anyone else visited out property that day and saw hubby boiling a deer skull, I would have just joked around and said that he was making me dinner. But I honestly thought that if she saw the way my husband and I lived, she would have thought twice about letting me write for her, even though my lifestyle obviously had nothing to do with the quality of my writing.
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