OK, picture the scene. I'm on a couple of very overgrown acres in Southern New Hampshire. Overgrown shrubs, plants, herbs, grass..name it, it's running wild.
On this particular evening, I'm out on the screened porch with boyfriend; grilling burgers, drinking something or another, and bemoaning the state of events with the lawn. I'd been out there on the acreage with branch loppers, hedge trimmers, a machete... trying to get the vegetation under control, and the biggest change in the landscape is that I took out the rotten fence after having accidentally backed into it with my truck! Poor showing? Oh yeah.
Obviously, something had to be done about this sad state of affairs; since I didn't know the first thing about what the hell I was doing, I asked boyfriend his opinion, as he knew more about this stuff than I ever would anyway.
Boyfriend, in his wisdom, suggests that we go to the tool rental place down the street, and rent a brush hog. I had never heard of such a thing, so I asked what it was, and he gave me the short explanation that a brush hog was like a weed whacker, only for brush and bushes.
I was perfectly ok with that explanation, and thought to myself, that I would be a 'good girlfriend', go to the tool rental place, pick this thing up, bring it home, and have a high old time whacking on all this crap taking over my lawn. My thought and hope, at that point, was that my boyfriend would be proud of me for taking initiative.
The next day was a scorcher. So, I was doing the whole summer dress and sandals thing when I walked into the tool rental place. To say I was sorely out of place, in a store full of farmers and contractors, was an understatement. When the clerk asked me what I needed, I completely flubbed up the name of the tool, and wound up very confidently asking the clerk for a bushwhacker, completely unaware of the connotation.
How the clerk and everyone else in the place kept from bursting out laughing, I will never know. The clerk, to his credit, patiently shows me what I now know are heavy-duty weed whackers, while I conversationally dig myself in deeper as I innocently exclaim at just how darn big and heavy some bushwhackers are, and that I'd had no idea!
Finally the poor clerk can't stand it anymore, and sends me off to Home Depot, filling me with assurances that Home Depot had a better selection of bushwhackers, that I might find easier to handle. I thought that was strange, but, went with it anyway. What the hell did I know?
Walking into Home Depot and asking that particular clerk for a bushwhacker yielded similar puzzling results. I went home, sans bushwhacker, while wondering just what the hell was wrong with people that didn't understand that I was just trying to do something about my overgrown lawn, dammit.
The next night, boyfriend was back visiting, and I rather apologetically explained to him why I hadn't brought home a bushwhacker. I felt so bad. The look on his face was as equally as puzzling to me as the looks on the faces of the clerks I had tried to buy or rent a bushwhacker from in the first place. Finally I come around to telling him the whole story, and he burst out laughing at me!!
As I recall, the first coherent sentence post-laughter was something to the effect of 'You don't know what a bushwhacker is, do you, honey?'. That was my first clue that I might not have been asking for lawn equipment, after all.
My cheeks blushed hotter than Hell itself, as boyfriend patiently explained to me what a bushwhacker is, and how what I'd really wanted was a _brush hog_, and that it went on the back of a tractor, and that it wasn't something I could have just put in the back of my SUV, but that it was very sweet of me for trying!
It took awhile before I felt secure enough to enter the tool rental place again, never mind the local bar or hardware store. Or, for that matter, that particular Home Depot.
Moral to this story: That yes, I can live down a completely embarrassing incident in a small town. It takes awhile, though.
until next time...peace
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