Yesterday was an incredibly gorgeous day – although around these parts, any day without a monsoon is a gorgeous day when you’ve had as putrid a fall as we’ve suffered thus far. But yesterday was a dazzlingly gorgeous day – comfortable temperature, cloudless sky, just a slight breeze – so Kathy and I took Ellie and Bobbi for a walk through Petrified Springs.
At one point Kathy realized that my efforts to take photos was being hampered by having a lively 72-pound golden retriever in tow, so she graciously took Bobbi off my hands. All was fine until the trail we were following took us close to the river bank, and Kathy got a little too adventurous for her own good. I can’t remember if she asked “is this mud muddy?” or “is this mud slippery?” – but about two seconds after the question was voiced, I heard her yell something- and let’s just say that it wasn’t Shucks. I turned from the dead stump I was photographing to see my wife lying flat on her back on the riverbank, in the soupy mud, with the two dogs splashing around in the stream itself. As I came closer, I expected her to be seething – or crying – or some combination of the two. . . but instead she was laughing hysterically. And when I scrambled down to help her up, both my feet went out from under me as suddenly as hers had, and we were both seated in the mud- laughing harder and harder. And when Bobbi and Ellie chose that very moment to clamber out of the stream and jumped up on Kathy, soaking wet, that’s when we realized we were in the middle of the funniest unfilmed episode of “I Love Lucy” of all time.
And as we sat there laughing, I was reminded all over again of why I love this woman.
pictured above: Kathy and the two dogs in “mid-incident.” I especially love how Ellie (she’s the one on the left) is sitting in the stream as though she saw what Kathy was doing and decided that it looked like fun.
By the way, it was funny as it happened – but today Kathy is feeling very stiff and uncomfortable. So the morale of the story is: Don’t try this at home.