Clearly, I come by it honestly. And by “it” I mean “playful insanity”.

Five years ago Victor brought home a battered old bear named Mathew McClawnaughey because he knows I don’t like flowers:

And I gave the bear a small makeover and renamed her Ruth Bader Ginsbear, because obviously:

And then Ruth sat beside me through good times and bad and waved at fascinated neighborhood children during the pandemic.

But now Hailey is off in college and this house feels too big and so I’m looking at downsizing so that maybe we could move to a smaller place and so I asked my dad if he knew anyone that could give Ruth a home and he was like, “I’LL TAKE HER” and my mother was like, “Henry. We do not have room for another bear” and he explained that he could fix all her broken parts at his taxidermy shop and then put her in the old-west saloon/courthouse that they built by hand during the pandemic and I think this explains a lot about my family.

So then my dad picked Ruth up in a bear-hug and waltzed her outside…

…past Bone Crawford, the 12-foot-skeleton that I’ve been meaning to take down for years but now has become a permanent fixture.

And then he propped Ruth on a post while he went to get his pick-up, right as the neighbors drove by slowly, shaking their heads as they watched a bear dressed in a judge’s gown cling drunkenly to a pole like it was Mardi Gras for bears.

“Ah, Jesus. They’re at it again, Bernice.” ~ my neighbors, probably.

And then my parents drove away, with only Ruth’s boots sticking up over the bed of their truck, making it look to everyone they passed on the highway as if they were transporting the very stiff corpse of a cowboy with extremely hairy legs.

And that was how my Thanksgiving was.