The Streaker

I'm convinced that living in the country makes men do strange things.  There is something about the open spaces and the lack of close neighbors that tend to make them forget their manners.  There never was a farmer that could walk into a barn without having to "see a man about a dog" immediately.  The same men teach their sons to "pee in the grass" when outdoors,  then wonder why they "pee in the grass" off of second base in T-ball.  Farm wives are facing an uphill battle in their fight to "civilize" our males.

A recent visit with a farming family revealed one wife's struggles to tame her hubby.  It seems that back in their early years, hubby was a bit of a streaker. 

At the time they were living in the old farmhouse on the home farm.  Like a lot of old houses, the bathroom had been added on to the kitchen to consolidate the plumbing.  Also, like most farm houses, the kitchen door was the one most often used by everyone coming to the house.  (My front door is so seldom used that it swelled shut and no one knew it until a poor visitor knocked on it.  We then had to run around the house and tell him to come to the back so we could let him in!) 

The farmer in question had a habit of coming in dirty from the field and sliding straight into the bathroom to clean up.  He would then "streak" through the house to the bedroom to get into clean clothes.  The farmwife had cautioned him repeatedly that he needed to plan ahead and not just wander around in his birthday suit.  However, he was younger then and not shy about flaunting the hard, toned muscles of the working man, so he continued his dash.

It so happens that the phone was located on the kitchen wall, just across from the bathroom.  The farmer also had a habit of answering the phone by rushing out of the shower and grabbing it.  The wife was getting pretty put out with having a naked man lounging in her kitchen chatting on the phone or grabbing a cookie on his way to jump into his jeans.

As would happen, he came in from the field one day dirty, hot and tired.  He immediately went to the bathroom to clean away some of the accumulated dirt.  Just about the time he got good and wet, the phone rang.  Expecting a call, he quickly jumped out of the shower and ran across the kitchen to answer it, where he proceeded to lean against the counter and talk.  The wife, signaled to the oldest daughter and told her to run out the front door and then knock loudly on the back door. 

The knocking came, and with cheerful tones the wife called out "Maybelle how good to see you!  What brings you out to this part of the county!  Come in, come in.  I'm sure I've got some pie left from lunch."

The farmer looked up in a panic.  He was trapped.  To get to the bathroom or the bedroom he had to cross in front of the back door.   If his visitor took one step into the kitchen he was in plain sight.  He looked frantically for something to cover himself with but all he had was the phone.  In desperation he opened the cabinet door and tried to scrunch himself down behind the small door.  All the while listening to the cheerful invitation to "come on in and sit down".  Footsteps approached and his wife and daughter burst into giggles at the sight of him attempting to climb into the cabinet. With a sheepish grin, he realized he had been "had".

"That will teach you to strut around in your birthday suit!", the wife laughed. 

He said later, that all he could think about was that Maybelle was the biggest gossip in the county and she would be running back to tell everyone about his kitchen "welcoming" if she had indeed walked through the door.

His family's laughter gave me the feeling that he didn't need Maybelle to spread the story....I was betting they had done a pretty good job without her.