Daddy was a pushover for my mother. He adored her, and trusted her implicitly. Mom never betrayed that trust, ever.
Except on April Fools Day.
Every April first, my mother would lay a trap for my father, and then watch with contained glee as he would assuredly walk right into it. Her jokes were always fun and delightful, and Daddy was always appreciative of being the object of her “affections.”
Poor trusting Daddy would forget from year to year that she had this capricious quirk about the day, and he was easy prey for my mother’s annual scheming.
Daddy had recently spent a sum of money on “professional” landscaping for a part of the meadow visible from the big kitchen window. He was very proud of his plantings, and enjoyed admiring them as he ate breakfast. The indigenous rabbits quickly became equally fond of Daddy’s “professional” landscaping, and would make quick work of any emerging tulip bulbs or tender new shoots on his shrubbery.
“I’m going to thin the numbers,” Daddy pronounced, meaning the rabbits, and placed a Hav-a-hart trap out in the meadow near his new flower beds. He would capture the bunnies, take them down the road, and release them. We were not sure that he wasn’t capturing the same persistent rabbit over and over again, but it didn’t deter him from his daily catch and release activities. He felt as if he were making some dent in the rabbit population, and hopefully increasing the flower population with his efforts.
Morning of April first, and trusting Daddy is sitting at the breakfast table, enjoying his tea, and he leans back in his chair to look across the meadow to the trap, checking to see if anything had blundered into it during the night.
Sure enough, he could see that there was something in the trap, because the door was in the down position.
“There’s something in the trap.” My father announced to my mother. Mom continued at the kitchen sink, washing up a few dishes.
There was a small silence.
“Honey, there’s something in the trap,” my father repeated. This time he added, “and I have never seen anything like that around here before.”
My father wears glasses, but his eyesight is fair. The trap was a good distance across the meadow, so the fact that he couldn’t recognize what he had in the trap was understandable. Mom, the consummate poker face, turns around and gives a cursory glance out the window at the trap.
“What is that? “ she asks.
“I don’t know” my father says.
Again, a small silence.
“I’m going to go see.” says my father.
By this time, Mom is dying of laughter inside, but there is not the tiniest ripple showing on the surface. She knows what will happen next.
Daddy is a country boy at heart, curious, but cautious. He reached behind the back door and took up his .22 rifle. He kept it there because…well…he was a country boy at heart. He checks to see if the rifle is ready to defend him against this unknown in the trap, and sets out across the back meadow, slowly, with his gun poised in his hand.
The ‘thing’ in the trap is an unusual color. It has an orange tint to it, a very unusual color for any of the typical fauna of the area. Daddy had lived there all his life and had never seen anything running around in the fields that had that coloring.
Picture if you will, a grown man with a .22 rifle, stalking slowly, in a sideways, crouching position, across a meadow, incrementally lifting the rifle to a firing position, with each measured step, as he approaches the unknown in his Hav-a-hart trap.
Picture also, a woman standing at the window, crossing her legs at the knees, trying to prevent herself from peeing because she was laughing so hard.
About ten feet from the trap, Daddy stops stock still. By this time the rifle is up to his eye, sighted and ready. He stops, and stands up completely straight, and drops the rifle to his side in one hand. His shoulders begin to jiggle up and down. We can’t hear it, but we know he is laughing out loud.
He turns around, and points a finger at my mother, who is watching him from the kitchen window, tears of hysteria streaming down her cheeks.
It seems Mom has succeeded, once again, in providing my father with his annual April Fools day joke.
She had gone out after dark the night before, and had placed an orange and black stuffed tiger toy in the trap. She had positioned the tiger so that it was not immediately obvious that it was a stuffed animal, allowing only provocative bits of the color to show.
She knew my father was intent on trapping and moving as many rabbits as he had tulip bulbs. She knew he was proud to check his trap every morning.
And she knew that getting him to fall for this year’s April fools joke, would be as easy as…well… trapping stuffed tigers.
Leslie
P.S. I had posted this on Leslie’s Blogger last year, and it is such a classic, I had to post it again. Happy April Fool’s Day everyone. When hunting wabbits, be vewy vewy caweful…
