The Last Chapter of Sonny Porche

I'll just admit it:  I'm cheating outrageously.  Once I get pictures uploaded from the beach (Christmas, maybe?) I'll give you an update on the Pacific side of life.  But in the meantime, I have a total brain fog and still have three bags to unpack.  If only I could find them.

But I found some more of the "Sonny Porche Saga" which I had started writing after a very eventful summer vacation last year, but never posted here.  I'll bet you never had a summer vacation like this.  You certainly HOPE you never had a vacation like this.  If you find you have a desperate need to read some more honest-to-goodness-I-swear-they're-true stories about my neighbor Sonny (including his first trip to "the veteran's hospital," known to most people as "the state penitentiary"), this is a good place to look.

The Sonny Porche Saga Draws to a Close ......

Sonny seems to have been unfortunate all the way around with mechanical implements.  But that didn't stop him from trying to mow his yard.

This was a dangerous activity however, even for someone who hadn't been electrocuted by a go-cart.  This house is at the back of the back of beyond, where the standard rules of civilization are often relaxed in favor of convenience.  Before Sonny moved in, it had been inhabited for almost five decades by a bachelor whose idea of "taking the trash to the curb" was to burn the small stuff and toss the larger things (wheelbarrows, washing machines, baling wire, dead rodents) out into the yard.  In any event, the nearest thing to a curb was a quarter mile away, and there's no trash service anyway.

During one of Sonny's mowing expeditions, something became entangled in the mower blades.  Hardly surprising.  So, Sonny turned the machine over to fix the problem.  He forgot, however, to turn it off first.  The predictable happened, and if he'd ever wanted his mama to teach him to crochet, it was too late now.  I wonder if he went "back" to the veteran's hospital?

There's not much more to tell about Sonny.  He played the guitar, one with a Hawaiian beach scene air brushed on the front -- well, before the mowing incident he did -- and once sang me a sad love song he had written for his lost love; I was in no way a stand-in for her, I just happened to be a convenient audience.  And he must have been a hard drinker because when we finally got around to cleaning out his house, we found that he'd used half-gallon whiskey bottles (all empty) as door stops in every room.

Sonny and his mama are gone now, and the house has been empty for a long time.  Well, not completely empty.  A small army of rats moved in (perhaps before Sonny moved out), and just warn the CDC that if bubonic plague breaks out in the near future, look to Sonny's house as the vector.

Wait till you hear what "cleaning" this place entailed.  Come back tomorrow for:  Rat poop.  Bring a shovel.