Open Season

That’s it!  No more pizza deliveries! 

Many years ago, our dearest friends came down with the influenza.  Well, not our friends exactly, rather their four children came down with the flu, at the same time.  They had been sick for the better part of a week and the whole family was exhausted and worn.  Sir Knight and I decided that we would do what we could to ease their burden and delivered homemade “take and bake” pizzas to their home – tucked away up a winding road on a country hillside.  The weather was sloppy – a wet spring snow had just fallen and the roads were soft with the spring thaw.  After dropping off the pizzas, as we made our way down their somewhat treacherous hillside, I rolled our Landcruiser.   Sir Knight and I crawled out of the truck (thankfully we had left our children at home), trekked back to our friend’s house and called a wrecker.  The insurance company totaled that truck and to this day, I still don’t like to drive to our dear friend’s home in the middle of winter!

Last Friday, Sir Knight, the children (all five of them), and I packed into our Landcruiser on yet another pizza run.  Friends (on the other side of the county) had been through the wringer.  The husband, a logger, had been injured on the job in the spring and had been off work since.  Immediately after the injury, he had been advised to rest and then had gone through extensive physical therapy, only to find out that his ankle had been completely destroyed – to the point that no amount of physical therapy could help.  Finally, he’d had his ankle surgically repaired, and was now recuperating, unable to put ANY weight on it for the next two months, before again attempting physical therapy. 

And so, with the Landcruiser filled to the brim with children, pizza and smore’s dip (complete with graham crackers for dipping), we set off for the small mountain town about a half an hour away.  In our defense, we missed four of them.  Four deer had jumped in front of our truck before the fifth one finally succeeded in its mission of self destruction.   I’m not kidding – that spike jumped in front of our truck before we saw it!  We felt the bump and saw the deer fly past the passenger side windows before we even knew what hit us!  Our front right bumper was ripped up and rubbing on the tire, so we pulled over to assess the damage.  Miss Serenity ran over to the deer to verify it was dead and found it incapacitated but still breathing.  Master Hand Grenade grabbed his knife and quickly put it out of its misery.  We tore the broken part of the bumper off, hopped back in the truck and continued on our way – arriving at our friends with a bloody knife to clean and deer hair to scrub off our hands.

After a lively debate about whether we should go back for the backstrap, we settled into a wonderful evening of pizza, fellowship and s’mores dip.  We drove home with one headlight, a funky turn signal and deer hair sticking out of the grill.

As Sir Knight and I  mulled over the evening’s events, we finally found a common thread – pizza!  We have decided that next time we take a meal to ailing friends, it will have to be lasagna!