Welcome to Story Hour! Today: Why April Sucks Part I

For many years April has not been a good month. Nothing good ever seems to happen in for me or Nathan in April.

When I was fifteen years old, I was headed home from school on the school bus, when the driver (and my brother and myself) happened to notice that my parents were sitting at the end of the road. None of us quite knew what was going on. So the driver continued to take us home. Now my parents had not been living together for a few days (maybe even a couple weeks) at that point, so this was quite confusing. So when we got into our house, I called my dad's cell phone. I remember him telling me "Its nothing to worry about, we're just talking on mutual ground. Just do your homework." Now I remember that I was doing Geometry that day and (as any normal person can tell you, math=headache) so I took off my relatively new, and somewhat strong, glasses... Not ten seconds later, the house phone rang, it was my dad again. "Lock all the doors. She's coming your way."



Hanging up, I yelled at my then 11-year-old brother to go lock the front door. I ran to the back door and locked it just as she was reaching it. Now, for some reason, I felt the need to go check the front door too. Good thing, since my hearing-selective brother chose not to heed my demands and it was open... This door I had to fight her for. She had reached it the same time I did and was turning and pushing. It took all of my weight to push the door shut and deadbolt it. At which point she tried breaking a window. She first attempted to do so by throwing a gazing ball pedestal at it. That was made of fiberglass, which when making contact with a double pane three foot by one foot window, split in two. She then reached for a cement frog garden ornament. It hit the window, cracked it first round then the went through second round. Now, mind you while all of this was going on I was yelling some profane things directly on the other side of the window. Things you would definitely not want to  say to your mother. But I was mad. Livid, in fact. And from my perspective, standing in the line of fire, she had no place there. (Although, according to her lawyer, the house was still hers and she should have not vacated the residence. But since she had, she needed to get back inside the residence by any means necessary.)

So once the frog had broken through the double-pane, she knocked out enough glass to avoid injury and then climbed inside. I, still yelling profane things, and my brother, somewhat awestruck, watched as she went to the linen closet and got out the vacuum to start cleaning up the glass, like what she'd just done wasn't borderline insane at all. At this point my dad is standing outside the window and yells at my brother and I to come outside right now. Feeling we were in more immediate danger than five minutes before, as though that seemed impossible, I grabbed my brothers hand and pulled him immediately outside.... no shoes, no glasses nothing. After nearly an hour, the sheriff showed up. After Dad had clued him in on the events of the day, she had been served with divorce papers that day apparently. So then he asked the sheriff if Dad could go in and retrieve any and all weaponry, my glasses, some shoes for us, and finally some clothes. The sheriff had asked Dad if there was some other residence we could stay at for the evening. Dad chose our grandma's house...

And thus began the un-fun summer. But that's all for today's story time. Another day we will hit up Part Two.
Until then...