pardon our dust

My family’s house is way back in the woods. We live next door, relatively speaking, to my dad’s brother and his family. We share about half the length of our driveway from where it branches off of the nearest main road before it forks off and goes to our respective houses. We’re way out in the boonies.

Dad recently had the house connected to city water service — yeah, in 2012, before this we were dipping water out of wells with our hands and bathing in mud or whatever, shut up — and had to to do some landscaping around the shared portion of our families’ driveway to clean up after all the groundwork. A few trees had to be cut down, mostly stuff that was already dead and would have come down anyway.

Whenever there’s a bare stump left behind, Dad likes to get creative on the weekends: with a steady supply of beer at the ready, he enjoys carving stumps into the shape of a mushroom with a chainsaw. Here’s one of Dad’s most recent mushrooms.

My uncle and his son have always said that this particular mushroom looks like a penis. They have to drive by it every day, and they teased Dad a lot about it looking really phallic and goofy. The man can’t catch a break. Clearly he’s a burgeoning artist trying to hone his craft when the rare opportunity affords itself, so it’s tough to be told that your beloved hand-wrought mushroom chainsaw sculptures look like cocks, literally. 

This past weekend, my uncle and cousin were out of town, and Dad took matters into his own hands, deciding to prove his artistry to his detractors once and for all. 

By carving six of these monsters up and down his brother’s driveway. Dad has always talked about retiring into a hobby woodcrafting and handmade furniture job, so maybe he has a bright future in the world of phallic handmade furniture. Anybody in the market for a solid oak wiener couch?