(Originally posted on my tumblr in September, 2018.)
As always, a bunch of my family went up to the cabin over the holiday weekend. It was mostly the usual nonsense. My aunts not at all understanding how things work despite having it explained to them multiple times, my sister forgetting basically everything a person needs to exist and having to scrounge it all together from other family members. Sadly, I was not there this time because I had work all weekend. But my dad, who talks on the phone more than any human being I have ever met, gave me the rundown on everything last night.
On Saturday night my dad and my uncle Cody (my dad’s brother-in-law) were up later than everyone else and were screwing around in the garage kitchen around midnight. They were messing with an elk call and making all sorts of terrible, terrible noises with it. If you’ve never heard an artificial elk call used by two drunk men, well, it’s a lot of very weird and vaguely unpleasant noise. They got my aunt’s corgis all the way in the house (about twenty yards away and not attached to the garage in any way) very overexcited, thought it was amusing, and then eventually went to bed, thinking that was that.
But no.
It was not that.
The next morning my dad rolls out of bed and shambles back in the direction of the garage to get his morning coffee. Before he can make it there my aunt Darla, owner of the corgis, comes rushing out of the house. Clearly, she had been waiting for my dad to wake up. She immediately demands to know what a moose sounds like.
My dad is not a functional man before coffee and has no clue what the fuck she’s talking about, nor any will to deal with his big sister’s nonsense before caffeine. He tells her he doesn’t have the faintest idea what a moose sounds like, he thinks they grunt or something, and steps around her to get at the coffee. She followed him and started going on and on about hearing weird animal noises in the middle of the night and how it got the dogs so excited. My dad isn’t paying her any attention, he’s just making coffee. Finally she seems to pick up on the fact that he’s not a part of this conversation and she wandered back into the house saying she was going to look up videos of what moose sound like.
After the first cup of coffee it finally clicks.
The noises she was talking about were him and Cody being idiots.
He never did explain it to his sister.