The (Dead?) Horse

Have you ever been unable to stop laughing about something? Sometimes it is something that is not actually funny in a hahaha funny sense. It happens to me frequently and usually at the most inappropriate time. Like in church. Once when Nathan was a baby we were sitting in church and he was gnawing on his teether - you know, those water-filled ring things? - and it sprung a leak and there was absolutely nothing that could be done to minimize the water fountain that sprung forth from that little teether! We about fell off the pew as I recall. Who knew that it was filled with about a gallon of water?? Anyways it happened again today and again in church........

But let me set the stage. This morning while driving to church we saw a very unusal sight - it was about 10 degrees outside and we passed a woman walking along the side of the highway and across the road the was something large under a tarp. As we zipped past, we noticed two feet sticking out from under the tarp. I thought it was a cow but Tom said it was definitely horse feet complete with horse shoes. Weird, huh? So we commented that it was going to be quite a feat just moving that animal off the shouder of the road and wondered how it came to be there in the first place, and what they were going to do with the body since the ground is too frozen to dig, etc.... It felt to me like we were in an episode of Northern Exposure.

So we got to church and sat down and when it was time for the sermon the pastor was giving examples of how some creatures are just programmed or wired to do certain things. And believe it or not the first example was a horse and how horses are just wired to run (and there was a photo of a race horse on the screen) and I guess that was the beginning of it for me - I could already feel the laughter welling up inside of me and the pastor went on to say that a horse who couldn't run might as well just fall down and die. At this moment I knew it was going to be one of those laughing moments......not because of a dead horse......but just the sheer absurdity of it! I didn't dare look at Tom but when I heard a little stifled whinny from him, I did look at him and from then on it was all downhill!! It was just the kind of thing that would have garned the *stink eye* and a sharp elbow to the ribs from my mom to one of us or better yet from me to one of my kids at a moment like that. And it was exactly and completely uncontrollable at the moment.

Fortunately we recovered from out fit of laughter quickly and later, on the way home we discovered that the (dead?) horse had been removed from the shoulder of the road.