In the Pink

People who love me have taken to giving me flamingos.

Not the real, feathery kind, but odd things...the somewhat creepy folk art painting of a moonlit witch flying over a field full of flamingos is probably my favorite.

Several years ago, my friend Bev told me that she'd always wanted a plastic yard flamingo. Bev was born on Christmas Day, and hadn't had much in the way of birthdays as a child...so now birtdays are a VERY big deal for her.

So, at the end of summer sales I bought her a flamingo. Actually, I bought her FIFTY flamingos, one for every year old she was going to be and hid them in my garage.

Christmas eve, my friend Dean and I (more than a friend then, but not now) stole out to her house and stuck all fifty flamingos in the frozen ground in front of her house (not as easy as you'd think in the middle of the night and the cold).

She was awakened the next morning with her partner making a crack about flamingos on the lawn. She figured that I'd come through with her plastic yard flamingo and opted for breakfast instead of looking out in her front yard...and then started getting, as she put it, strange calls from her neighbors.

Once she did look outside, she says she laughed for the rest of the day...and a week later, 49 of those flamingos had mysteriously migrated to MY lawn.

The next month, 48 of them flew back to her house....and then to mine...and back to hers...and finally we decided that maybe they needed to visit another friend...and another friend after that...

Until we'd had a year of fun with them. I'm not sure where they've flown off to now, but I hope someone else is enjoying them as much as we did.

The funny thing, though, is that no one is buying Bev flamingos...they buy them for me. Not that I mind. :D