I Married the Moose

If you were following along with me on social media this week, you know that we finally hung up our moose head in our “new” home.  Thirteen months is an appropriate amount of time to wait to decorate your home when you move in…right?

If you live outside of rural Idaho, “hung up our moose head” is not a euphemism for anything.  We actually have the head of a dead moose hanging up on our wall.

Poor Morton (yes, he has a name) has been stuck under a sheet since last spring when we put our Illinois home on the market.  Because, trust me, our realtor didn’t need to tell us that no one would buy a house in the suburbs of Chicago with a dead moose hanging in it.

To answer the normal questions…yes, my husband shot it.  Yes, it’s from Idaho.  Yes, he ate it.

You can only get one bull moose in Idaho in a lifetime, and this is his.

If you are anti-guns, anti-hunting, or vegan, this is all so offensive to you, and for that I’m so sorry.  I’ve been there.  When I met my husband, I was anti-guns and anti-hunting (yet, curiously okay with eating meat).

We had many talks on these topics when we first started dating.  And believe me, there was plenty of time to talk.  Our entire dating relationship existed when he lived in Boise and I lived in Chicago.  (We had never even lived in the same state when he proposed…gosh, that sounds so irresponsible when I think about it now.)  Anyways, we had a lot of time to talk.

He loved all things guns and hunting and had a moose head hanging on his apartment wall.

And I thought there should never be any guns in the world ever, and all animals should just frolic about until they magically “poofed” out of existence one day.

The problem was…I was so head-over-heels in love with him.  I was a giddy schoolgirl, swept off her feet, who wanted to schedule the wedding tomorrow.  If I wanted to marry him, I had to marry the moose too, because this was his thing.  Was this a deal breaker?

If I loved him, I had to love all of him – moose included.

So right before our wedding, over a decade ago, we hauled poor Morton 1,700 miles across the country on I-80 from Boise to Chicago.  He stared at us from the back seat the whole way.

Then just last year, we loaded Morton up in the back seat again to drive 1,500 miles in the opposite direction back to Idaho.

And now here he is, staring at us every day…again.  My husband still loves him, and I’m still mildly disturbed by him.

But here’s the thing about this exquisite display of my husband’s manhood…it’s a constant physical reminder that when you marry someone, you marry all of them.  To this day, when I look at that dead moose, I think “I can’t believe I have a moose hanging in my house…I love my husband so much.”

I’m reminded that my husband was a person well before I ever met him.  And I fell in love with that person.  It would be a waste of time, and our marriage, to constantly try and stop him from being who he already was.

So come September, when whatever season starts that he has a tag or a stamp for (I have no idea…I can’t keep track of these things) and he wakes me up at 4:30 in the morning while he’s suiting up in full camo, I’ll think:

I married the moose.

Look at those kids…before there were babies to be had and facial hair to be grown. (His facial hair…not mine….)