When you catch your husband with his hand in your gnome’s butt …

Sweetums is never one to let a contentious election keep him down. Perhaps it’s a good thing that he provided a much-needed distraction Tuesday night as the country focused on poor ol’ Alabama. (And for the record, World, I love this state and its wonderful people unconditionally).

Any-hoo, back to Sweetums and his distraction. I was coming from the living room to greet him in the kitchen as he came home from work when I spied an astonishing tableau before me: Sweetums had a tissue in his hand and he was wedging it (the tissue, not his hand … I think) into the butt-crack of our small concrete garden gnome. He could easily access the crack because it’s a Mooning Garden Gnome, y’all (I’ll wait while you express shock that we have one of these … yeah, that oughta be long enough). His usual spot is on the front porch were he can moon delivery persons and woodland creatures who happen past.

I stopped short when I saw Sweetums and wondered, as you might assume, why he’d brought the Mooning Gnome inside and why, for the love of chocolate gravy, he was wiping Gnomey’s butt with a tissue.

“I’m wiping off the scuff mark,” Sweetums explained. It’s true that Mooning Gnome had at some point acquired a smudge on his right cheek. We’d wondered how it got there – had a delivery person kicked it, or perhaps one of the many rabbits in our yard nibbled it? – but we’d never felt the need to actually clean the gnome’s butt.

Turns out, Sweetums had a motive. After wiping Gnomey’s hiney, Sweetums stuck his “I Voted” sticker to Gnomey’s cheek. Yes, he had gone to all this trouble just to make a unique, by which I mean utterly weird, “I Voted” photo. And for the curious, last year the sticker was on the Bigfoot statue. I’ll wait while you express shoc… never mind.