Forking

Forking: Sticking white plastic forks in your friends' lawn for them to discover later.

A gal was telling Mom and me this story last night. I knew partway through that I had to start capturing details so I could repeat them here. Let's see if I can decypher my napkin notes... She asked that I not use her name, so I'll just call her Edgar.

I had never heard of forking before. I was familiar with teepeeing. (In fact, I'd just seen toilet paper in someone's graceful diodar tree the day before while out geocaching. The storyteller noted how teepeeing was now illegal in our area. Forking, apparently, wasn't. Yet?)

Edgar and her friend (also named Edgar) went late night to the home of friends from church and started sticking plastic forks in their lawn. They had covered half the lawn when they ran out of forks or the neighbor showed up with a flashlight--I forget if I'm mixing separate forking stories--but regardless, they left with half the lawn forked.

The next morning, the residents pulled out of their garage, went off to work or wherever, and completely missed the lawn decoration.

The gardening crew arrived. They saw a lawn with forks in it. Half the lawn. Why had the residents done that? What were they supposed to understand? Well, they just mowed the part of the lawn that had no forks.

The residents returned home later. They saw a lawn with forks in it. The part that had no forks had been nicely mown. The part with forks had not been mown. Why had the gardeners mowed part of the lawn, left part of the lawn unmown, and placed forks in the lawn? Well, the gardeners were not there for the residents to ask. But the gardeners would be back in a week. So, the residents left the forks in their lawn.

Edgar, who I'll call Samantha, ended up seeing these people and got to hear all of these details. Samantha explained that they'd been forked. "Been forked?" They were like me. They only knew about teepeeing.

"Aha!" They thought they knew who had been up to no good. So, they went and forked the lawn of friends of theirs from church, one of whom is an elder.

And that's where the story stands as of this posting.

Samantha told me she put 2000 forks in someone else's lawn.

"Have you ever Saran-wrapped a car?" she asked.