So one day I get a call from a friend. Her voice breathless, all brimming with enthusiasm, she blurts out, "Hey, do you want to go skydiving? You're the only person I know that would go with me."

This was my reply to that little invite.

"Letmethinkaboutthatno."

My friend Kelly does things like skydiving. She can pull a car's engine, reroof a house, and haul fifty pound bags of feed. She is also a little bitty thing with these teeny tiny feet. Really small feet - the 'I need to go to the kid's shoe section of the store and I hope to god they have more than those stupid sneakers with the light in the heel that flashes every time you take a step' kind of small feet.

But the first thing you notice about Kelly is that she doesn't seem like the dare-devil rough and tumble type.

She seems nice.

In fact, the phrase that would most likely spring into your mind is -

"Why, she's nice as pie."

Okay, I have to stop here for a moment and wonder just where does that saying come from? I can understand someone being described 'as nice as a selfless nun who works with amputee kittens' or 'nice as a billionaire that just gave me a wheelbarrow of cash for no reason what- so- ever'. But nice as pie?

Whatever.

Sure. Kelly seems all nice and all and you'd never dream that she'd be the type to leap out of airplanes or get grease under her fingernails. You'd also never ever guess that Kelly is also -

a stone cold killer.

A duck and chicken killer to be precise.

When she told me that she was raising her own meat I had to ask exactly how do her feathered friends go from their fowl lives to being dinner. Kelly ducks her head (sorry) and grinds the toe of her itsy bitsy shoe into the ground. "Oh, well, you see...."

And she goes on to tell me that she waits until one of her flock totally pisses her off. The offending bird could be pecking on a weaker one or simply have an attitude that leaves something to be desired. It has now become quite a different day from the happy, sunny morning on the farm.

It has become a day of death.

Kelly lays low, her assassin's tool hidden behind her back. Slowly, with stealth and cunning she creeps up behind her prey. All sound stops.

And then she cuts off their head with a pair of garden loppers.

Geez lou-eez, I prune my camillias with garden loppers. You can buy them in the home and garden department along with slug bait and those horrible satanic- faced yard gnomes. What would cause a person to look at a pair of loppers and think, 'ya know, I bet these would do a jim-dandy job of separating an animal's head from their body'?

But that's Kelly for you. She's not afraid of a couple thousand feet of clear blue sky between her and the ground or a headless future meal running around her lawn.

Because - she is a dare-devil.

As far as how I live my life, I will never jump out of an airplane that is still operating. I am not mechanical one bit and can't bring myself to squish a spider. But I am a dare-devil.

I'm an artist. I'm a writer. I don't have a 'real job' to fall back on. This is it, baby. When bills are due and assignments are scarce this is what working without a net is really about.

But without the death and blood part.

So kudos to you, Kelly my wild friend.

And kudos to me as I attempt to navigate that razor's edge one more day.