Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Labor Day, 2009
A friend of mine was supposed to come over today to make biscotti with me. We both love biscotti and have been going to make it all this week-end but something or other got in the way each day.
She likes to use the cool mornings to work in her yard, preparing for winter. She loves to have an excuse to be out among her extensive flowerbeds, a passion I do not share.
When it became noon and I had still not heard from her, I called and left her a message to call me when she came in from the yard. A few minutes later she returned my call and what she had to say brought to mind another story from my childhood.
She had been in an area between her garage and the neighbor’s garage, cutting down her peonies when she encountered a ground nest yellow jackets. She was badly stung, as were the 3 little girls playing in the neighbor’s yard. Several of the horrible little beasts even clung to her as she escaped into her house. They are now trapped between the screen and window in her kitchen.
I don’t care for gardening / yard work because I have such a phobia about getting stung. And here is why:
One day when I was about 8 years old, Mom and I were visiting my Aunt Jenny’s house along with my Aunt Zora and Aunt Verna, a sister-in-law. There were about 6 of us cousins playing around the house. The oldest cousin was “Pingo”, about 10 years old, down to the youngest, my cousin Bobby about 4 years old, to be shooed outside. Aunt Jenny told us to go up to Grandma’s house, two doors up the lane, to see the new piglets in Grandma’s neighbor’s yard. The top of Grandma’s woodpile provided a perfect viewing over the fence into the pigpen next door.
Of course, we all made a mad dash for Grandma’s yard, pushing and shoving to gain the highest point on the woodpile for the best vantage point. Pingo’s brother, Mike, being the tallest and fastest of us, got the prime spot, with the rest of us crowding around him. Pingo spotted a wooden box that had been tossed onto the woodpile to be used for kindling and decided it would give her the extra boost she needed to see over the fence. It did for a short moment. But as Pingo stepped down and I tried to step up, we turned the box over, disturbing a nest of yellow jackets beneath the box.
Screaming, crying, pushing and running we all clamored off of the woodpile in a race to escape the horrible stings. Pingo, deliberately walking stiffly, yelled to the rest of us not to run, not to run, as the yellow jackets would only get more riled up. She may have been right but none of us were listening.
Four of us kids reached Aunt Jenny’s house first, trailing yellow jackets into the kitchen. Our four mothers added their screams to the general chaos. Stoic Pingo, holding Bobby’s hand, brought up the rear of our mob. Both of them were liberally covered in stings and angry yellow jackets. Poor Bobby and Pingo were stung the worst – Pingo from not running, and Bobby because his little 4 year old legs just couldn’t run fast enough.
The girls were promptly dumped into a bathtub of cool water with baking soda added while the boys were washed at the kitchen sink and their wounds plastered with a baking soda paste. Our clothes were heaped into a paper bag with the top securely folded down until the clothes could be taken out to the wash line and the yellow jackets shaken out of them.
A dish of ice cream was our medicine that day, with lots of careful sympathetic hugs from our mothers. However, to this day, I’ll shriek whenever an insect of any type flies in my direction, even if it isn’t a yellow jacket.
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1 comment:
I love that you are doing the family history research!
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