Not So Long Ago... Sunday

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Not so long ago, when I was 4 or 5 years old, I endured the worst rainstorm of my life...

My family lived way back in the woods, in a place we called "The Holler". There were eight of us kids and I was next to the youngest. When you're poor and live out in the middle of nowhere, you pretty much have to make your own fun. Luckily, there were so many of us kids, that we had enough people to play almost any outside game we wanted. We played a lot of Freeze Tag and Ain't No Bears Out Tonight. But the real fun, or so I thought, was getting to go into the woods.

Until that fateful day, I had never been allowed to go into the woods, because I was "too little". I remember getting mad and stomping my feet, whenever the others told me that I was too little to do something, and yelling, "Y'all just wait 'till y'all get little and I get big! I won't let y'all do nothing either!" Of course that made them all laugh at me, which made me even madder. But that day was different as the bigger kids were going to pick fox grapes and Daddy had told them that they had to let me go.

We walked deep into the woods. So deep that it was almost dark as night in some places. The older kids set about picking grapes. I couldn't pick many as all I could reach were the very low vines and there weren't a lot of those. Suddenly, I felt rain on my arm, then I felt rain on my head, and soon, I was being drenched by an absolute downpour! I was scared to death of thunderstorms and to me, rain was a definite sign of a storm. I started to cry, "Take me home! It's raining!". To my horror, I heard my brother's voice from above my head saying, "It ain't raining! I'ma peeing!". He had been standing on a tree branch, picking grapes, when he got the urge to go. He swears to this day that he didn't know I was down there, but I don't believe him. When I found out I was covered in pee, I cried that much louder, and then they had no choice but to take me home. By the time we reached the house, I swear, there wasn't an inch of my little body that didn't have a mosquito bite on it! I never begged to go into the woods again...

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