I was talking to a friend the other day about surviving our childhood.
I don't know about anyone else but I barely made it out alive.
I had broken bones and near drownings more than once.
Bee, hornet, and yellow jacket stings, tick bites, poison ivy, I think the only poisonous thing that I avoided was snakes and still saw plenty of them.
In the daylight hours I was fearless and fierce.
We weren't never ever sick, I have to think that it had something to do with what we ate.
Oh and did we eat well.
Muscadines, plums, blackberries, peaches, apples, we plucked these straight from the trees and ate them as we walked from place to place. However our favorite delicacy was Watermelon.
I was a huge fan of watermelon back then and that is how the events of this story took place.
My father and Mother both come from large families, who in turn created large families of their own.
My father had 26 siblings, My mother was one of 13.
Add in the factor of the town being more of a village and as you can imagine most of my playmates and neighbors were my relations.
Hence whenever I "borrowed" watermelons from Mr. "Bully" Coleman's 100 acre watermelon patch I didn't feel as though I was doing anything wrong.
My cousin Mark and I would walk down into the middle of the "Wada melon Paych" and literally lay in the sun eating just the hearts of the melons.
Being full was no excuse to stop eating them.
Oh no.
We would eat, and eat, and eat some more until nausea kept us from putting one more of the tender sweet morsels into our mouth.
On one of these occasions Mark and I were accompanied by another cousin although at the moment I can't remember which of the 5 billion or so he was.
The road had just recently been paved after a couple of centuries of being hardened red clay.
The day started like any other.
Mark, the anonymous cousin and I tiptoed to the center of the field. As usual we gorged on Watermelon hearts until we felt ill, traded lies, and tried to appear grown by out cussing one another.
We had been cursing up a blue streak when an odd sound silenced us and made us pay close attention.
"Chick, chick, chick, chick,"
Our juvenile eyes locked and bounced from person to person.
"What that is?"
Mark asked.
At precisely that moment One of Cousin Bully's blue tick hounds peeked his long forlorn looking head onto the row where we were.
The noise had been his paws against the pavement.
To our young minds it seemed as if he were checking us out and memorizing who we were.
After looking each of us in our eyes, the dog nodded his over sized skull once.
It's floppy ears gave a slight bounce, It looked as if it had made a firm decision.
Myself and my fellow delinquents watched the nod in slow motion. Somehow we knew that the dog was going to snitch us out.
As the "Chick, chick,chick chick" of the blue tick paws receded the three of us ran for our lives.
Why we thought the dog could tell on us I don't know, but somehow we knew he was a snitch.
