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| This was my brother Gene, a year or two younger in this photo, who made me a stick and vegetation village. |
With little
to stimulate our Mom's creative mind, she often escaped to the great outdoors
to rid herself from the boredom of hot sweltering summer days in the 1940s and
1950s. Those were days before air conditioning. One summer
afternoon in Sikeston my brother Gene and I went fishing with our mother out to
one of the LRDD[1]
ditches on the outskirts of town. Our mother loved to fish. Gene
and I neither one liked to fish and were not fond of tagging along with our
mother to one of her favorite fishing places. Back then, there were no iPads, cell phones, or the like to entertain us while waiting for her to decide
to return home.
We found a
shady area along the side of the ditch and settled in for the long wait for our
mother to conclude her fishing endeavor. Like our mother, Gene was a
creative person too and envisioned concepts others could not see. He
often drew cars and buildings when nothing was going on at the time. That
day, Gene decided to play big brother and entertain me. He started to
build a small village out of the sticks and vegetation found in the shaded
area. I helped by finding just the right size sticks for his
village. After an hour or so he built an impressive small village of
seven or eight buildings, along with a road dug into the sand between the buildings.
He was pleased with his creation, and I was happy to have him along as company
for the outing.
Before
long, our mother decided the fish were not taking her bait that day, and it was
time to go home. A few hours after returning home, Gene began to itch.
Once he started scratching his hands and arms, large red, watery, whelps began
to surface. My Mother looked at his itching body and said, “Well Gene,
you have a bad case of poison ivy. What were you two doing while I was
fishing?” He told her that we made a few buildings and a small village
out of the sticks and vegetation in the area. He explained it was the
only shaded area we could find to wait on her. He could not understand
why I did not have poison ivy too. Our Mother explained, “Sticks most
likely were not covered in the ivy vine. Therefore, your sister’s
body didn’t touch the poison oil that causing the poison ivy rash.” Poor
Gene suffered from the results of that fun afternoon for about ten days.
He had large weeping whelps on his skin that about drove him crazy.
I remember
that the treatments our Father used on Gene to rid him of the poison ivy was
about as bad as the ailment itself. Dad put some paste on him named “Blue
Stone” and it burned Gene so bad that he ran outside, then ran in circles in
the back yard. As a little sister, I
felt bad that Gene got the itchy rash because he was entertaining me; and that
the Blue Stone treatment was painful. However,
I was sure glad I didn’t get it. Since that day, I am careful when I
venture into mother nature. I look carefully for the dreadful poison ivy
vine and avoid it.
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