Ohio Ramblings

I grew up in Ohio. Ohio is very different than Texas. You don't really get Spring there good until May.

I was born in the house I grew up in. My parents still live there. I lived out in the country off a gravel road (it did get blacktop sometime between when I left home and when I visited last year.) On the other side of the gravel road was a field. The neighbors down the street owned it and farmed it. Some years it would be corn, other years soy beans and less frequently tobacco. I will always remember the revenuers coming and cutting down some of the tobacco when the farmers planted more than their tobacco base allowed. I will also remember the smell of the tobacco when they would cut it and the smell that was everywhere when they hung it in the barns to dry before selling it. Most of all I remember the giant green tobacco worms that would end up in the yard at some point. They were about as big as my finger and bright green. When you squished them the guts where yellow and you always squish them if you live in tobacco country.

On the other side of the field, there was a creek (or a crick for you folks from Ohio.) I used to go down there in the spring and hunt for wildflowers on the banks and dig them up and drag them home to transplant into our yard for my mother. I found dogtooth violets and virginia bluebells and spring beauties and buttercups along with trillium, mayapples and a whole bunch more I don't remember now .

I was never allowed to swim in the creek because my mother was afraid I would drown. Even after I was 16 years old and a lifeguard she wouldn't let me get into that creek. I was allowed to go wading from about the age of 8 (with my old sneakers on of course so my feet didn't get cut on broken glass.) In the creek you could always find tadpoles and minnows in the spring and crawdad's. I used to sneak and take my shoes off when I was pretty sure my mother wouldn't catch me and I remember hating the feeling of the crawdad's scurrying across my bare feet. It was almost enough to make me put shoes back on.

One time, I found a wounded bird. It was a starling. I, of course brought it home. I wanted to be Ellie Mae Clampett when I grew up back then. My mother let me keep the bird for a while and we named it George of the Jungle because it would always try to fly and would end up flying directly into the trunk of a tree. The day it quit doing that is the day it flew alway. We had it for about 2 weeks. I would feed it canned catfood for lack of something better. (I remember trying to dig up worms for it but wasn't getting very many.) At any rate, it would follow me around the yard chirping to be fed that catfood. It must have been a pretty funny site.