Sometimes over the course of time, we have physical hurts, or psychological or hurt feelings. Here are a few things I have thought of as far as hurts through the years. One time, Daddy came in. He had been standing there talking to Ole John, who he rode home with most days. He said Joe just got his leg cut off. We went out back to see what had happened. Bobby Joe had been cutting brush with a hatchet. His tennis shoes, which everybody wore for school, were high tops and were black and white and made of cloth. These shoes had kept him from having a catastrophe when the hatchet bounced off of them.
One Saturday afternoon Mama said who wanted to go to the grocery store with her? We were both barefooted, as kids usually were during summer months. Bobby Joe and I both went to the store with Mama and we just went to pick up one item. Bobby Joe cut his toe real bad on a broken bottle. Needless to say, we started putting on our shoes to go to the store. This was in the pre-lawsuit days so all we had was a cut toe out of the deal.
One thing that happened to me was slamming my finger in the car door. Mama said it was a good thing I slammed it myself. I was taking typing then and it kept me from being a good typist.
Perhaps the worst thing happened when Paul was about 4 years old; he got kicked in the head by a yearling colt. He could have been killed and we probably weren't smart enough to know it. The permanent effect was a scar in the shape of a horseshoe. The best thing that happened out of the deal was that Paul went with me and Bob to the Twin Cities when we bought a car because he needed the individual attention at that time. We stopped in Mora and heard a music arrangement.
On several occasions Bob and the kids hit yellowjacket nests in the ground while mowing at our place in Leggett. The yellowjackets followed them all the way to the house when they ran in. We put a baking soda paste on the stings.
When I took the two-story ladder and hoped to clean the green East Texas mildew off the white siding of the house, I was stung by wasps. I was on the ladder and near the electrical outlet. I took the ladder down and decided that the green could stay on the wall.
A near miss occurred when Bob and I were digging a well at the house in Leggett. It was close to the pond, back of the house. It was deeper than I was tall when it caved in during the night. I had just been in the hole the day before. Some of our tools were lost, but we were safe.
We never know what is next in life, and sometimes that's a good thing.
