Repost for My Niece

Actually this was a combination of one or more happenings, but it was to fit a "prompt" on a writing blog,,and a repost...I don't think my niece (this is her mom,,lol ) has read this and she asked if I had written any stories lately..


"Street, where I grew up"


I love the street where I grew up. Now that might be an overstatement, but I do definitely hold a lot of fondness for the unnamed oil top road that lead out to the main highway.

Well, I guess it had a name but it was always called “First street to the left after you pass Ross’s Affiliated Food Store”, Our house sat almost directly across the street from Grannie and Paw’s house. Both houses are gone now. At least from there. Grannie and Paw’s house now sits in a pasture ten miles toward town. Back to where they moved it from in the first or was it the second place. Anyhow, Daddy’s house was moved thirty miles south to sit next door to one of my sister’s house (the one in this story,,no, sister not the house, well the house too,,just read on). Everyone should rest easy because the street is still there. I saw it just this last Sunday.

I rode over that way intentionally to take a picture for a story that I wrote. I took the picture but decided to not use it for that story, so I will use it for this story. I jump around, a lot, kind of like Grannie and Paw’s house.

Me and my younger sister, (she is still older than me), we stayed into stuff all the time. You remember me telling you about the main highway. Well, we couldn’t ride our J.C. Higgins, Sears Roebuck, store bought bicycles on the main highway, but that was where the filling station was that sold snow cones,- if he ever had ice. There ain’t no need to fill you in on the deciding part of whether or whethern’t we were going. I guess you can say the first leg of the trip was uneventful.

The old codger had a way of intimidating us kids when we ordered our snow cones If you asked for extra syrup, he would stop pouring right then and say, “hee’uh, that’s enough”, and if you didn’t say anything, he liable to just stop anyhow. I can’t remember what she got but I got the coconut. Bright blue. Syrup and ice running down my chin and forearm. Dripping off my elbow onto the sizzling hot oil dirt in front of the old filling station.

Have you ever tried to ride a bicycle while holding onto and eating a snow cone? A bright blue, coconut snow cone? Well she was better at it than I was. I was able to catch up to her at the hill right before you had to turn left, just past Ross’s Affiliated Food Store. It was always a known fact that to get back to, or get to anywhere on a bicycle, there is a race. I had a plan. I was not going to be outsmarted or out bicycled.

I kept a piece of a cane pole stuck behind and through my seat. This was to protect me from dogs. I steadied my left hand, holding half of the bright blue coconut snow cone, on the left handlebar. With my right hand, I reached back and snatched my dog stick from its perch. With one quick motion I won the bicycle battle, but lost the bicycle war. In my mind, it would just slow her down enough so that I could zoom on ahead and have bragging rights to arriving home first. It DID slow her down. My aim was perfect. The cane pole slide between the two spokes just about where the valve stem was. The wheel came around and the cane pole locked against the front wheel support fork.

Here it gets a little fuzzy. From later examination, the fork proved a lot stronger than the spokes. The fork held. Half the spokes didn’t. They vanished. Ass over tea kettle just don’t quiet describe the following event. Luckily the grass at the edge of the street was pretty tall. The dust had not even settled when she jumped up. She was wearing her snow cone mixed with a sundry of other green vegetation. How I held onto that Blue coconut snow cone I can’t even begin to guess, but she gingerly took it from my left hand and soon I was wearing THAT blue snow cone. We didn’t even try to make up a story to tell when we got home. It was our butts! – AAA-ginnn..

Epilogue: This episode was minor. Someday I will tell you about how I had to let her shoot me in the butt with my own BB gun.