Gone Fishing

Linda at age 3 - Don't let the sweet smile fool you!

I'm pretty sure she talked me into it.  Linda, that is... my younger sister... the daredevil... the one with all the crazy ideas of things to do.  For instance, she's the one who convinced me that it would be really fun to climb up the ladder that some inattentive adult had left propped against the side of our house.  Climb, we did, until we reached the roof just above the kitchen.  And there we sat; a six-year-old and a five-year-old, just sitting on top of the house.

I don't know if it was because we were afraid to climb back down (I doubt if that were the case, because I don't recall anything that Linda was ever afraid of) or if it was simply a matter of, "Well, now that we're here, what do we do?"  Either way, we just sat there like two turtles on a log until we heard the back screen door slam shut and Mother step into the back yard calling our names.  Now what?

We knew we didn't have time to climb down the ladder and make it all the way to the ground before Mother rounded the corner from the back and came down the side of the house where the ladder was... unless she went in the opposite direction, to the other side of the house.  Which way would she go?  Did we risk it?  Should we wait until we could tell what direction she was taking?  We actually considered just quietly sitting there in hopes that she would go back inside.  We discussed this in whispers, because Mother had the hearing of some sort of superhero.  I guess we thought she would get tired of looking and give up, then forget about the fact that she couldn't find us and didn't know where we were.  Children ages six and under have strange thought processes.

"Jaaannet!  Liiindaaaa!" she kept calling.  "Where are you?"  Finally, I could stand it no longer.  "Up here," I replied in a pitifully, faint voice.  I couldn't make eye contact with Linda because I knew with my betrayal she would want to shove me right over the edge of the roof.  What seemed like an eternity passed between my revelation of our location and Mother's arrival at the foot of the ladder.  With every step she took I tried to think of ways out of the predicament; some way to avoid what I knew was coming.  Nothing worthwhile came to mind.  I'll never forget the look on her face, nor the sound of her voice as she asked, "What are you doing up there?"  She really didn't want to know... I could tell.  She really meant, "We're all going inside and I'm getting the flyswatter," which is exactly what happened.

Linda - just over 1 year old

This idea, which once again I'm certain was Linda's, didn't get our backsides blistered like that ladder one did; but I don't think Mother was much happier with it.  We went fishing.  We hadn't planned on going fishing.  We weren't equipped to go fishing.  We weren't old enough to go fishing on our own.  As a matter of fact, I think this may have been the same summer as the adventure on the roof... the summer I was just about to turn seven and Linda was five, and we had just been given permission to go walking through the pasture.

As an adult, when I had the opportunity to rear my small children in the same little white frame house where I spent my early childhood, I can recall looking out behind the house into that pasture and thinking, "Had Mother lost her mind when she let us wander out unattended in that grassy, snaky field?"  But, apparently she had found it harmless enough to let us take off on our own and wander across a five-acre pasture in search of who-knows-what.  I'm sure we didn't even know what our intentions were as we started on our journey... just getting out of the house.  In any case, when I was with Linda, some opportunity for mischief always seemed to present itself.


In all fairness, I can't remember exactly who had the idea.  It was probably whoever spotted the "pond" first.  The "pond," as we called it, was nothing more than a very small outcropping of the slough that ran beside our house and alongside the pasture.  Most of the slough was hidden by the thicket, brush and willows that grew along its banks.  And during most summers, there was so little rainfall that there was barely any water in it at all.  But the "pond" jutted out away from the rest of the slough and into a part of the pasture.  When Daddy had some of his cows in the pasture, this was one of the places they would gather for a drink.  There were no cattle in the pasture on the day of our excursion.  Even if there had been, I believe they would have been smart enough not to drink out of the "pond" that day.  It was full of fish... dead fish.

Linda and I were amazed at the number of fish we saw.  We really had never thought much about fish living in the slough.  Oh, there was that one summer when we went fishing in the slough with MaMaw and the fishing poles she had made for us.  Each of us had a long, thin stick, with a piece of string attached to the thinner end, and a diaper pin attached to the other end of the string.  For anyone young enough not to have seen a diaper pin, these are like safety pins on steroids... at least an inch-and-a-half long.  We watched MaMaw carefully bait our diaper pin hooks with fat, squirming night-crawler worms that she had dug from her yard near her "scraps pile" as she called it.  Today we know of such things as compost piles.  We sat on the dirt near the edge of the water and dipped our impaled earthworms below the surface of the water.  I actually caught a little fish!  Probably a bream.  Fish must be pretty stupid.

Well, the sight of these fish got us thinking.  We may have already been in the doghouse about some previous misdeed and were trying to come up with a way to gain Mother's favor again.  This would be the perfect solution.  We would bring her some fish that she could cook for supper for all of us.  Daddy didn't hunt or fish, so we rarely had anything like fish or game to eat.  This would be such a treat!  She would be so excited!  We were on a roll!

Me, on the left, and Linda, on the right - just about the ages of the Fishing Trip

Not quite certain of how to approach the situation, we looked around until each of us found sticks long enough that would allow us to reach out into the water and drag a fish back to the bank.  When we retrieved the fish at the edge of the water, we neatly placed them in a pile while we went back for more.  We didn't know how many fish it took to feed a family of four, but we weren't going home short-handed.  When we had dragged in all we could reach from our gathering spot on the bank, we just couldn't stop ourselves.  There were still so many fish left out there.  So we waded, ever so slightly, into the edge of the pond; the green, algae-covered water just covering the tops of our shoes.  When we had reached all we could from that point, we waded a little farther... ankle deep now.


I can't recall just how far out we went, and how high up our bony little legs that water reached, but at some point we felt like we had enough for what we had heard referred to as "a mess" of fish for supper.  We had no idea how appropriate the phrase "mess" was for our situation.

Since we hadn't planned on a fishing excursion before leaving the house that day, we hadn't brought anything with us in which to carry our catch.  I recalled how MaMaw would take her apron, or the front part of her long shirttail and pull the bottom of it upward to form some sort of kangaroo-type pouch in which to carry tomatoes and peas from the vegetable garden.  I thought this would be a perfect solution for transporting our gift to Mother.  After several unsuccessful tries due to lack of years of practice and a shirttail that was entirely too short, we settled on gathering all we could in our arms and carrying them bear-hug style.

When we reached the back door, we decided on the surprise tactic.  We would neatly place the fish in rows across the back steps, then go inside and call Mother out to see what we had brought for her.  When our seafood display was complete to our satisfaction, we carefully stepped across the rows of slimy, green-tinted and now fly-covered corpses, entered through the back door, passing through the back porch and into the rear entrance of the hall.  We didn't get far before she met us, with both of her hands covering her mouth and nose.  We were trying to lead her to the back door to see our surprise, but we couldn't get her to listen.  She was in a real hurry.  She removed one hand from her face, trying desperately to cover both her nose and mouth with the other while she took her free hand and quickly steered us back to the back door... all the while making some odd, almost choking-like sounds in her throat.  I was afraid something terrible had happened, and was hoping that our surprise would take her mind off whatever had her so upset.

"Look, we brought you fish!  You can cook them for supper!  Surprise!" we chimed in unison.  Still, Mother hasn't spoken a distinguishable word.  Only those odd sounds coming from the depths of her throat as she herded us toward the water faucet on the side of the pump house and began to pull our clothes off of us.  Then she finally says something we can understand.  "Can't you smell that?!" she asks us.  "Smell what?" we replied, as she turned her face away from us and the stench of rotted fish, trying desperately to catch a whiff of fresh air to fill her lungs.

We were stripped to our undies in the backyard, which by the way was most humiliating, and showered at a distance by the water from the garden hose in an effort to blast some of the green slime from our smelly little bodies.  The clothes were thrown across the clothesline in the back yard, and repeatedly washed down with the same garden hose.  The smell could never be removed, and the clothes had to be burned in one of the burn barrels that sat in the back corner of the back yard.  I'm not sure what became of the fish.  We weren't allowed to handle them any further.  I'm pretty sure that Mother didn't touch them, either.  That was probably one more mess we made that Daddy was faced with taking care of when he got home at the end of the day.

We didn't have fish for supper that night.  I really can't recall when we had fish again, unless we had it at a restaurant.  Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure Mother still orders chicken anytime we go out for fish or seafood.