Learning A Valuable Lesson!

The part of Louisiana I grew up in rarely ever had snow. Maybe it snowed twice in my twenty plus years there. But the times it did were magical for us kids. I remember once when I was a young teenager we had perhaps the most snow ever with two or three inches accumulated. Talk about walking in a winter wonderland!

We didn’t have winter clothes, therefore, just about everything we had was soaked as we would go out and play and come in and change. We had eaten enough snow ice cream to make us all sick but we were having a ball. Granny was hollering about us all coming down with some bad ailment if we continued to stay outside, but this was one of those once in a lifetime opportunities and we intended to make the best of it.

We boys, of course, lived to torment girls. My sisters had some friends over that day and it gave us new targets for snowballs. I knew all of the girls there except one who was a new friend and my sister told me it would be advisable for me not to mess with her because she was a rodeo girl. What a laugh! A rodeo girl? Don’t mess with Ann because she might get angry? That was like saying sick em to a dog.

This warning sent me into special operations as I sought to make a champion snowball with Ann’s name on it. Who ever heard of any boy being worried about a rodeo girl? I didn’t even know there were any rodeo girls anywhere around where we lived. Having made me a huge wet snowball I slipped around the house and then to the back porch where they were all sitting. I had noticed that this Ann person was pretty stocky and she was wearing boots but after all, she was a girl, and girl’s typically scream and fret but that was about it.

I came to the corner of the house and with my best Dixie League fast ball I let the snow ball fly and it caught its target right in the face. A direct hit! Wow! What a shot! But Ann didn’t whimper and scream, she bolted up off that porch and started towards me. There was something about the way she moved that made me aware that I should leave the premises, so I turned and ran about as fast as I could in the snow. I could hear her breathing. She was still coming.

Ann caught up with me down in the grove of pine trees in a lot beside our house. She brought me down like I was a steer and having pinned me in the snow she began to teach me some rodeo techniques. She was laughing as she smothered me in the snow. She flipped me over and stuck my face into the snow and began squashing it and rubbing my nose in it. I couldn’t catch by breath and I couldn’t get up. This was not like anything I had experienced before.

Finally, she stood up with one foot on me and let out a yell. Everyone had come down to observe my humiliating predicament and they all stood there laughing, everyone that is, except me. I was still trying to catch my breath. I learned at least one lesson that day. No, it wasn’t anything about the feminist movement or equal rights. It simply came down to this, ‘Don’t mess with Ann because she is a rodeo girl!” More later……………..