A burr haircut, a pair of underwear (and yes, it was briefs) and some cut-off blue jeans were all the clothes I needed as a kid. My summers were spent outside.

We could wake up in the morning and hit the great outdoors until after dark and never stop. Stopping to eat was a hard thing to do, and we would always put off going to the bathroom ’till the last moment. Have you ever seen a little kid who is having so much fun they won’t stop long enough to go to the bathroom? They wind up crossing their legs and jumping up and down in misery fearing they may miss a moment’s fun.

Summertime for me was a time of great events. First of all, it was the only time we didn’t have to get dressed every morning for school. As a boy I would go around without my shirt because shirts were too cumbersome. I also felt that being without a shirt would toughen my skin so when I would fight the wild animals around my home like Tarzan did, the scratches wouldn’t hurt as much.

Being barefooted made the soles of my feet feel like leather by summer’s end and the old mulberry tree in our yard gave way to permanent dye stains on our feet for several weeks. Eventually the sticker burrs that had embedded themselves into our soles would get red and sore, so Mama would get out the trusty needle and tweezers.

My dad would use the end of his pocketknife to help us dig stickers and Mom would always get mad. She always complained about Daddy’s pocketknife. He would use it for all sorts of things, from digging stickers out of our feet to cleaning fish, fixing calves, splicing wire, to cutting a slice of cheese. Mama would fuss at him telling him to get that dirty knife off of her food!

“It ain’t no tell’n where you had that thing,” she would say.

My feet carried me places I should have never gone. There is a very faint spot in my memory of the time my feet carried me to an old pond way on the backside of our property. Our land was situated on a 12-acre tract. Four acres belonged to my parents, four acres to Aunt Merle and the other four to Aunt Florence. Aunt Florence’s land had an old pond on it.

For whatever reason, I had snuck off from the house and my dog and I went down to this pond. Now, before any of you start asking where my mother was in all this, let me make some things perfectly clear.

When I was growing up here in Hufsmith our road was still a dirt road. Hufsmith Road and Stuebner Airline were both dirt and the only people who drove down our road were family or very close friends. I can still remember jumping up and running to the window when we heard a car just to see who it was. Times were different then and when we played outside the fears and concerns of the safety of the children were lessened by the fewer evils of life at that time.

My mom heard the dog barking from the open windows of our un-air conditioned house and she came out to investigate. To her panic and shock she found me about a hundred yards away from the house butt-naked wading in this pond. The dog knew I had gone somewhere I shouldn’t have gone, and the dog was in a panic too, barking and running along the bank of the pond.

When my Mama found me, she grabbed up my clothes and me and held me very tight in her arms hugging me and crying, then she spanked me and hugged me and cried some more. Then she spanked me and hugged me and cried some more and, as far as I know, I got a small series of hugs and spankings all the way back the house.

It has just recently came to my attention that one of the things I did not know at the time was my mom was in the midst of a migraine headache during all this. They used to put her down for several hours at a time and through all this, she had to go find me way off in the pasture somewhere!

Well, I know several good things came from this story. Number one, I lived to tell about it and number two, I learned to never go swimming buck-naked again. If I had kept my clothes on, the spanking wouldn’t have stung so much!

I remain,

Clifford

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