first time I witnessed the public panic over some possible cold temperatures, my response was something like… You see, we had lived in the Great Snowy Upper Midwest, where the wind chill plunged to 40 or 50 below zero, and caused the trees to crack open. For the 15 years before that, we had lived in the Great Snowy Northeast, where one year it snowed clear into the first week in June. I had called my mother on the phone to cry about it, since I’d planted flowers like a dummy, thinking that the snow was over for the year. It wasn’t.
Check on your neighbors, don’t go outside, what nonsense was this? The cold came and went and left one gazillionth of a millimeter layer of fragile, delicate ice coating on the ever-present wet spots on the sidewalks and streets. You could have coughed on it and it would have melted, if that paints a better picture.
Perhaps a dozen toxic snowflakes had been sighted by the ever vigilant news crews.
School was delayed for an hour until the dangerous ice melted. I drove my boys to school and watched them mingle with the other kids on the sidewalk, who were all shivering and shaking, bundled in layers of jackets, coats, hats, mittens, scarves, the whole schmeer. My guys wore only the school uniform, which consisted of long pants and a short sleeved polo shirt.
Mothers anxiously escorted the smaller children to safety in case they were Overcome With Cold, or had to possibly walk by some ice that hadn’t fully melted. My boys got a lot of stares, as did I, clad only in a short sleeved t-shirt and jeans. The temperature gauge on my car read 52. I ignored the stares and drove home. About 30 minutes later, I received a phone call from a very nice, but very concerned elementary school principal.
“Surely,” she said, “you realize the necessity of dressing young children appropriately for the winters here?” She had received several calls from mothers who had witnessed my boys entering the school… on morning, of mornings, during this dreadful cold spell, I agreed they had no coats on, which she could not quite understand. “It’s winter,” she kept repeating, “It’s winter out there.”
“For it’s winter,” I kept answering. “For us transplanted Northerners, this is a summer night. My kids don’t even put a sweatshirt on until it’s about 30 degrees. In their last school, the teachers didn’t even let the kids inside to play during recess until the temperatures dropped below zero. Not 32… zero.”
school,” she insisted, “No teacher or principal would be so cruel to a child.”
“Oh, we’re very used to the cold,” I re-assured the poor woman, but I took pity on her and made the boys wear sweaters to school in the mornings until the Louisiana winter ended in February.
HANDY HINTS ON OTHER STUFF
Fire ants are evil, vicious insects straight from the Bowels of Hell. Their sting is 20 times stronger than a wasps, and burns like a fire under your skin. There is no cure, and the pain lasts for weeks. These ants are tiny, black, and mean. Those little sandy mounds you will see on the ground all over down South? They are nests. Alligators can and do bite you and don’t mind eating you for lunch, either. Please do not get suckered in by the weirdo’s on Discovery or Nature channels on TV, who state that these creatures are misunderstood or harmless. Alligators only do two things: they either eat you, or they don’t.
You can indeed fry an egg on the hood of your car in Louisiana in the late summer, when temperatures are at their hottest, but it’s really hard to get it off afterwards, so don’t be as stupid as I was when you try it. Be smart and fry it in a frying pan that’s placed on the hood of your car.
LAST, BUT CERTAINLY NOT LEAST…
The three stories that come next are about events in Louisiana that stood out in my mind. Well, everything about the time down there stands out in my mind, but these three incidents are kind of related to each other, in that they all involved mini dramas around three different types of Louisiana critters.
You might read them and think afterwards, did she make these up, or did they actually happen?
Yes, they happened. Really.
You might ask, did these people actually say all that stuff? Well, who the heck recalls each and every word that they’ve spoken ten years ago? Conversations are verbatim in a whole lot of places; in others, the basics of what was said is absolutely there, as best as I could reconstruct it. Go with the flow, as my Mom used to say.
(Okay, I actually uttered a more profanity when some of this stuff happened… but I didn’t want you thinking I was too bitchy, so I cleaned some of my curse words up, geeze. Sue me…)
OLD RATS AND NEW RATS
Rats are vermin. I don’t care how many people keep the nasty creatures as pets and can bore you to tears with stories of their intelligence, playfulness, devotion, blah blah gag blah. They are still rodents with icky naked tails and feet, beady little eyes, and front teeth that never stop growing.
Until I moved to Louisiana, I had rarely seen a real live rat. Maybe in a pet store, sure, trying to appear all cute n’ harmless, running on a wheel or burying themselves in soft cedar shavings. I knew better. I had rat history, you see.
The first time I ever officially saw a rat was when I was a child, living in Clark Air Force Base on the Philippine Islands. The air base isn’t there anymore, incidentally. Mt. Pinatubo erupted on June 15, 1991 and destroyed it, after being inactive for 600 years. (This is also the birthday of my son, Chase, which if you knew him, you’d realize this event sort of matches his personality, but he’s mentioned in different stories.) Where was I… oh, on the island, yes. I was about six years old and my little brother was about three. We were both in our pajamas, lying on our stomachs on the floor, watching television. Paladin: Have Gun, Will Travel, was playing. We weren’t allowed to watch a lot of television except for a few programs at night. Mom approved of Westerns, and so did the Philippine government, they imported a lot of American westerns to their TV stations.
Our television was against the back wall of the living room. My mother was sitting on the couch behind us. I heard my little brother say, “Cat!”
I looked over about the same time that my mother let out a scream, which scared the out of me, for I had never in my life heard her do that. I only caught a glimpse of this big, dark thing walking slowly along the wall behind the television… TV’s were bulky structures that stood on stumpy little legs in those days.
Mom snatched my brother and me off the floor and ran into her bedroom, dropping us both on her bed. She crouched down on the floor and looked under the bed and the dresser, then tucked all the edges of the blankets under the mattress. We were told to stay there and She ran out of the room, slamming the door shut behind her and we did as we were told, we sat huddled together in the middle of the big bed and did not move. A minute later I could hear her yelling into the phone to my Dad to come home immediately, there was a big rat in the house.
Later, as this story was retold, I learned that my Dad had been down in the squadron building with a bunch of the other pilots and flier type guys, and they were all laughing after my Mom’s call.
“She saw some damned mouse,” I believe is close to what Dad had said. A few of the fellows decided to tag along with him on his way home, supposedly to give him moral support, but in reality, just to tease my Mom about getting so hysterical over a mouse.
Not too long afterward, I heard my Mother yelling, as my Dad and his entourage came in through the front door, that the rat had gone into the kitchen. I heard men laughing. I heard my Dad being a smart ass to my Mom. Then it got quiet, all the men must have been going
