Thursday, August 11, 2005

Some of us are Country Boys.......some of us are NOT......

Ok so, Lucy after posting a comment about her family being old order Mennonite got me reminiscing on the times when my parents tried to de-urbanize me by throwing me into the wilderness.....

1) Family vacations to lancaster Pennsylvania: We stayed at B&B's throughout Lancaster PA and usually with Mennonite families who didn't have electricity, but had running water. My mom would pretend that the lack of alcohol didn't bother her and my dad would pretend he felt comfortable whittling on the front porch with the man of the house.... while I would be catching fireflies or something else equally nauseatingly Norman Rockwell-ian. However these vacations ended after one fateful summer when, while on vacation..... my dad DARED me to touch the electric fence meant to keep goats in.... he didn't think I'd do it.... yeah maybe that's why my hair's curly and my elderly senile aunt thinks I get it permed. After that shocking experience (ha ha bad pun I know) I decided to play with the kids of the people that ran the place, this is when I discovered a new friend called severe allergic reaction. We were playing in the barn and discovered that their cat had just had kittens.... so we each took three kittens in our arms and were walking back to the house to show them to our parents..... by the time I got to the house I was covered in hives, I was wheezing and my face was so swollen I couldn't open my eyes..... can we say epi-pen and the fastest migration back to suburbia in history?? yeah I think so...

2) Sleep away camp. Now I liked sleep away camp, I just think that some higher power realizes that I am not meant to interact with nature, save the beach, and constantly reminds me of this fact. While at summer camp on the Delaware Bay, my summer camp for those of you who know Rehomo/Dewey/Bethany at all, was across the bay from the Rusty Rudder, we used to canoe from our camp to the rudder. ANYWAYS, the delaware marshland is also the breeding ground to horseflies/green flies that are A) as big as your head and B) when they bite it F'ing HURTS!!! So after 2 weeks of sleeping every night in a tent, being eaten alive by bugs that left welts that look like someone beat me, and having my legs torn to shreds by marsh elephant grass, I came home a tanned and happy child....... however, after getting home my mom had to have the sheets changed almost daily because I'd be scratching the bites so bad when I woke up it looked like a murder scene cuz I'd bled all over the sheets....

also! one time when we were living in a hotel for the summer (Our house had flooded and every room was destroyed....except for my room which I think is god's repayment for my awkward teen years) I came home from summer camp after not having showered for 2 weeks, no joke 2 weeks, I was 10 and didn't like the idea of communal showers, especially since our counselor showered with us and there's nothing more embarrassing when your ten than showering with someone who's more....mature.... ANYWAYS I take off my shirt to go swimming in the hotel pool and my mom starts screaming.... I look down and there are two ticks both swollen like WHOAH sticking out from my belly button area, yeah you'd think that I would have noticed that.....hmmmm...... Yeah this is the same summercamp that we all had to come up with nicknames for each other and they came up with "fruitcake" for me.... yeah I thought it was a cool nickname....boy was I dumb :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm with you when it comes to nature. I like the idea of nature but I would rather not have to spend time out in it.

Lucy said...

Ha - glad I could inspire all these lovely memories. Especially the one about the ticks - when I was 15, I found a tick on my boob....yeah, it was just as delightful as it sounds.