Sticks and stones don't break aunt Brenda's bones!

The place where I grew up, on Maloneyville Road, was on an acre of land that once was part of one large farm. Up on top of the hill was my Uncle Jesse’s house; down from him was my Uncle Jimmy Barne’s house, then my papaw Chesney’s, then my Uncle Jim Carlisle, then us. If you wanted to visit a family member, all you had to do was either walk up the road or through a cow pasture. Uncle Jim, aunt Brenda, and their son, Bradley (who now prefers to be called Brad) lived right beside us. The only thing separating our property and theirs was our driveway.

I used to get a kick out of standing up on the hill behind my parents house and listening to my mother and aunt Brenda talk on the phone. You could hear the phone ring at one house and hear a “hello” coming from the other. Then you could just sit and listen to the whole conversation. It was quite comical. Why they didn’t just walk over to one house or the other, I’ll never know. Anyways, this story isn’t about that.

We were having a cookout in my parent’s back yard. Dad had a charcoal grill fired up and was grilling hamburgers. Uncle Jim was laying underneath an old Impala doing some mechanic work. Mom and aunt Brenda was busy fixing up the picnic table with potato salad, baked beans, chips, and drinks. All of us kids were running around the yard playing. In our yard was a huge tree that would drop limbs on the ground. I was going around picking up the limbs and throwing them over the fence into the cow pasture. I had been doing this for a few minutes and I found one pretty large limb that was about 4-foot long and about 2-inches thick. I was using it like a cane, hobbling around in the yard. I would hold it up like a gun and pretend to shoot squirrels out of the tops of trees. I finally tired of the stick and decided to break it. What better way than to hold it like a baseball bat and swing it full force into the side of a tree? So, that’s what I did. Without one single thought of what would happen when that stick broke, I swung it with all of my might into the side of that tree. “Whack!” When that limb hit the tree it splintered off like a broken Louisville Slugger during the World Series. About that same time, my aunt Brenda was walking past the tree on her way to her house to get something. I watched the broken end of that stick sail through the air and smack her right in the back of the head. She whirled around and looked at me like she had just been shot. “Aaaaahhhhhh!!!” she yelled. My mom saw the whole thing and was already standing in front of me giving me the riot act. “Byron, what do you think you are doing? You could have hurt her real bad! You could have knocked her out. What if you had hit her in the eye?” Of course this got my dad’s attention and he came running over from the grill, grabbed me by the arm and started in. “What in the samhill is going on? Ain’t you got a lick of sense? What are you trying to do, kill somebody?” Of course I was pretty much speechless. It all happened so fast. I wasn't intending to hurt anyone, I was just messing around.

I don’t remember getting a whipping over this incident but I was embarrassed and learned a lesson for sure. I reckon my aunt Brenda wasn’t too awfully upset or hurt, because she returned to the cookout and ate a hamburger. I’ve been conscientious of my surroundings ever since that event.

Moral of this story: Always be aware of your surroundings, don’t do anything stupid, and aunt Brenda must be pretty hard headed!