Matchsticks

     When my oldest brother Charles, the firstborn of our family, was a little boy, he went with our parents to visit Daddy's first cousin, Thurman, the brother of James. I only mention James because he used to come see us and I remember him, but I have no recollection of Thurman.

    They were sons of Uncle Martin, the brother of my paternal Grandmother; more relatives of my past whom I do not remember, which has nothing to do with this story except for explaining the familial trail and letting the reader know that most of these people, although in my ancestry, are figments of my imagination.

Kickback

     I couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old, nine at the most. We were living on a sharecropper tobacco farm in North Carolina. Mother told me to get some eggs from the chicken house, so I walked across the yard to the barns, then stopped cold in my tracks at the sight of a copperhead snake draped across one of the logs at the base of the hen house. When I could move my legs again, I turned and ran back to the house.

    Mother called my brother Charles from his bed and the next thing I know, I'm standing some yards from the chicken house; Charles is kneeling with his arms around me from behind helping me to hold his .22 rifle. I do not remember pulling the trigger, but I do remember the kickback.

   After that we probably gathered the eggs and went back to the house to eat some scrambled ones. To my best recollection, that is the first and last time I ever shot a gun.

Small pleasures soften big blows

    Year after year my husband and I reap more harvest from our garden than we can possibly eat in the summer or put up for the winter. And year after year I ask him, "Why do you plant so much?" His answer is always the same. "Because I never know what will grow and what won't."

    So every summer I find myself inundated with heaps of vegetables and barely a space in the refrigerator for a carton of yogurt. He goes to the garden in the morning and comes back with a bucket, sometimes two, full of produce -- baby yellow squash picked at precisely the right moment for tenderness, shiny purple eggplant pretty enough for a picture, and crunchy cucumbers of which I eat so many, I feel like I'm in a pickle, pardon the pathetic pun. We bag produce and give it to others who like fresh vegetables and don't grow their own.